?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988) Aphrodite.
Collage and acrylic, with pencil and ink, on board, 1973. 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: Cordier & Ekstrom, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, Connecticut; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
Exhibited: Romare Bearden: 1970 - 1980, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, October 14, 1981 - January 4, 1981. This retrospetive exhibition traveled to the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum.
This brightly colored collage is a superb example of Romare Bearden's mid-career work in collage. It is related in composition and technique to such other mythological works as Delilah and Prologue to Troy #1 from Bearden's 1972-3 series The Prevalence of Ritual. All share compositions of smaller collaged figures against richly textured, verdant green backgrounds. He also revisited this composition in his 1977 collagraph Prelude to Troy.
