Lot 169
ALMA HELD (American 1898-1988)
Red Sweater - A Young Football Player - 1928
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower left “Alma Held - 1928”
27 inches x 24 inches
Estimate:  $2,000 - 3,000   € 1,500 - 2,200

Price Realized: $20,400.00

Provenance:
Estate Auction of Alma Held, these showrooms, April 1989 where acquired by the present owner.


Alma Held was born in Le Mars, Iowa on December 16, 1898 but lived most of her life in Waterloo, Iowa. She received her M.A. from the University of Iowa (1926) where she would later serve as an associate professor alongside colleague Grant Wood. She was initially a student of Charles Cummings and she later studied under Charles Hawthorne at Cape Cod. At the National Academy of Design, in New York, she studied under Sidney Dickinson and was awarded the Suydam Medal for life drawing. Beginning in 1925, she started exhibiting at the Iowa Salon and earned awards for her still lifes and portraits. She would continue exhibiting, and taking commissions for the remainder of her life. She was an accomplished technician and superb draftsman. During the war, when supplies of oil paint were limited, she turned to watercolors and, from then on, rarely worked in oils. Held died on January 11, 1988.  She never married and supported herself entirely through her art. It is interesting to note the obvious similarities between the offered lot and Grant Wood’s painting of the same subject titled Plaid Sweater which was executed in 1931 and is now held in the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. One, of course, cannot help wonder if Wood’s painting Plaid Sweater was inspired by the offered painting which was executed three years prior.