Feb 16, 2012 - Sale 2268

Sale 2268 - Lot 71

Price Realized: $ 120,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 75,000 - $ 100,000
KARA WALKER (1969 - )
Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated).

15 offset lithograph and screenprints on Somerset textured paper, 2005. Each 610x889 mm; 24x35 (and inverse) inches, full margins. Each signed, dated and numbered 3/35 in pencil, lower right. Printed and published by the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, New York. Superb impressions with very dark, richly printed blacks.

Scene of McPherson's Death * Buzzard's Roost Pass * Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta * Occupation of Alexandria * Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp * Confederate Prisoners Being Conducted from Jonesborough to Atlanta * Banks's Army Leaving Simmsport * Crest of Pine Mountain, Where General Polk Fell * Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats * Pack-Mules in the Mountains * Deadbrook After the Battle of Ezra's Church * Foote's Gun-Boats Ascending to Attack Fort Henry * Lost Mountain at Sunrise * Signal Station, Summit of Maryland Heights * An Army Train.

Alfred H. Guernsey's and Henry M. Alden's 1866 Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, based on images from Harper's Weekly, serves as the framework for this monumental portfolio depicting the history of the Civil War. Kara Walker uses these original illustrations as the framework for her interpretation, on which she overlays her signature black cut silhouettes. While her cut images reference history, particularly that which related to slavery and the Civil War, this was the first time in which Walker directly juxtaposed her own historical images with ones from the period. "These prints," Walker explains, "are the landscapes that I imagine exist in the back of my somewhat more austere wall pieces."