Romare Bearden American, 1911-1988

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

Romare Bearden created House in Cotton Field in 1968, drawing both on his own childhood memories of the American South, and his investment in making art that spoke to the realities of Black life in the United States. [1] It utilizes the collage style—combining cut-out photographs gleaned from magazines, newspapers, and books with bright swathes of colored paper—that would become Bearden’s signature and preferred medium, although at that time he had been working in collage only a few years. While his interest in art had grown from his work as a political cartoonist during college, the early decades of Bearden’s career had been spent as a painter, including figurative Social Realist work during the 1930s, as well as experimentations with abstraction in the 1940s and 1950s; it was not until 1964, spurred in part by his effort to find a way of working collaboratively with other Black artists interested in the Civil Rights Movement, that Bearden would begin working in collage. [2] Very quickly, he found the medium suited to his interests as an artist—allowing him to conjoin sharply disjunctive, fragmentary materials

into a new order, while at the same time giving compelling material form to what Robert G. O’Meally calls “the complex layeredness” of Black American life (emphasis original). [3]

House in Cotton Field depicts a cabin at the edge of an expansive field of cotton—but it is also a portrait of a family in the tender, twilight moments at the end of the day. In the golden light of the setting sun, two figures work in a field, making the most of the last daylight to finish the day’s hoeing and harvesting—while an older figure, closer to the house, stands at the edge of a verdant patch of green, perhaps about to begin gathering food for the family’s dinner. Through the open door of the cabin, meanwhile, we glimpse a young woman in the midst of undressing—and a young child makes his way along the dirt path toward the house.

In House in Cotton Field, the abundant detail of Bearden’s earliest black-and-white photomontages (e.g., The Conjur Woman, 1964; The Museum of Modern Art) has been pared back, giving over to a starker, but also more vividly colored composition. Photo-collaged elements are used selectively—as abbreviations rather than descriptions of the cotton field’s furrows, the dirt of the path outside the cabin, or the quilt in its interior—and they are carefully balanced with fields of bright, unmodulated color reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs. [4] In the counterpoint between these elements, we can also discern the work’s rigorous organizational structure—the way the cabin’s right edge cleanly cleaves the composition in half, for example—which grants the work a sense of stability and order. Just the year after he completed House in Cotton Field, Bearden would in fact explicate this approach to composition in “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” an essay that detailed the influence of his early training in mathematics, as well as his desire to forge a language that was “strict and classical, in the manner of great Benin heads” or the “methods of De Hooch and Vermeer.” [5]

Bearden’s stated desire was to make work with the enduring power of African sculpture or seventeenth-century Dutch painting—but he wanted to do so while attending closely to the experience and lived realities of Black Americans. In House in Cotton Field, he brings his rigorous compositional program and masterful sense of color to bear on the humble lives of a family of sharecroppers, in a way that refuses to romanticize the difficulty of their daily existence, while also dignifying the work that allows them to survive. The collage does not disguise the hardscrabble nature of the family’s lives, registered in the gnarled hands of the older figure and the cabin’s pieced-together construction. At the same time, House in Cotton Field pointedly focuses on the family’s industry—the two figures who remain in the field late in the day, or the older figure who

stands, unbowed and at the ready, to the cabin’s right. Bearden even chose to utilize an image of a ruler within the

cabin’s construction, a testament to the ethic of discipline that structures the family’s lives. It is this discipline that

seems to unite the family—whose members are not pictured gathered in a moment of leisure, but whose disparate activities

nevertheless speak to their commitment to each other, to their collective survival and well-being.

As closely as House in Cotton Field attends to the experiences of its subjects, lived without luxury or many modern comforts, it is yet not an image solely of unending work or hardship—but also of cooperation, kinship, and resilience. Even in its depiction of the backbreaking labor involved in growing and picking cotton, it also pictures the family united in a common purpose; in the field, a male and a female figure toil side by side, lightening by sharing the load—their labor, like the roof of their humble home, touched by the rays of the setting sun, which bathe the scene in a quasi-celestial light. The figure at the work’s near-center, meanwhile, gestures to the strong, stabilizing force of the family’s matriarch—who stands, her back against a tree, as a kind of literal pillar within the work. A version of Bearden’s many “conjur women”—similarly forceful Black female figures, whose positioning at thresholds and border-places speak to their capacity to bridge natural and spiritual worlds (see

[1] Bearden was born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, near Charlotte, and frequently returned there during summers to visit his grandparents. On the importance of the South to his imagery, see Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections (Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum, 2011), the accompanying catalogue for an exhibition that included House in Cotton Field.

[2] Bearden turned to collage after first suggesting that it be used as the basis for a collaborative project created by the members of Spiral, a group of African American artists that he had helped to found in 1963. Spiral was formed in response to the Civil Rights Movement as a forum for discussion about the role that art should play in broader political struggle. Although the other Spiral members were uninterested in working in collage, Bearden took up his own suggestion, and began working in the medium beginning in the mid-1960s. On Spiral, Bearden’s early work in collage, and the relationship between his art and politics, see Kobena Mercer, “Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Midcentury,” in Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, eds. Michael Ann Holly and Keith P. F. Moxey (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2003), 29–46; and Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Political Bearden,” in The Romare Bearden Reader, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 256–69.

[3] Robert G. O’Meally, “An Introductory Essay,” in The Romare Bearden Reader, 23. See also Elizabeth Alexander, “The Genius of Romare Bearden,” in Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 36.

[4] On Bearden’s engagement with the work of Henri Matisse, see entries from the journal of Romare Bearden, 1947, printed in The Romare Bearden Reader, 101; Calvin Tomkins, “Putting Something Over Something Else,” The New Yorker, November 2 0, 1977; and Albert Murray, “Bearden Plays Bearden,” in Romare Bearden: 1970–1980 (Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum, 1980).

[5] Romare Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo 2 (1969): 14.

[6] On Bearden’s interest in “conjure women,” see the essays in Conjuring Bearden, ed. Richard J. Powell (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2006), especially Richard J. Powell, “Changing, Conjuring Reality,” 19–33; and Leslie King-Hammond, “Bearden’s Crossroads: Modernist Roots/Riffing Traditions,” in Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections, 86–103.

[7] The area of green that extends beyond the lower right corner of the work might be seen as one of what Bearden called the “open corner”—a concept he learned from studying Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy. One corner of the work is left deliberately open, which, as Bearden claimed repeatedly, “allow[ed] the observer a starting point” in viewing the painting—an entry-point from which they might even be said to complete it. See Bearden and Carl Holty, The Painter’s Mind: A

Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting (New York: Crown Publishing, 1969), 113–15; Charles H. Rowell, “Inscription at ‘The City of Brass’: An Interview with Romare Bearden,” Callaloo 36 (Summer 1988): 428–46; and Robert G. O’Meally, “The ‘Open Corner’ of Black Community and Creativity: From Romare Bearden to Duke Ellington and Toni Morrison,” in Robert G. O’Meally, Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 86–116.