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Allen Skeens

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Eleven tightly grouped people, most playing musical instruments, fill this abstracted, horizontal composition, which is drawn with graphite on cream-white paper. The people’s facial features, including almond-shaped eyes, wide noses, lips, and round faces, as well as their hands and blocky bodies, are drawn simply with single lines and no shading. In the lower right corner, the man holds two drumsticks over a snare drum as he looks to our right with his lips parted. There is an oval-shaped patch of gray above his left eye, to our right, where his eye socket would be, and a single line straight across his forehead. To our left, one man stands playing a clarinet with an open book in front of him, and the musician next to him plays a guitar. Two triangles under the guitarist’s chin suggest a collar or bowtie. In a second row, above and presumably behind this front row, three people play saxophones in the upper right, and at least one more plays a horn in the upper left, facing our left in profile. Fragments of a few more faces and profiles are tucked among the group. A line around the scene creates the rectangle containing the musicians, and there is a wide margin of blank paper around the edge of the sheet. The artist signed the work in the upper left corner, within the margin, “Rom are bear den.”
Romare Bearden, Le Jazz, c. 1967, graphite on wove paper, Gift of Allen Skeens, 2001.66.1

Le Jazz

Romare Bearden · c. 1967 · graphite on wove paper ·  Accession ID  2001.66.1