ArtistAmerican
Herbert Gentry
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Herbert Alexander Gentry was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 17, 1919, and grew up in Harlem after his family relocated there in 1924. His mother, who performed under the name Teresa Gentry and had danced in the chorus with Josephine Baker, moved in circles that included Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Duke Ellington. That milieu - the Harlem Renaissance at full momentum - left a permanent mark on how Gentry understood art as something inseparable from music, community, and street life.
He served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945 in the 90th Coast Guard Artillery, passing through Morocco, Algeria, Italy, Corsica, and France. After the war ended, he returned to Paris as one of the first American artists to do so, enrolling at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He earned his diploma in 1949, having studied informally with Georges Braque, who critiqued and encouraged his work. That same year he opened Chez Honey, a club-galerie in Montparnasse that operated as a gallery by day and a jazz club by night, run together with his wife. It became a hub for artists and musicians of many nationalities.
In the late 1950s Gentry began making regular trips to Scandinavia, settling in Copenhagen around 1958. He would spend the rest of his working life moving between Denmark, Sweden, Paris, and New York - specifically the Hotel Chelsea, where he maintained a residence from 1972 onward. He lived in Gothenburg from 1963 to 1965, then Stockholm, then Malmö from 1980 to 2001, before returning to Stockholm for his final years. He died there on September 8, 2003.
His paintings center on interlocking faces, heads, and mask-like forms set within dense webs of calligraphic lines and color. Art historian Peter Selz described the work as fusing jazz's staccato beat with biomorphic form, holding the picture plane in the Cubist tradition without tipping into total abstraction. The presence of African mask imagery, Picasso's influence, and the improvisational quality of bebop all run through the canvases. Gentry himself said the figures reflect the people he had met throughout the world.
In 1975 he became the first non-Scandinavian artist given a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. His work entered the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, Moderna Museet, the Stedelijk Museum, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian.
On the Scandinavian auction market, Gentry's work circulates primarily through Danish and Swedish houses. Bruun Rasmussen in Aarhus has handled the largest share of his lots appearing on Auctionist, with works also passing through Stockholms Auktionsverk, Skånes Auktionsverk, and Höganäs Auktionsverk. Prices at recent Nordic sales have been modest, with ink works on paper reaching around 3,000 DKK and lithographs in the low hundreds of SEK, reflecting a secondary market still catching up to his institutional standing.