Home to Ithaca

1979

Romare Bearden

Artist, American, 1911 - 1988

Printed with mostly geometric shapes in vibrant, flat colors, this stylized horizontal screenprint shows buildings lining a harbor across from us, with a sailboat entering the scene from our right. The top quarter of this print has a band of pale turquoise clouds against a vibrant cobalt-blue sky. The buildings on the shore across from us are mostly nickel or slate gray with black squares and rectangles for windows and doors. A few of the buildings are white and two are hot pink. One arched, sunshine yellow form at the center of the composition could be an opening or a domed roof. One gray building, in front of the yellow, has a band and roof picked out with glittery gold. Several palm trees grow atop the spring-green hills beyond the buildings. A band of caramel brown near the water could be a sandy beach. Lumpy brown forms could be rocks in the water near the shore. The waterway is celestial blue with a few bands in grape purple, light gray, spring green, and turquoise. Billowing white sails pull the boat into the image. A person silhouetted in black holds a shield and spear at the bow. Three long black sticks with white arrows at the end, perhaps more spears or paddles, protrude from the front of the ship, and the side is decorated with several shield-sized panels. The artist signed the paper in the margin under the bottom right corner of the printed image, "Romare Bearden," and numbered the lower left corner, "65/125."
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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.

In Home to Ithaca, the fourth print of the suite, Bearden added a twist. Homer relates that Odysseus was asleep on the ship’s deck when his vessel sailed into Ithaca’s harbor. But Bearden portrays Odysseus poised triumphantly on the ship’s bow, a shield in one hand and a spear in the other. In creating a black Odyssey—all the figures in the suite are dark skinned—Bearden not only cast Homer’s tale in unconventional terms, he underscored the myth’s universality, such that a “child in Benin or [one] in Louisiana,” in his words, would appreciate its relevancy.


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    color screenprint on wove Lana paper

  • Credit Line

    Purchased as the Gift of Richard A. Simms

  • Dimensions

    image: 38.1 × 60.96 cm (15 × 24 in.)
    sheet: 55.88 × 75.25 cm (22 × 29 5/8 in.)

  • Accession

    2013.142.6


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

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

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2016

  • Three Centuries of American Prints: from the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery in Prague, Prague 1; Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, 2016 - 2017, no. 135.

Bibliography

1992

  • Gelburd, Gail and Alex Rosenberg. A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker. Exh. cat., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992: 49.

Inscriptions

lower left in graphite: 65/125; lower right in graphite: Romare Bearden; lower right verso in graphite by unknown hand: Home to / Ithaca / X BEA-3

Markings

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

Watermarks

LANA

Wikidata ID

Q77006216


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