?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988) Sermons: In that Number.
Photomontage, mounted on masonite, 1964. 910x781 mm; 39 1/2x30 inches. Signed and numbered 1/6 in white ink, lower left. A very good, dark impression of a very scarce, early work.
Provenance: ex-collection the artist; Cordier & Ekstrom, New York; private collection; New York.
Exhibited: Projections, Cordier & Ekstrom, New York, October, 1964, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, October, 1965; Romare Bearden in Black and White, Photomontage Projections 1964, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, January 17 - March 20, 1997, with the labels on the frame back. This exhibition traveled nationally to museums through 1999, including the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI, the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, and the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art, GA.
Illustrated: Romare Bearden in Black and White, Photomontage Projections 1964, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 70.
This exceptional photomontage projection is an extremely scarce and important work by Romare Bearden in this experimental medium. With photostat printing, Bearden enlarged his 1964 collage, which Swann Galleries sold on March 7, 2006. This is one of the artist's more Social Realist photomontages and reflects the Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s with which his fellow artists in the Spiral had been grappling. This title comes from the refrain of When the Saints Go Marching In, and its apocalyptic imagery from the Book of Revelations. It was paired with the photomontage Sermons: The Wall of Jericho, which incorporates multiple images of African masks against ancient and modern architecture.
Reginald Gammon, a member of the Spiral Group, had suggested Bearden enlarge his small collages to a much larger format with the use of photostat. They were first shown together in the exhibition Projections at Cordier & Ekstrom in New York in October, 1964. At the time, Arne Ekstrom described them as "an edition of 6, each signed and numbered, mounted on board and put on strainers and framed by Kulicke Frames in narrow silver frames... In these days of civil rights strife they are, on the sociological side, a unique statement of pride in tradition, dramatic in many instances by never a form of protest or agitation. Artistically they are remarkable." Schwartzman pp. 210-212.
