ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988) All The Things You Are.
Collage, color dyes and watercolor on board, 1987. 914x610 mm; 36x24 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower left.
Provenance: ACA Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection (1988).
Illustrated: Myron Shwartzman. Romare Bearden: His Art and Life, back jacket illustration. The artist is shown posing with the collage.
This significant and dynamic collage of a jazz saxophonist was made in the spring of what became the last full year of Bearden's life. Despite failing health, Romare Bearden displays his mastery of the medium - the collage displays a daring expressiveness with its highly saturated colors and paper shapes. Myron Schwartzman recounts in his Romare Bearden: His Art and Life how Bearden completed All The Things You Are as part of a last major series of large collages on the theme of jazz while battling bone cancer. Schwartzman also describes how André Thibault/Teabo worked increasingly as his assistant at that time. Bearden continued to work in collage and watercolor until the final months of his life. Schwartzman pp. 299-300; Fine p. 123.
