Hughie Lee-Smith is one of America's foremost contemporary black artists. But one would not necessarily know his race nor at once recognize his essentially "black" message on first viewing Confrontation, a scene in which the principal characters are two white girls. In numerous other of his characteristic dream-world pictures Lee-Smith has featured white actors as often -- if not more often -- than blacks. This may be his way of inducing white spectators, the more likely to identify with whites in his pictures, to experience empathically the feelings of isolation, loneliness, and futility that many blacks know as part of their actual day-to-day existence.

The "confrontation" here is not between the girls, who seem barely cognizant of one another, but rather between them and their situation. As youths, the two figures represent those whose prime-of-life is ahead and to whom the expectation of life's normal benefits should be a natural course. Instead they appear alienated, from each other to be sure, but more importantly from the strange, unreal, or better perhaps, surreal environment. Like a theatre stage property, the ruin of brick and stucco wall at mid-ground speaks of neglect and decay, and passage of time a grim reminder of the dilapidation one can readily find in the poorest urban neighborhoods. In a more symbolic sense the wall alludes to barriers. constraint, and frustration.

For counterpoint and irony the artist has placed with the figures in the near-ground ostensibly festive elements: slender staffs and a hoop festooned with ribbons of frosty pink and green. Yet even these seem meager and transitory. The long cast shadows, a favorite device of such surrealists as Dali and DeChirico, reinforce the notion that day is ending and, figuratively, time is running out. On the other hand, these same attenuated shadows strain to the left, to the edge of the scene and beyond, as if reaching out to the unknown. A spacious, inviting seacoast in the distance beyond the ruin may be a glimpse of that unknown. It is like a harbor from which ships of liberation and hope might set sail.

Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida, but his family moved north when he was a boy, settling in Cleveland, Ohio. There he studied at the Karamu House, a regionally well-known center for black artists and performers, and later at the Cleveland School of Art. He transferred to Wayne State University in Detroit where he completed a B.S. degree in art education. He continued to live and work in Detroit until 1969, when he accepted a two-year appointment as artist-in-residence at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Since 1972 he has taught at the Art Students League in New York.

In 1975 Lee-Smith was one of the artists featured in the Whitney Museum's important exhibit, An American Dream World: Romantic Realism 1930- 1955; accordingly, since that time he has generally been categorized a "romantic-realist."