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Estimate: $ 50,000 - $ 75,000
ROBERT COLESCOTT (1925 - 2009) A Legend Dimly Told.
Acrylic on canvas, 1982. 2135x1830 mm; 84x72 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, upper left, recto. Signed, titled, dated "June 1982" and inscribed "This title is from a poem by Emily Dickinson" in pencil on the stretcher bars, verso.
Provenance: Semaphore Gallery, New York; private collection.
Exhibited: The Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1983; Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975–1986, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, and a traveling Exhibition, 1987–1989, with the labels on the frame back. This major retrospective traveled to eight other museums including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the New Museum, New York and the Seattle Museum of Art.
Robert Colescott was born in Oakland, Calif., on Aug. 26, 1925. His mother, a pianist, and his father, a jazz violinist who supported the family as a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad, moved to California from New Orleans in 1919. Sargent Johnson, who worked with Colescott's father on the Southern Pacific, was a family friend. In 1949, Colescott earned a bachelor's degree in painting at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year, he studied with the painter Fernand Léger in Paris where he developed his keen sense of the history of painting, and the power of historical painting. By the late 1960s, he had found his mature figurative style.
In 1997 Colescott was the first African American chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Today, his paintings are in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
