Sale 2487 - African-American Fine Art, October 4, 2018

145 c ROBERT COLESCOTT (1925 - 2009) Down in the Dumps: So Long Sweetheart . Acrylic on cotton canvas, 1983. 2135x1830 mm; 84x72 inches. Signed and dated in acrylic, upper right recto. Signed, titled and dated “Jan. 1983” in pencil on the stretcher bars, verso. Provenance: Semaphore Gallery, New York; private collection (1984). Exhibited: California Contemporary: Recent Work of Twenty Three Artists , Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Monterey, CA, 1983; Semaphore Gallery, NewYork, 1984; The Human Condition: SFMOMA Biennial III , the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, June 28 - August 26, 1984; Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975–1986 , San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, with the labels on the frame back, 1987-1989. This retrospective traveled to eight other museums including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the New Museum, New York and the Seattle Museum of Art. Illustrated: Lowery S. Sims and Mitchell D. Kahan, Robert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975–1986 , rear cover. This significant Colescott painting is a richly painted canvas from his mid-career that includes a self-portrait. Here the artist is being dumped at the foot of a dump - an enormous, teeming pile of all kinds of household objects. In her retrospective essays, Lowery Sims further connects Colescott’s painting to art history - how his f lattened and filled landscapes echo the pictorial space of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. The artist also created an alternate version with a woman standing in front of the dump, his parody of the Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World , called Christina’s Day Off (Down in the Dumps II) , 1983, which is now in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum. In this period of more personal imagery, Colescott never shies away from confronting social issues - Mitchell Kahan describes how in Colescott’s painting “unfulfilled desire and jaded consumption are twin urges revolving in the same orbit.” Sims/Kahan p. 7 and 26. [35,000/50,000]