Princeton University Art Museum has highlighted Romare Bearden’s 'Odysseus Leaves Nausicaa' in its galleries, presenting the 1979 color screenprint in the museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art section. The work is shown in the Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion and is listed by the museum as on view.
The print belongs to a larger body of work Bearden began in 1977, when he made a cycle of 20 collages based on Homer’s 'The Odyssey' and then translated them into screenprints. In the museum’s collection text, Bearden is described as having reflected on the continuity between Homer’s epic and African American life, saying, “All of us, from the time we begin to think, are on an odyssey.”
Bearden, who was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and died in New York in 1988, was long committed to using art in support of the civil rights movement. The museum notes that in this series he populated scenes from the ancient Greek myth with dark-skinned figures, linking Odysseus’s long exile and journey home after the Trojan War with the struggles of the African diaspora.
In 'Odysseus Leaves Nausicaa,' the princess Nausicaa, who had cared for Odysseus, bids him farewell as the boat that will carry him home waits at the edge of the composition. The museum’s record describes the work as a screenprint depicting figures, ships, cities and mythology, and identifies the subject as a scene from the Homeric narrative.
The object entered the museum collection in 2011 as museum purchase 2011-11, through the Felton Gibbons Fund and matching funds provided by the Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund. The work is catalogued under object number 2011-11 and titled 'Odysseus Leaves Nausicaa' in the museum’s collections database.
The museum’s online record places the print within its broader collections search and related interpretive material, including an online collection set on African American Prints. It also preserves the full citation for the work as a color screenprint measuring 46.2 x 60.8 cm in the image and 55.8 x 75.4 cm on the sheet, with the date 1979.
