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Subjects: Landscapes

Landscape served as a background for many political cartoons Bearden made during the 1930s. In his paintings of the early 1940s, the land, while often beautifully rendered, continued in this subservient capacity, and highly developed farm scenes subsequently played a role within Bearden's collaged memories of Mecklenburg County. After the Beardens built a home on St. Martin in the early 1970s, the artist also created many collages featuring a woman bathing in a pool in a lush island setting.

Eventually, however, Bearden explored Caribbean landscape motifs as a prominent subject in collages, watercolors, and monotypes. Apparently influenced by this immersion in the tropical paradise, Bearden's late memories of Mecklenburg County no longer show the landscape as the background for a figural situation, but as the sole subject of individual works.

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1. Blue Snake, 1971
2. Rain Forest--Pool, c. 1978
3. Winter (Time of the Hawk), 1985