Oct 03, 2013 - Sale 2323

Sale 2323 - Lot 7

Price Realized: $ 32,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988)
Christ Healing the Sick.

Oil on gessoed masonite panel, mounted on wood board, 1945. 300x248 mm; 11 3/4x9 3/4 inches. Initialed in oil, upper right.

Provenance: Kootz Gallery, New York; Far Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; private collection, Pennsylvania; thence by descent to the current owner.

This stained glass-like oil painting by Romare Bearden is an excellent and early example of his postwar painting. Here, the artist deftly synthesizes his interests in both the Old Masters and Cubism. This oil is part of his important Passion of Christ series exhibited at New York's Kootz Gallery in October of 1945,--11 watercolors and 11 oils. The show was a sensation both critically and commercially, with the majority of the works selling, and a purchase that December by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, of He is Arisen. Bearden's Madonna and Child was also included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting in November 1945. Another work from this period, the watercolor Golgotha, 1945, is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Schwartzman pp. 132 and 137.