113
●
ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 -1988)
TrainWhistle Blues.
Watercolor, pen, pencil and collage on wove paper, circa 1979. 340x254 mm; 13
3
/
8
x10 inches. Signed
in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection.
With this outstanding watercolor, Romare Bearden reinterprets his early photomontage
TrainWhistle
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
. According to curator Ruth
Fine, 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.
[20,000/30,000]