With an intimate interiority intimating a nostalgic domestic scene of weighty poignance, Romare Bearden’s magisterial Untitled (Mecklenburg Morning) demonstrates the artist reminiscing his youthful exploits in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The composition is dominated by two figures. One, a standing nude constructed with restrained economy out of washes of yellows, reds and blues outlined in black, props one knee and both hands upon a wooden chair, head turned at the neck to gaze out a window revealing a cloud-spotted blue sky and rising morning sun over a yellow landscape. Bearden constructs his second figure, a seated woman gazing straight ahead toward the viewer, out of layers of watercolor and torn patterned and textured paper. The remainder of this dense interior comes alive with layers of paper patterned with vegetal motifs; the tight, branching lines of the walls offering contrast to the loose linearity of Bearden’s figures.
The nude makes frequent appearances in Bearden’s oeuvre, reflecting his immersive study and diligent copying of Western masters—especially Ingres and Matisse—as part of his artistic training. Like other nudes in this series, such as Down Home, Also, the figure grants a sense of loving relaxation to the scene. In a heartwarming touch, Bearden appears to have modeled the seated woman after his own great grandmother Rosa Kennedy—a photograph of her and his great grandfather Henry was prominently hung in Bearden’s studio around the time the present lot was executed in 1980. Her right hand is enlarged and out of scale, a motif Bearden frequently utilizes in his collages to emphasize the manual labor intrinsic to the livelihoods of his Black subjects. Bearden masterfully controls space, utilizing passages of blank paper to establish breaks in the work’s tempo, inspired by his experiments composing Jazz as well as his study of Chinese landscape painting under the calligrapher Mr. Wu while living in Paris.
The series from which this work arrives arose after a New Yorker profile of Bearden in 1977, which spurred the artist to ruminate over his childhood memories. Born in Charlotte, South Carolina, his family soon moved to Harlem, where his parents became foundational to the neighborhood’s vibrant cultural scene. In summertime, he escaped the urban heat to stay with his great grandparents, who remained in Mecklenburg County. The process of recounting these youthful memories for the profile inspired Bearden to produce visual elaborations of singular events which, layered on top of each other, create a collage of his early life. Works recounting his earliest memories in Mecklenburg, such as in the present lot, are intentionally small in scale, conveying the experience of the artist as an adult returning to childhood vistas. Bearden remarked that “although in your imagination everything looks so big to you when you’re a child, when you go back you find that it’s only two or three strides, that it ain’t that big. So I felt more comfortable doing these things small” (R. Bearden, quoted in Something Over Something Else, exh. cat., Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 2019, n.p.).
An exceptional polymath, Bearden studied mathematics and literature at Boston University and New York University. He undertook additional coursework in art, where he began to experiment as a cartoonist. A talented pitcher as well, Bearden turned down an offer to play for the Philadelphia Athletics, as he did not wish to disguise his Black identity to participate in still-segregated Major League Baseball. Despite the urgings of his mother to become a doctor, he took up art classes with Georg Grosz, who introduced him to the political collages of the Dada group, as well as Old Masters such as Duccio, De Hooch, and Ingres. After serving in the Second World War, Bearden moved to Paris, where he studied philosophy at Le Sorbonne and enmeshed himself within the postwar Parisian art scene, sharing café tables with figures such as James Baldwin, Georges Braque, and Constantin Brâncuși.
Bearden’s continuing importance as “the nation’s foremost collagist” (New York Times, 13 March 1988) and immense impact upon the Harlem Renaissance is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (February 25th- July 28th 2024), where his six-panel masterpiece The Block (1971) hangs in the place of honor as the last work in the show. He meticulously imparts his careful study of aesthetics and art history into Untitled (Mecklenburg Morning). The artist wrote that his aim was “to paint the life of my people as I know it—as passionately and dispassionately at Brueghel… my intention, however, is to reveal through pictorial complexities the richness of a life I know” (R. Bearden, quoted in “Rectangular Structure in my Montage Paintings,” Leonardo Vol. 2, 1969, 11-19). Deeply personal, and yet saturated with a broad human compassion, the present lot demonstrates Bearden at the height of his artistic powers.