Romare Bearden (1911 - 1988)

Romare Bearden's body of work stands as a pillar of Black art, depicting the lives of African Americanonnecting the people to current social unrest. At the start of his career, Bearden studied at the Art Student League of New York, a government-funded project, and illustrated political cartoons for Baltimore Afro-Americans. Bearden became acquainted with the popular themes and styles created by African American artists and realized the inadequacy of political art. Bearden intended to utilize his work to move social boundaries and expand critics' recognition of African American art beyond the limitation of "African idiom" by exhibiting the expansive topics African American artists can cover. In the 1960s, to create better social connections with his works while innovating his artistic approach, Bearden started exploring while drawing references to events he experienced and depicted in his early works. Through the gradual transition, Bearden eventually found a collage, using pieces of painted color patches and arranging them into paintings like abstractions. One step further, to draw political connections with his collages' content without depicting a political event scene, Bearden uses sources directly from newspapers and magazines. In their original content, Bearden's sources delineate black people and their experiences in specific events, so Bearden's audiences can draw recognizable connections when viewing Bearden's works. The representation of black people in popular media was always filtered through social categorization, which parallels Bearden's concern about the understanding of black artists by critics and the art world. To challenge the limitation, Bearden constantly deconstructs his sources into fragments in organic shapes and rearranges them randomly, so the context of the original narrative is also deconstructed.

Over the decades, Bearden has been the focus of several museum retrospectives including those organized by the Museum of Modern Art, Mint Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Studio Museum in Harlem, and National Gallery of Art. His work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1984, he received the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York City, and in 1987, he was awarded the President's National Medal of the Arts. In March of 1988, Bearden passed away in New York City. Two years after his death, the Romare Bearden Foundation was established, working to preserve the legacy and memory of his foundational body of work.

Sunset, a collage of verdant greens, delicately accented by the magenta hues of a figure cradled in foliage abound. Though shape and shadow are bisected and sourced from the saturated dyes of cuttings and photographs, the composition of Sunset is imbued with a dreamy gentleness that an impressionist scene of idyllic nature might invoke. The feminine figure in the foreground, whose shades of orange share a color palette only with the setting sun, is the portrait of interior serenity. Donning a beaded headband with eyes not quite closed, the corners of her mouth curve into a gentle smile. Bearden, a tour de force of the mixed media and collage genre, beckons viewers to consider how a spirit of tranquility can be inscribed within pressed layers of paper on fiberboard. Created at the height of the artist’s collage works, Bearden’s Sunset is the pinnacle of craft and detail, illustrative of an artist’s keen sensibility of surreal place and personhood that a work can evoke.

Provenance

Private Collection, New York, NY

Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Exhibition History

Romare Bearden: Narrations, 22 September – 29 December 2002, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, NY

Romare Bearden: Narrations, 7 February – 23 April 2003, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI

Romare Bearden: Narrations, 22 May – 20 July 2003, Delaware Art Museum (First USA Riverfront Art Center), Wilmington, DE

Bearden & Company, 27 February – 28 August 2020, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Selections from the Hamptons Virtual Art Fair, 3 September – 17 October 2020, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Selections from the Collection, 15 April – 29 May 2021, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Figuratively Speaking, 2 March – 6 May 2023, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Sunset, 1980-81

(Also Known As Mysterious Woman in Swamp)

Collage and Mixed Media on Fiberboard

14 x 18 in. (35.6 x 45.7 cm)

Signed, Titled, Dated and Inscribed on Reverse: "Sunset” Collage & Mixed Media 1980/1981, Romare Bearden