NGA | Bearden: Borrowing and Mixing

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Borrowing and Mixing

Romare Bearden's night classes at the Art Students League in New York City (1935), introduced him to compositions of great Dutch, Flemish, and French masters. Like many artists before him, Bearden extended his formal education by copying great works of art. He had black-and-white photostatic enlargements made from photographs of works by earlier painters, and these monochromatic images allowed him to clearly see compositions, tonal rhythms, and scale relationships. From a three-year period of copying in the early 1950s, Bearden intensified his dialogue with the world of art.

In 1977 Bearden made a series of watercolors illustrating The Odyssey, Homer's ancient Greek epic from about 750–700 B.C. For this scene, he used a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Pintoricchio as a model.

After a ten-year quest to return home following the Trojan War, Odysseus arrives in Ithaka to find his wife Penelope under siege by suitors. She had promised to marry one of them upon completion of her weaving, but—convinced her husband will return someday—she wove her cloth by day and unwove it each night so that she would never be finished. Arriving to see Penelope's faithfulness, Odysseus fights off the suitors and reclaims his place as king.

You can see the almost one-to-one correspondence between these images. Observe the details Bearden borrows from Pintoricchio's painting:

An interior with a square-tiled floor
The cat playing with a ball of yarn in the foreground. (Did Bearden substitute his own cat?)
The window, with Odysseus's boat floating on the Ionian Sea beyond.
A rush of suitors on the right with Odysseus, at the door, behind them.
Penelope at left, with her hands on her loom, its upright frame and pulleys silhouetted against the window.
A female servant at her feet.
A male figure advancing toward Penelope, his pose and gesture the same in each work.

Analyze Space

Pintoricchio's interior space seems to have depth, as if you could step in.

Bearden's space is tilted up and flattened by the repeated, high-keyed color pattern of his floor tiles. We are stopped at the picture plane. Compare the suitors and the figures of Penelope and her servant. Pintoricchio's figures occupy space; they are modeled and three-dimensional.
Wall Paintings from the tomb of Amenhotep Huyi, 18th Dynasty

Wall Paintings from the tomb of Amenhotep Huyi, 18th Dynasty

Bearden's friezelike figures have profile faces, frontal eyes, and emphatic hand gestures resembling figures in ancient Egyptian art.

Do you see a connection between Bearden's simplified color shapes and the work here by the twentieth-century French master Henri Matisse?
Henri Matisse, Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1940

Henri Matisse, Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1940

Consider Bearden's strategy of race-reversal

Pintoricchio's figures are white, dressed in typical Renaissance clothing. Bearden's figures are black. While elements of their dress, such as the suitors' leggings and boots, are Renaissance, also present are African and black American dress and adornment—Penelope's flat-collared dress, the black Southern headscarves she and her servant wear, and the suitors' Benin-style African headgear.

Foreigners, possibly Nubians, bearing tribute. Wallpainting from the tomb of Amenhotep Huyi, 18th Dynasty, photo: E. Strouhal. Werner Forman Archive/Art Resource, NY

Henri Matisse, Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1940, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Given in loving memory of her husband, Taft Schreiber, by Rita Schreiber

"Everything that I have done since then [several years after leaving the Art Students League] has been...an extension of my experiments with flat painting, shallow space, Byzantine stylization and African design."
Romare Bearden, Odysseus Enters the Door Disguised as an Old Man, c. 1977

Romare Bearden, Odysseus Enters the Door Disguised as an Old Man, c. 1977

Romare Bearden, Odysseus Enters at the Door Disguised as an Old Man, c. 1977, Evelyn N. Boulware

Pinturicchio, Penelope with the Suitors, 1509

Pintoricchio, Penelope with the Suitors, 1509, National Gallery, London

Above, look carefully at the ways Bearden makes elements from Pintoricchio's work suit his own ideas about space, color, and composition.