Lot 50: HAROLD CAZNEAUX, Portrait of Edna Thomas (1885 - 1974.). 15 1/8 x 12 5/8 -inch chloro-bomide print.

HAROLD CAZNEAUX, Portrait of Edna Thomas (1885 - 1974.). 15 1/8 x 12 5/8 -inch chloro-bomide print. Cazneaux was the major Australian pictorialist photographer in the 1920's. This portrait of Thomas was taken during her tour of Australia in 1924 - 25. She is dressed as a southern belle. A light-skinned black American, she sang popular songs by white composers such as Stephen Foster, like "Suwannee River" and "My Old Kentucky Home" that imitated Negro music. She was known as "The Lady From Louisiana" Images by Cazneaux from the same sitting as this portrait were shown in the magazine HOME . They indicate she falsely claimed that the dress she wore was her great grandmother's. and that she was a Southern Belle. [see scans.]
Her early career as a singer thus hovered between whiteness and blackness. But once the Harlem Renaissance began, she became an actress and fully embraced her blackness, though she could also play Mexican women, and played the role of the Mexican woman in the stage and film versions of "Streetcar Named Desire." She played Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles' 1936 production of "Macbeth" for the NY Negro unit of the Federal Theater Program. In 1937 she was one of the founders of the Negro Actor's Guild, where she continued to have an active role as one of the Vice Presidents along with Ethel Waters, Frank Wilson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and James Weldon Johnson.
In addition to her identity as a black performer, she was also major figure as a proud lesbian. A biography of her by Jonathan Katz [Katz, Jonathan. Gay, Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, New York: Harper & Row, 1983, pp. 526-528 ] includes amazing information that she volunteered for a psychoanalytic study of lesbianism. When the study was published she was presented under a pseudonym Mary Jones, but was later correctly identified. All this is presented in fascinating detail here --
Portraits of Thomas in the collection of the English National Portrait Gallery can be found .
Provenance: from Cazneaux's granddaughter to the consignor. The granddaughter has provided a note indicating it had an overmat, now lost, signed by Cazneaux.

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