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Romare Bearden: Collage/In Context

FOG Design+Art, January 20–23, 2022, Booth 207


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Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Blue Shade, 1972 collag...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Blue Shade, 1972
collage of various papers and fabric on Masonite
9 1/2 x 14 inches / 24.1 x 35.6 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Of the Blues: Intermiss...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Of the Blues: Intermission Still-Life, Instruments of Dixieland, 1974
collage of various papers, acrylic, and lacquer on Masonite
28 x 22 inches / 71.1 x 55.9 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Evening, 1973 collage o...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Evening, 1973
collage of various papers and acrylic on Masonite
22 x 30 inches / 55.9 x 76.2 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Little Sister, c.1968 c...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Little Sister, c.1968
collage of various papers on board mounted on wood
9 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches / 23.2 x 18.1 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Spring Way, c.1968 coll...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Spring Way, c.1968
collage of various papers and acrylic on Masonite
24 x 36 inches / 61 x 91.4 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) The Tidings, c.1964 col...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
The Tidings, c.1964
collage of various papers on paperboard
7 1/8 x 9 inches / 18.1 x 22.9 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) The Evening Meal of Pro...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
The Evening Meal of Prophet Peterson, 1964
collage of various papers on paperboard
12 1/2 x 15 3/4 inches / 31.8 x 40 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Baptism, 1964 collage o...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Baptism, 1964
collage of various papers on paperboard
10 1/8 x 6 1/2 inches / 25.7 x 16.5 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) La Primavera, 1964 coll...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
La Primavera, 1964
collage of various papers and fabric on paperboard
8 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches / 21.6 x 33.7 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Inscription at the City...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Inscription at the City of Brass, 1972
collage of various papers, fabric and acrylic on Masonite
40 7/8 x 36 inches / 103.8 x 91.4 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Untitled, 1973 collage...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Untitled, 1973
collage of various papers on Masonite
10 3/4 x 7 7/8 inches / 27.3 x 20 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Ground Breaking Time-No...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Ground Breaking Time-North Carolina, 1971
collage of various papers and aluminum foil on paperboard mounted to plywood
15 x 19 1/4 inches / 38.1 x 48.9 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Memories, 1970 collage...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Memories, 1970
collage of various papers, acrylic, and graphite on plywood
14 x 19 3/4 inches / 35.6 x 50.2 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) The Last of the Blue De...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
The Last of the Blue Devils, 1979
collage of various papers on Masonite
18 x 14 inches / 45.7 x 35.6 cm

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Spring Planting, 1969 c...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Spring Planting, 1969
collage of various papers on Masonite
35 5/8 x 48 inches / 90.5 x 121.9 cm
signed

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) Tidings II, 1972 collag...

Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
Tidings II, 1972
collage of various papers and fabric on Masonite
13 5/8 x 22 inches / 34.6 x 55.9 cm
signed

Benny Andrews (1930-2006) New Arrival (Migrant Ser...

Benny Andrews (1930-2006)
New Arrival (Migrant Series), 2004
oil, fabric, and paper collage on paper
29 3/4 x 22 1/4 x 1/4 inches / 75.6 x 56.5 x 0.6 cm
signed

Hannelore Baron (1926-1987) Untitled (C82352), 198...

Hannelore Baron (1926-1987)
Untitled (C82352), 1982
mixed media collage with fabric, paper, ink, watercolor and monoprint
16 3/4 x 12 1/2 inches / 42.5 x 31.8 cm
signed

Hannelore Baron (1926-1987) Untitled (C82370), 198...

Hannelore Baron (1926-1987)
Untitled (C82370), 1982
mixed media collage with paper, ink, watercolor and monoprint
18 3/4 x 15 1/8 inches / 47.6 x 38.4 cm
signed

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) March 17, 1959, 1959 pape...

Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
March 17, 1959, 1959
paper and card collage with nylon stocking on Masonite
13 1/2 x 9 inches / 34.3 x 22.9 cm

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) Untitled (Tripod), c.1976 ac...

