.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
“Life is going to triumph somehow.”
– R. Bearden, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else,” The New Yorker, 28 November 1977, p. 77
With the lolling cadence of a dream sequence punctuated by the weighty poignance of nostalgia, Romare Bearden’s masterful Liza in High Cotton (1978) cuts and pastes just one of the ceaseless stories of love, loss and labor whispered across the American South throughout the early twentieth century. A thoughtful fusion of collage elements, the present work syllabizes the artist’s signature style into a narrative pregnant with both personal and universal resonance. Indebted to the longstanding landscape tradition, Bearden overlays an acrylic and watercolor ground with torn paper and hole punch scraps in lieu of vegetation, fabric and magazine snippings in the place of figurative forms, and printed elements suggestive of both natural and manmade structures. With little more than washy medium and well-chosen color, Bearden implies a depth of field as the lush hills recede towards the horizon, subject to the fiery, inescapable sun. Distinct characters inhabit their individual space in the foreground, pieced together from Bearden’s tactile surroundings, yet together they piece together a patchwork story of community in high cotton.
Despite the artist’s playfully patterned and populated world, the substance of Bearden’s practice lies in his inimitable ability to reflect in myriad media a raw lived experience. Far from an imagined scene, the present work gracefully eulogizes Bearden’s unrealized play date with his first sweetheart, Liza, who could not come out given her laborious responsibilities: “I couldn’t play with her that day, her grandmother said she was in the fields” (R. Bearden, quoted in Something Over Something Else, exh. cat., Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 2019, n.p.). A heart-tugging but fitting memory for a collage from Bearden’s Profile series, a body of work divided between Part I, The Twenties and Part II, The Thirties, each of which contains Bearden’s recollections from those respective years. Mecklenburg County, in North Carolina, recurs frequently as a setting throughout the former set of works, where Bearden resided with relatives during his childhood before relocating to Harlem. Attempting to understand the world from four feet tall, these works are instilled not with a bitterness of situation engendered by years of toil, but rather a hopeful perspective in which the sun rises instead of sets. The cotton plain could almost pose as a flowered meadow, and the central figure could be humming a love song rather than a lament; yet, while harmony is seemingly close at hand, the reckoning of Black reality during the 1920s in the southern United States is not far removed from Bearden’s studied pastoral. Bearden may be buoyant, but he is not naïve; as a caseworker at the New York City Department of Human Resources until the late ‘60s, Bearden was no stranger to struggle. And this vision that was apropos in 1978 sadly remains just as relevant today: twenty-four, including the present work, of the twenty-eight original collages in Profile/Part I were reunited for the first time at the landmark High Museum exhibition in 2019 to great acclaim.
Beyond the formal aspect, the construction of the present collage is as embedded in its surface as its meaning. In his moving tribute to his old friend, playwright Barrie Stavis reminisced on his first encounter with Liza in High Cotton: “Romie and I used to have lunch together about once every two to three weeks. I would go to his studio in Queens, and sometimes he would have sandwiches and tea ready for us. …One of these visits took place in late October 1978. It was a wet, cold day and I was chilled. I took off my damp, heavy overcoat and threw it on the edge of Romie’s worktable. About three feet away from the coat there was a collage on which he was working, and when I threw the coat down, I made sure there was a comfortable distance between the coat and the collage. But, to my horror, a mass of white bits of paper blew away, settling on the table and floor in disarray. I cried out in despair, ‘Romie, what have I done?’ Without missing a beat he said, ‘The design wasn’t quite right – but I didn’t have the energy to work on it. Now I must find it’” (B. Stavis, quoted in M. Moorman, “Imitations of Immortality,” ARTnews, Volume 87, no. 6, Summer 1988, p. 40). And find it he did, rearranging what another might find as studio refuse into crucial compositional components. At the Cordier-Ekstrom opening, Bearden proudly showed his friend the finished work on the gallery wall, crediting Stavis’s errant jacket for the much-improved presentation.
Thus engaging with both his past and his present, albeit inadvertently, Liza in High Cotton comprises the best of Bearden’s unique take on life – an acknowledgement that it is hard coupled with a relentless spark to keep it going. That spark at one time was Liza herself, a compatriot with whom Romare could run and laugh and stave off oncoming adulthood. Then at another time it was Stavis, writing letters back and forth about ideas on plays, prose, poems for over forty years. Memorialized in a 1977 New Yorker interview with Calvin Tomkins and then again in the 2019 High Museum eponymous show, Bearden believed “the art of painting is the art of putting something over something else” (R. Bearden, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else,” The New Yorker, 28 November 1977, p. 72). Liza in High Cotton puts paper punches over paint, sky over field, and people over problems. For his astute talent in always putting joy over suffering, Bearden could be called the best painter of them all.
