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Overview

Romare Bearden mined a wide range of sources: the Bible, the writings of French satirist François Rabelais, his childhood memories of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, the people and streets of Harlem, the epic poems of Homer, and more. He revisited many of these themes time and time again. Thus he made ink drawings and watercolors inspired by Homer’s Iliad in the 1940s, and a series of twenty collages based on The Odyssey in 1977.

Bearden’s collages drew strong praise when they were exhibited at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York’s Upper East Side in the spring of 1977, and he went on to make watercolor versions around the same time. About two years later, he translated six of the collage compositions into screenprints, which were published as the Odysseus Suite in 1979.

Inscription

lower left in graphite: 65/125; lower right in graphite: Romare Bearden; lower right verso in graphite by unknown hand: ODYSSEUS Leaves / Nausicaa / BEA-6 / 800

Marks and Labels

blindstamp: HMK (for printer Mohammad Omer Khalil, New York)

Provenance

(Bill Hodges, NY); gift to NGA, 2013

Associated Names

Bill Hodges Gallery

Bibliography

1992
Gelburd, Gail and Alex Rosenberg. A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker. Exh. cat., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992: 44.

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