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989)
Untitled (Tripod), c.1976
acrylic, graphite and photocopy collage on paper
13 3/4 x 10 1/4 inches / 34.9 x 26 cm

Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965) Third Theme, 1938-39 t...

Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965)
Third Theme, 1938-39
tempera and paper collage on paperboard
15 x 15 inches / 38.1 x 38.1 cm
signed

Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965) First Theme, c.1964 te...

Burgoyne Diller (1906-1965)
First Theme, c.1964
tempera, paper and paperboard collage on paperboard
18 x 21 1/4 inches / 45.7 x 54 cm

Balcomb Greene (1904-1990) 37-B1, 1937 cut paper c...

Balcomb Greene (1904-1990)
37-B1, 1937
cut paper collage with graphite on paper
10 1/4 x 16 3/8 inches / 26 x 41.6 cm
signed

Balcomb Greene (1904-1990) 39-02, 1939 cut paper c...

Balcomb Greene (1904-1990)
39-02, 1939
cut paper collage with graphite on paper
10 3/8 x 14 5/8 inches / 26.4 x 37 cm 
signed

Gertrude Greene (1904-1956) 39-17, 1939 cut paper...

Gertrude Greene (1904-1956)
39-17, 1939
cut paper collage on paper
14 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches / 37.1 x 24.4 cm
signed

Nancy Grossman (b.1940) Collage Pastel #2, 1976 co...

Nancy Grossman (b.1940)
Collage Pastel #2, 1976
collage of dyed paper, tape, watercolor and pastel on paper
26 x 20 inches / 66 x 50.8 cm
signed

Nancy Grossman (b.1940) Venice-Ravenflag, 1978-82...

Nancy Grossman (b.1940)
Venice-Ravenflag, 1978-82
collage of various papers with watercolor on paper
17 1/2 x 22 3/4 inches / 44.5 x 57.8 cm
signed

Nancy Grossman (b.1940) Black Thundercloud Landsca...

Nancy Grossman (b.1940)
Black Thundercloud Landscape, 1963
collage of various papers and watercolor on paper
22 1/2 x 22 3/4 inches / 57.1 x 57.8 cm
signed

Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) The Door, 1958 paper co...

Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)
The Door, 1958
paper collage and oil on paper
28 1/2 x 22 5/8 inches / 72.4 x 57.5 cm
signed

Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) Untitled, 1958 paper co...

Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)
Untitled, 1958
paper collage and oil on paper
22 5/8 x 28 1/2 inches / 57.5 x 72.4 cm
signed

Alfred Leslie (b.1927) Untitled, 1960 collage of p...

Alfred Leslie (b.1927)
Untitled, 1960
collage of paper and oil on paper
25 x 19 inches / 63.5 x 48.3 cm
signed

Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000) J-S-48-58, 1958 oil...

Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000)
J-S-48-58, 1958
oil and canvas collage with graphite on canvas
16 1/2 x 24 inches / 41.9 x 61 cm
signed

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) Untitled, 1956 wood as...

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)
Untitled, 1956
wood assemblage with paper collage on panel
37 1/4 x 25 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches / 94.6 x 64.1 x 6.3 cm
signed

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) Untitled, c.1946...

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992)
Untitled, c.1946
collage and assemblage with gouache, ink, metal, wood and paper collage mounted to cardboard
14 x 11 1/8 x 1/2 inches / 35.6 x 28.3 x 1.3 cm
signed

Larry Rivers (1923-2002) Noses, 1962 collage of va...

Larry Rivers (1923-2002)
Noses, 1962
collage of various papers, gouache, graphite and tape on paper
15 1/8 x 12 3/4 inches / 38.4 x 32.4 cm
signed

Anne Ryan (1889-1954) Untitled, c.1950 fabric and...

Anne Ryan (1889-1954)
Untitled, c.1950
fabric and paper collage with metallic paint and wax crayon on paper
7 7/8 x 7 inches / 20 x 17.8 cm
signed

Anne Ryan (1889-1954) Untitled, c.1951 fabric and...

Anne Ryan (1889-1954)
Untitled, c.1951
fabric and paper collage with watercolor on paper
6 3/4 x 5 inches / 17.1 x 12.7 cm
signed

Betye Saar (b.1926) Night Letter: Some Day Some Pl...

