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Collage: Bearden's Signature Style
Romare Bearden, Spring Way, 1964, Smithsonian American Art Collection, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design
Like the content of Bearden's art, his methods and materials are complex and layered. Each object merits long periods of observation to discover its many facets. Throughout his more than forty-year career, Bearden successfully worked in a wide range of media, including oil and watercolor painting, edition prints, monotypes, and even one-known assemblage sculpture. However, the technique that made him famous was collage. From the start, Bearden employed collage in unique and innovative ways, and his techniques evolved over time. This section is a summary of Bearden's collage practice, his methods and materials. Although Bearden may have made collages as early as 1956, it was in the 1960s that his art underwent a transformation. During the period from 1963 to 1964 two major shifts occurred in Bearden's art. First, he moved from abstraction back to figuration, and second, he changed his technique from primarily painting to primarily collage. His renewed interest in figuration may have resulted from a recent trip to France, where Bearden was inspired by European old masters. However, many factors contributed to his shift to collage. |
Prominent New York artists, such as
Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning were using collage in the
1940s. Bearden would have known of the 1951 publication edited by
Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, which featured
collage. In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art mounted the 
Art of Assemblage, which included collages by artists whom Bearden
admired such as Jean Dubuffet and George Grosz. The 252-work exhibition
also included works by dada artists Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters.
Bearden would have been aware of this exhibition. In 1963 to 1964,
he began working in collage as his primary medium.Bearden was always concerned with the underlying geometry of his compositions. In 1968 he described his collage practice: "I first put down several rectangles of color some of which…are in the same ratio as…the rectangle that I'm working on. [Then] I paste a photograph, say, anything just to get me started, maybe a head, at certain—a few—places in the canvas…I try to move up and across the canvas, always moving up and across. If I tear anything, I tear it up and across. What I am trying to do then is establish a vertical and horizontal control of the canvas. I don't like to get into too many slanting movements...."  top: Kurt Schwitters, Cherry Picture, 1921, Museum of
Modern Art, New York, Mr. and Mrs. A. Atwater Kent, Jr. Fund
above: Materials from Bearden's studio |
For compositional inspiration, Bearden
looked to the "carefully planned structures" of the Dutch masters.
 He
explained: "Because many of the paintings I was doing were of interiors… I began to look again at Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch and Jan
Steen. I found that, especially with Vermeer and Steen, a lot of the
work was controlled, like Mondrian's, by the use of rectangles over
rectangles. I really think the art of painting is the art of putting
something over something else."  Over
time Bearden's repertoire of collage materials expanded to include
strips of wallpaper, posters, fabrics, foils, miscellaneous found
materials, and paper he printed and painted himself. To some areas
he added spray paint; he masked others to create crisp edges. In the
1970s Bearden began to enhance the surface texture and color by using
abrasion, bleaching, and puddling techniques. Circular markings on
works of the 1970s were possibly made with an electric eraser. top: Pieter de Hooch, The Bedroom, 1658/1684, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection
above:Romare Bearden, The Blues, 1975, Honolulu Academy of Arts/gift of Geraldine P. Clark
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