George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Page from an American History Textbook, a Robert Colescott’s 1975 painting, will be sold at an auction next month.
The painting is riff on Emanuel Leutze’s widely-known 1852 painting of the first President of the United States crossing the Delaware river by boat and will be offered with a guarantee during Sotheby’s contemporary art evening sale on May 12, where it is expected to achieve a price of $9 million–$12 million— far above the artist’s auction record of $912,500, which was set in November 2018.
In Colescott’s painting, he has replaced the white figures in Leutze’s scene, which has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection for more than a century, with Black figures representing racist tropes that have been used throughout American history. Colescott, who in 1977 became the first Black artist to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, is recognized for his oeuvre’s satirical edge.
The work is now being sold from the holdings of private Midwest collectors, who purchased it from John Beggruen Gallery in San Francisco in 1976. The painting was exhibited in 2009 at the Jepson Center in Savannah, Georgia. The work was also included in the 2018 exhibition “Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas” at the Seattle Art Museum.
If the painting reaches its high estimate, it will rank among the few works by contemporary Black artists that have achieved an auction price above $10 million. Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kerry James Marshall, and Mark Bradford are among the select few that have crossed that threshold.