.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
An artist’s artist, Romare Bearden embodied the primary principles of international modernism by mingling inspiration from sources across time, space and disciplines to design a socially-conscious oeuvre devoted to aesthetic above all. Born in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County, Bearden came of age in a tumultuous America, when people of all backgrounds were jostling for a better life in the face of economic depression, international turmoil, and racial tension. A move to New York introduced Bearden to the community of artists both north and south of 110th Street – a line Bearden would straddle for the rest of his practice – and the rich art historical resources of the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and New York Art Students League. Wary of his lack of formal training, Bearden enrolled in classes with German ex-pat George Grosz and sought engagement with the Old Masters from Italy, the Netherlands, and France, copying in watercolor and photostat masterpieces of the past five centuries. Unlike many of his avant-garde contemporaries, Bearden did not eschew canonical influence, abiding instead by André Malraux’s maxim that all art derives from its predecessors: “In essence, art is an old tune that the artist plays with new variations” (R. Bearden, quoted in S. E. Lewis, “New Encounters,” in Romare Bearden: Idea to Realization, exh. cat., DC Moore Gallery, New York, February-March 2011, p. 12). And play Bearden did, drawing from African masks, Dutch landscapes, Dadaist philosophy, jazz music, literature and every humanistic pursuit in between, as if to underscore his belief that, despite superficial differences, creativity bubbles up from the universal impulse inherent in all people.
Cattle of the Sun God (1977) and lot 60, Untitled (from Lament for Bullfighters Series) (c. 1946), testify to two key periods in Bearden’s career. The latter abstracts its raucous imagery from Federico García Lorca’s 1935 poem “Lament for a Bullfighter (Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)”, in which the vulnerability of Man is rendered in stark relief against the unrelenting advance of a charging bull. Cattle of the Sun God, while also underpinned by literature, interprets a scene from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in ink and paper collage, a medium Bearden learned to use to its maximum communicative potential. These cardboard quadrangles bursting with high-key color, photograph clippings and calligraphic line came to form the crux of Bearden’s practice, which found art historical precedent in the protest art of Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch: “Collage methodology, fracturing space and form, was a brilliant choice for an artist wishing to convey his responses to a society increasingly aware of the possibilities of nuclear war, of the growing controversy that preceded and accompanied the United States’ engagement in Southeast Asia, and on a daily basis for African Americans, of the ongoing bestiality imposed by the Jim Crow laws, which both limited opportunities in every aspect of life and maintained the splintered existence of an illegal de facto segregation” (R. Fine, “Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between,” in The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 2003-April 2005, p. 41). While each of these explicit experiences could be read into his work, for the artist remained sensitive to the social milieu even after leaving his post at the New York City Department of Social Services, Bearden maintained that a one-note understanding of his process muted the soul raging behind every creation. In his personal way, Bearden made art to transcend life’s trivial vulgarities by resonating across generations and segregations: “The artist must be the medium through which humanity expresses itself. In this sense the greatest artists have faced the realities of life, and have been profoundly social” (R. Bearden, quoted in J. Francis, “Reading Bearden,” in The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 2003-April 2005, p.179).
Cattle of the Sun God (1977) and lot 60, Untitled (from Lament for Bullfighters Series) (c. 1946), testify to two key periods in Bearden’s career. The latter abstracts its raucous imagery from Federico García Lorca’s 1935 poem “Lament for a Bullfighter (Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)”, in which the vulnerability of Man is rendered in stark relief against the unrelenting advance of a charging bull. Cattle of the Sun God, while also underpinned by literature, interprets a scene from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in ink and paper collage, a medium Bearden learned to use to its maximum communicative potential. These cardboard quadrangles bursting with high-key color, photograph clippings and calligraphic line came to form the crux of Bearden’s practice, which found art historical precedent in the protest art of Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch: “Collage methodology, fracturing space and form, was a brilliant choice for an artist wishing to convey his responses to a society increasingly aware of the possibilities of nuclear war, of the growing controversy that preceded and accompanied the United States’ engagement in Southeast Asia, and on a daily basis for African Americans, of the ongoing bestiality imposed by the Jim Crow laws, which both limited opportunities in every aspect of life and maintained the splintered existence of an illegal de facto segregation” (R. Fine, “Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between,” in The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 2003-April 2005, p. 41). While each of these explicit experiences could be read into his work, for the artist remained sensitive to the social milieu even after leaving his post at the New York City Department of Social Services, Bearden maintained that a one-note understanding of his process muted the soul raging behind every creation. In his personal way, Bearden made art to transcend life’s trivial vulgarities by resonating across generations and segregations: “The artist must be the medium through which humanity expresses itself. In this sense the greatest artists have faced the realities of life, and have been profoundly social” (R. Bearden, quoted in J. Francis, “Reading Bearden,” in The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 2003-April 2005, p.179).