Romare Bearden’s work in painting and collage helped shape art of postwar America, influencing generations of painters from his early contributions to the Harlem Renaissance to late-twentieth century paintings and illustrations. His first show took place in 1940 at Addison Bates’s gallery in Harlem, a major center of African–American art and culture. Bearden took instruction from George Grosz at the Art Students League and earned his degree in science and education at New York University. His early work as a Social Realist gave way over the years to a refined collage technique that drew from mosaic technique. Over the following decades, his collage technique grew to embrace a variety of media, layering cut paper along with the addition of paint and drawing, earning him the New York Times’ laurel, “the nation’s foremost collageist” [sic.] (C. Gerald Fraser, “Romare Bearden, Collagist and Painter, Dies at 75,” The New York Times, Mar. 13, 1988).

For an artist well known as a collagist, Bearden came to the medium relatively late in his career. He fought against the view that collage was a lesser art form, protesting “I paint on collage. I consider them paintings, not collage. I use collage, pieces of paper that I’ve painted on myself” (Mary Schmidt Campbell, Memory and Metaphor, 1991, p. 48). By the time Bearden established himself in the art world -- and in the medium of collage -- he became happy to upend expectations of his work by returning to "conventional" watercolor. In 1984, Bearden turned to the subject of Obeah, the Afro-Carribean spiritualist cult. "Obeah is a religion still practiced by blacks in parts of the Southeast and in the Carribean, where Bearden maintains a home," explained The New York Times, when Bearden exhibited this new body of work. The use of watercolor supported the subject matter, "The medium by which he enters a shadowy, superstitious, swampy world, filled with rites and ritual passages, which have always fascinated the artist, is watercolor alone" (Campbell, p. 48). Bearden had long used the tile-like quality of collage to evoke mosaics and stained glass. His attention to the expressive possibilities of Bearden’s new medium was just as focused—and reviewers took note:

The figures seem invaded by magical forces; the paper seems occupied by stains. While the subject of these water colors is a world beyond rational understanding, the water colors seem themselves to have been given form by something outside reason. If the Obeah holds such an attraction for Bearden, it is clearly because its mixture of rules, improvisation, trust and sacrifice is characteristic of art-making itself.

The success of Bearden's work is a result, in part, of his grasp of positive-negative space. While the white of the paper can be used to set off the strong and festive color, more often than not, Bearden uses colors and shapes to light a fire within the paper . . . In ''Green Man,'' the blank paper is transformed into dappled rays of sunlight on the clothing and face of a man bewitched. In ''Our Eyes Meet,'' the paper is the white of spellbound eyes. Making the paper an active force enables us feel a reality behind the figures and the degree to which the invisible permeates the Obeah creed (Michael Brenson, "Romare Bearden, 'Rituals of the Obeah'," The New York Times, November 30, 1984).

When they were exhibited in 1984, the Newark Museum acquired one of the sixteen works from this show, with others going to major private collections. The text for the catalogue of the Obeah series was published in three languages: English, French, and Creole, nodding to the roots of the Obeah group in Haiti and New Orleans. The present work is inscribed in these three languages on the verso at lower right:

"Green Man "
F, "L'Homme Vert"
CR, "Msieu Ve"

Bearden made his own statement for the works’ genesis:

One Obeah woman thought that she made the sun rise. Each night she held back the moon and conceived a rooster which she hurled out into the sky, and it became the sun, . . . the darker side of things . . . is what the Obeah are mostly about. The Obeah go back to the Ashanti. This is magic, not religion, although it is not voodoo. Sometimes the magic and religion interweave, but as I see it, it is more about magic . . . I was very interested in the fact that the Obeah and their roots could be traced back to Africa (as quoted by Ruth Fine in The Art of Romare Bearden, 2003, p. 123).

Bearden knew something magic himself. His work is suffused with an evocation with the spiritual powers of the people he documented. The Green Man is a chimerical document: one part portrait, one part incantation. The work depicts a man wearing a macumbeiro mask, conjuring the spirit world of Obeah. This mask derives from the Macumba ceremony in Brazil, brought to international audiences by the film Black Orpheus (Marcel Caums, 1958). Bearden believed the film displayed African-American culture with aesthetic integrity: once men put on the macumbeiro masks they went to a different world inhibited by celebration and joy. Bearden knew Obeah wasn’t meant to be frightening, but he wanted his "Green Man" to look fierce (he thought his sitter looked too humble), therefore, he added vibrant greens, reds, and a cigar.