The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. confirms that this work will be included in the forthcoming Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné.

Romare Bearden's work in painting and collage helped shape the 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. Over the following decades, his collage practice grew to embrace a variety of media, layering cut paper along with paint and drawing, earning him The New York Times' laurel, "the nation's foremost collagist." [1]

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" [2]. 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.

The present work was likely executed in the second half of the 1940s, when the artist was exploring, among other themes, imagery from antiquity, including interpretations of The Iliad and the Passion of Christ. The figurative side of the work closely resembles other works from his 1948 series interpreting scenes from the Homeric epic, treating the bricks and arched windows in much the same manner as The Walls of Illium (1948, 17 x 24 inches, private collection). The horizontally oriented side of the sheet is handled in a Matisse-inspired manner typical of the artist's work in these years. In 1950, Bearden moved to Paris, and his work underwent a marked stylistic change; the present work was completed by this time.

[1] C. Gerald Fraser, "Romare Bearden, Collagist and Painter, Dies at 75," The New York Times, March 13, 1988

[2] Mary Schmidt Campbell, Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987, New York: Oxford University Press, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1991, p. 48