Painting and Drawing | Collages, Projections, and Variants
The Evolution of Bearden's Collage Technique | Printmaking

Techniques: Collages, Projections, and Variants

Although he added collage elements to paintings of the 1950s, Bearden's 1964 collages were a radical departure from those earlier works, marking a new direction in his art. They were small, measuring from approximately 5 x 10 to 13 x 19 inches, and they primarily employed snippets from newspapers and magazines such as Ebony and the Saturday Evening Post, often with linear details added in graphite or ink.

Shortly after these collages were completed, Bearden had twenty of them enlarged by means of a photographic process called photostat, popular from the 1950s through the 1980s after which it was essentially replaced by digital technology. Bearden called these enlargements Projections. Although the Projections received considerable critical acclaim when they were exhibited in 1964, Bearden never again made another body of work in this way. He did, however, add photostatic fragments to the palette of papers he used as elements in many later collages. Many compositions first seen in the 1964 collages and Projections served as the basis for Bearden's work in a variety of media throughout the rest of his career.

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1. Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings, 1964
2. Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings, 1964
3. The Visitor, 1970/1974