?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 -1988) Train Whistle Blues.
Watercolor, pen, pencil and collage on wove paper, circa 1979. 340x254 mm; 13 3/8x10 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection.
With this outstanding watercolor, Romare Bearden reinterprets his early photomontage Train Whistle Blues: II and the collage Train Whistle Blues: I, both from 1964. Both works were included in the 2003-2004 National Gallery retrospective, The Art of Romare Bearden. Bearden incorporated the tradition of the blues in these works by emphasizing the role of call and recall: "His reprise of often-worked themes from his memory—and the often-repeated motifs associated with them—seemed to him like the riffed repetition of a classic blues AAB pattern, in which the second line is a slight alteration of the first." With this repetition, Bearden revisits the blues with this later layered work on paper.
