Lot 27
Romare Bearden
(African American; 1911 - 1988)
Circe
Wool
c. 1978. Produced by Modern Master Tapestries, NYC. From an edition of 20.
Romare Bearden depicts the mythological figure Circe, portrayed in Homer's Odyssey as a goddess who transforms Odysseus' fleet of the Argonauts into a herd of swine through the use of a magical potion. Here, Circe reclines in her mansion on the island of Aeaea as Odysseus' ship sails past in the distance.
Romare Bearden was a prolific artist whose works were exhibited during his lifetime throughout the United States and Europe. His collages, watercolors, oils, photomontages, and prints are imbued with visual metaphors from his past in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem as well as from a variety of historical, literary and musical sources.
He was born in 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina, but raised largely in New York City. His family actively participated in the Harlem Renaissance, which provided the artistic and intellectual foundation for him to emerge as an artist of genuine talent, versatility, and conviction. Bearden studied at New York University, the Art Students League with George Grosz, and Columbia University. His early Social Realist works gradually gave way to cubism in the mid 1940's to express mythological and religious themes. His success as an artist was recognized with his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo show in Washington, DC, in 1944
After serving with the army, he was able to travel to Paris and study at the Sorbonne. When he returned from his sojourn, his work became more abstract. In the early 1960's, he began making collages as "an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience." Bearden's early collages were composed primarily of magazine and newspaper cuttings. Along with his Projections, which were enlarged photostatic copies of these collages, they mark a turning point in his career and received critical praise.
Bearden achieved success in a wide array of media and techniques, including watercolor, gouache, oil, drawing, monotype, and edition prints. He also made designs for record albums, costumes and stage sets, and book illustrations. His work is included in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (1991). In 2003 the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., organized a major retrospective of Bearden's work that subsequently traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
59" x 83"
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