Betye Saar (b.1926)
Night Letter: Some Day Some Place, 1977
mixed media collage on paper
23 1/8 x 17 3/4 inches / 58.7 x 45.1 cm
signed

Joseph Stella (1877-1946) Macchina Naturale #8, c....

Joseph Stella (1877-1946)
Macchina Naturale #8, c.1936
collage of various papers, soiled papers, leaf, gouache and ink on verso of printed paper
12 x 8 15/16 inches / 30.5 x 22.7 cm
signed

Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) Untitled, 1973 mixed med...

Lenore Tawney (1907-2007)
Untitled, 1973
mixed media collage with various papers, feathers, quills, thread, watercolor and ink on paper
9 1/2 x 8 inches / 24.1 x 20.3 cm
signed

Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) Untitled, 1957 collage...

Esteban Vicente (1903-2001)
Untitled, 1957
collage of various papers and charcoal on cardboard mounted to wood strainer
32 x 26 inches / 81.3 x 66 cm
signed

Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983) Collage #197, 195...

Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983)
Collage #197, 1957
collage of various papers and tempera on illustration board
10 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches / 26.7 x 20.6 cm
signed

Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983) Untitled, 1947 co...

Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983)
Untitled, 1947
collage of various printed and cut papers, gouache and ink on paperboard
16 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches / 42.5 x 34.9 cm
signed

William T. Williams (b.1942) Easy Dreams, 2008 col...

William T. Williams (b.1942)
Easy Dreams, 2008
collage of acrylic painted paper on Masonite
30 1/4 x 21 3/4 inches / 76.8 x 55.2 cm
signed



Artists


Press


Press Release

For its inaugural presentation at FOG Design+Art, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to announce Romare Bearden: Collage/In Context, a dual presentation of exhibitions exploring the evolution of collage practices throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. A solo exhibition of collage works by Romare Bearden (1911–1988), will feature nineteen masterworks created throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the artist’s creative prowess was at its height. Seeking to convey the unparalleled status of Bearden’s contributions to the medium, the booth will also feature a group exhibition curated to contextualize Bearden’s work among other major American artists working in collage from 1937 to 2019, providing unique insight into the precedents, impact, and legacy of Bearden’s work.

Romare Bearden began his career as a political cartoonist in the 1930s, an endeavor that anticipated his later work with ephemeral, mass-produced printed matter. He even used a collage technique in several of his cartoons from this period, pasting clippings from newspaper articles into his panels to set up his strip’s message, which often focused on the political struggles of the African diaspora in the US and abroad. The clean, expressive linework seen in his cartoons carried over into his painting career of the 1940s and 1950s, when he authored a vibrant body of modernist works whose imagery gradually vacillated between process-based abstraction and cubist-inflected figuration. Although the timeline of the artist’s earliest mature experiments in collage is uncertain—dates range from 1956 to 1961—Bearden did not earnestly begin his collage practice until the months spanning 1963 to 1964, at the age of fifty-one. The US political climate had reached a fever pitch in advance of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of 1963, and the artist, who had grown up in the south and was eminently aware of the nation’s civic failings, found his practice reinvigorated by possibilities he discovered in figurative collage. Working in a mode that incorporated approaches from the cubist and dada collages with which he was familiar, Bearden began producing collage works at an intrepid pace.

Romare Bearden: Collage will present a survey of Bearden’s masterful, intricate compositions focused on themes as expansive as his own talent and wide-ranging interests, which included Greek mythology, jazz, blues, European Old Masters, and Black American life in both urban and rural settings. Highlights of the presentation will include La Primavera (1964), one of the artist’s first major collages that converges cultural signifiers from southern Black American life with allegories of the European Renaissance; Spring Way (c.1968), a work the artist revisited over a period of several years that was inspired by his family history and the Great Migration; and Blue Shade (1973), a collage that incorporates an especially diverse array of media and improvisational composition techniques. Ultimately, Bearden was enamored of the medium’s potential to lay bare the foundational structures of pictorial representation, in both social and formal terms. As Thelma Golden writes, Bearden was drawn to collage’s capacity to get at an “essential notion of representation [by] opening up the authentic and the experiential through formal means.”[1]