– R. Bearden, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else,” The New Yorker, 28 November 1977, p. 77
With the lolling cadence of a dream sequence punctuated by the weighty poignance of nostalgia, Romare Bearden’s masterful Liza in High Cotton (1978) cuts and pastes just one of the ceaseless stories of love, loss and labor whispered across the American South throughout the early twentieth century. A thoughtful fusion of collage elements, the present work syllabizes the artist’s signature style into a narrative pregnant with both personal and universal resonance. Indebted to the longstanding landscape tradition, Bearden overlays an acrylic and watercolor ground with torn paper and hole punch scraps in lieu of vegetation, fabric and magazine snippings in the place of figurative forms, and printed elements suggestive of both natural and manmade structures. With little more than washy medium and well-chosen color, Bearden implies a depth of field as the lush hills recede towards the horizon, subject to the fiery, inescapable sun. Distinct characters inhabit their individual space in the foreground, pieced together from Bearden’s tactile surroundings, yet together they piece together a patchwork story of community in high cotton.
Despite the artist’s playfully patterned and populated world, the substance of Bearden’s practice lies in his inimitable ability to reflect in myriad media a raw lived experience. Far from an imagined scene, the present work gracefully eulogizes Bearden’s unrealized play date with his first sweetheart, Liza, who could not come out given her laborious responsibilities: “I couldn’t play with her that day, her grandmother said she was in the fields” (R. Bearden, quoted in Something Over Something Else, exh. cat., Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 2019, n.p.). A heart-tugging but fitting memory for a collage from Bearden’s Profile series, a body of work divided between Part I, The Twenties and Part II, The Thirties, each of which contains Bearden’s recollections from those respective years. Mecklenburg County, in North Carolina, recurs frequently as a setting throughout the former set of works, where Bearden resided with relatives during his childhood before relocating to Harlem. Attempting to understand the world from four feet tall, these works are instilled not with a bitterness of situation engendered by years of toil, but rather a hopeful perspective in which the sun rises instead of sets. The cotton plain could almost pose as a flowered meadow, and the central figure could be humming a love song rather than a lament; yet, while harmony is seemingly close at hand, the reckoning of Black reality during the 1920s in the southern United States is not far removed from Bearden’s studied pastoral. Bearden may be buoyant, but he is not naïve; as a caseworker at the New York City Department of Human Resources until the late ‘60s, Bearden was no stranger to struggle. And this vision that was apropos in 1978 sadly remains just as relevant today: twenty-four, including the present work, of the twenty-eight original collages in Profile/Part I were reunited for the first time at the landmark High Museum exhibition in 2019 to great acclaim.
Beyond the formal aspect, the construction of the present collage is as embedded in its surface as its meaning. In his moving tribute to his old friend, playwright Barrie Stavis reminisced on his first encounter with Liza in High Cotton: “Romie and I used to have lunch together about once every two to three weeks. I would go to his studio in Queens, and sometimes he would have sandwiches and tea ready for us. …One of these visits took place in late October 1978. It was a wet, cold day and I was chilled. I took off my damp, heavy overcoat and threw it on the edge of Romie’s worktable. About three feet away from the coat there was a collage on which he was working, and when I threw the coat down, I made sure there was a comfortable distance between the coat and the collage. But, to my horror, a mass of white bits of paper blew away, settling on the table and floor in disarray. I cried out in despair, ‘Romie, what have I done?’ Without missing a beat he said, ‘The design wasn’t quite right – but I didn’t have the energy to work on it. Now I must find it’” (B. Stavis, quoted in M. Moorman, “Imitations of Immortality,” ARTnews, Volume 87, no. 6, Summer 1988, p. 40). And find it he did, rearranging what another might find as studio refuse into crucial compositional components. At the Cordier-Ekstrom opening, Bearden proudly showed his friend the finished work on the gallery wall, crediting Stavis’s errant jacket for the much-improved presentation.
Thus engaging with both his past and his present, albeit inadvertently, Liza in High Cotton comprises the best of Bearden’s unique take on life – an acknowledgement that it is hard coupled with a relentless spark to keep it going. That spark at one time was Liza herself, a compatriot with whom Romare could run and laugh and stave off oncoming adulthood. Then at another time it was Stavis, writing letters back and forth about ideas on plays, prose, poems for over forty years. Memorialized in a 1977 New Yorker interview with Calvin Tomkins and then again in the 2019 High Museum eponymous show, Bearden believed “the art of painting is the art of putting something over something else” (R. Bearden, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else,” The New Yorker, 28 November 1977, p. 72). Liza in High Cotton puts paper punches over paint, sky over field, and people over problems. For his astute talent in always putting joy over suffering, Bearden could be called the best painter of them all.