?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988) The Stubborn Old Lady.
Collage of various papers and mixed media, mounted on masonite, 1971. 508x330 mm; 20x13 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, New York; ACA Galleries, New York; Luise Ross Gallery, New York, with the gallery labels on the frame back; private collection.
This collage was used as the cover illustration for Loften Mitchell's novel The Stubborn Old Lady Who Resisted Change, written in 1968 and published in 1973. Mitchell and Romare Bearden were both friends and social workers in the New York City Department of Welfare. In a 1968 article in The Crisis, Mitchell described the autobiographical story of a young case worker working with a semi-blind woman who refused to leave her New York tenement despite the fact that the building was literally falling down. Bearden also entitled the collage A Land Beyond the River after a Loften Mitchell play.
This striking and complex collage dates from the same year Romare Bearden made his famous collage panorama, The Block, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to its stark urban depiction, The Stubborn Old Lady is closely related in its composition and experimentation with materials. Fine pp. 64 and 256.
