George Lucas’s Lucas Museum buys Robert Colescott masterpiece for $15.3 million at Sotheby’s

Robert Colescott’s (1925–2009) painting “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook” (1975) sold this week at Sotheby’s for $15.3 million, after a seven-minute bidding war. The buyer was revealed to be the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which in today’s announcement described the work as the “crowning” piece of the artist’s career.

The museum’s director, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, said the acquisition brings to the collection “a dynamic tool for exploring the many dimensions of narrative art”, noting that the painting inserts figures such as George Washington Carver, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben into the patriotic narrative familiar from popular culture and from Emmanuel Leutze’s iconic painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851).

The work, guaranteed by the auction house, sold above the pre-sale estimate of $9–12 million (final prices include fees), shattering by dozens of times the artist’s previous auction record, which was just $912,500 in 2018.

The painting had remained in the same private Midwestern collection since 1976, when it was bought from the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. The Art Newspaper reports the work belonged to the late Robert and Lois Orchard of St. Louis, Missouri. It was included in Colescott’s acclaimed retrospective that opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2019, which then traveled to the Portland Art Museum.

Colescott’s profile has risen steadily in recent years, supported also by artist Kerry James Marshall, who has spoken openly about Colescott’s influence on his work; the Blum and Poe gallery has represented the artist’s estate since 2017. The Lucas Museum opens its doors this week in Los Angeles.

Source: Artnet News (https://news.artnet.com)