?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988) At the Dock.
Watercolor on wove paper, 1984. 762x559 mm; 30x22 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection; June Kelly Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; private collection, Connecticut (1990).
Exhibited: Romare Bearden: Storyteller, Jenkins/Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA, April 3 – June 21, 2014; DC Moore Gallery, New York, with the labels on the frame back.
At the Dock is an excellent example of Romare Bearden's experimentation in watercolor in the early 1980s. Watercolor is an important part in the artist's ouevre beginning with his modernist Passion of Christ series painted in 1945. Bearden was influenced by the watercolors of the German expressionist master George Grosz who taught Bearden drawing at the Art Students League in New York in the early 1930s. In this late period of his career, Bearden displays a creative mastery of watercolor, particularly with the 1984 Obeah series. Bearden's late watercolors represent both a culmination of his artistic improvisation with the medium, and his awareness of the traditions of his second home on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
