?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988) The Train.
Watercolor on illustration board, circa 1985. 330x432 mm; 13x17 inches. Signed "Romare" and inscribed "For Maya" in pencil, lower left, and titled in watercolor, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; the estate of Dr. Maya Angelou.
The train is an important and re-occuring image in the work of Romare Bearden, beginning in 1964, when it appeared in his collages Mysteries and Watching Good Trains Go By. The train represents not only a memory of his childhood growing up in Charlotte, NC, when he loved to watch the Southern Railway trains go by, but the possiblity of social and economic movement for African-Americans, particularly during the Great Migration. Romare Bearden made several photomontage and collage images with trains in the 1960s and 1970s, but his 1974 print The Train is probably his best known image. Printmaker Bob Blackburn and Bearden together created a new and innovative combination of etching and photo engraving to re-create the appearance of his collages.