While Bearden’s collages drew widespread acclaim and recognition for their originality and influence, the medium as a whole experienced a renaissance in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as all manner of painters, printmakers, filmmakers, and sculptors likewise found the medium replete with generative possibility. In fact, the increasing prevalence of collage techniques in 20th-century art was the subject of a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 called The Art of Assemblage, which Bearden visited. Exhibiting 250 works by 130 artists, the show traced the evolution of the medium from the cubist experiments of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris through the movements of dada, surrealism, nouveau réalisme, abstract expressionism, and neo-dada. Curated by William Seitz, the exhibition’s sprawling parameters sought to demonstrate the immense impact of collage and assemblage practices on the primary movements of 20th-century Western art.

Collage/In Context takes an approach similar to The Art of Assemblage, bringing together a diverse range of artists working in collage across multiple decades, but with revised parameters to focus on artists working in proximity to Bearden. Many of the artists included here were also represented in the 1961 MoMA exhibition, including Bruce Conner (1933–2008), Conrad Marca-Relli (1913–2000), Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), Anne Ryan (1889–1954), Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Esteban Vicente (1903–2001) and Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983). Expounding on the indelible impact of Bearden’s work are collages by such artists as Nancy Grossman (b.1940), who worked closely with Bearden to develop a new technique to preserve the integrity of their supports under the weight of several layers of paper and glue. A strong selection of collages by Betye Saar (b.1926) dating from the 1970s through the early 1990s juxtapose objects of particular familial or autobiographical significance with an array of other elements, often referencing sociopolitical ideas or mystical concepts. A small but potent group of works by Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) demonstrate the artist’s iterative process of formal experimentation, wherein ordinary inanimate objects are anthropomorphized to suggest unexpected connections between subjects. Rounding out the presentation are works by artists that could have easily fit into the 1961 MoMA exhibition but were a bit less prominent—but no less important—at the time, such as Hannelore Baron (1926–1987), Burgoyne Diller (1906–1965), Balcomb (1904–1990) and Gertrude Greene (1904–1956), Grace Hartigan (1922–2008), Alfred Leslie (b.1927), Larry Rivers (1923–2002) and Lenore Tawney (1907–2007). Finally, a selection of works created in the decades following Bearden’s death, including collages by Benny Andrews (1930–2006), Al Hansen (1927–1995) and William T. Williams (b.1942) emphasize the enduring influence of Bearden’s work.

While the conceptual underpinnings of these artists’ collage works range from complex narrative, to aesthetic experimentation, to theoretical postulates, all share a common impulse to transform fragmented materials into a new image bearing the significance of both its component parts and the reconstituted, holistic composition. For many of these artists, collage was a means to incorporate the substance of their lived reality into their art through a process that balanced degeneration and regeneration, which was often a reflection of the social upheavals of their era. Bearden stands out as a leader in this arena, as he recursively sought to translate American and African themes that survived or grew out of the ruptures of slavery and diaspora into a visual language created from the manufactured imagery of his moment. He was fascinated by the continuum he perceived in the rituals surrounding birth and death, as well as the traditions that brought factions of society together to observe and reminisce. As Ruth Fine observes, “One great legacy of Bearden’s art is its insight that what we share as a global community is equal in both interest and importance to what makes each of us unique…In the materiality of his expansive expression, method and message become one.”[2]



[1] Thelma Golden, “Projecting Blackness,” Romare Bearden in Black-and-White: Photomontage Projections (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997) p. 40.

[2] Ruth Fine, “Bearden: The Spaces Between,” in Fine et al., The Art of Romare Bearden. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003) p. 4.

 

Preview Gala
Wednesday, January 19 / 4–10PM

Public Days
Thursday, January 20 / 11AM–7PM
Friday, January 21 / 11AM–7PM
Saturday, January 22 / 11AM–7PM
Sunday, January 23 / 11AM–5PM

Visit Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Booth 207
Fort Mason Center, San Francisco