One on One: Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt

Patchwork Quilt’s public debut was in She, a group exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom that juxtaposed representations of women in pairs of works that reached across geographies and chronologies. It was shown with a small wood sculpture of a reclining figure, identified as being made by an artist of the Dogon people of Mali [see below]. The exhibition’s evocative mix and match of works echoed Romare Bearden’s practice of pulling inspiration and imagery from diverse sources, cultures, and time periods: “Art is always made from other art,” he said in 1987, in an interview with Charles H. Rowell, “and you just have to find your place.”¹

She exhibition catalogue spread with Patchwork Quilt and a reclining figure by a Dogon artist of Mali, 1970

His figure’s straight, extended legs and arm bring to mind the formal rigidity of Egyptian sculpture [right], which can make it difficult to see Patchwork Quilt as an image of repose;² in fact, the work has occasionally been erroneously reproduced as if rotated 90 degrees—as a vertical picture with a figure striding forward.³ The subject’s pose also resembles that of a woman in a photograph by E. J. Bellocq, whose images of prostitutes in the New Orleans red-light district were exhibited at MoMA a month before Patchwork Quilt was shown at Cordier & Ekstrom; the catalogue for the exhibition was in Bearden’s library, and it is entirely possible that he would have seen it.⁴

Statue of King Menkaura (Mycerinus) and queen. Egyptian, reign of Menkaura, 2490–72 BCE

E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits; Photographs from the New Orleans Red-Light District, circa 1912, front cover with untitled image

The pose of Bearden’s figure has none of the apparent discomfort of Bellocq’s [left], but the two depictions are formally linked by the curved edges of the couches and the striped patterning of wicker and fabric. The geometric planes of the woman’s face—her eye formed by a triangle of negative space that is mirrored by the pasted shape of her hanging earring—recall those of the African masks Bearden frequently used in his collages. Her most natural-seeming gesture, the resting of her head on her curved arm, has a fluidity similar to that of the nudes of Henri Matisse, whose Blue Nude II (1952) was also included in She.

Romare Bearden. Patchwork Quilt. 1970. Cut-and-pasted fabrics, paper, and gelatin silver print with acrylic on board

In Rowell’s 1987 interview, Bearden identifies Patchwork Quilt’s majestic, reclining figure as a facet of the specific lived experience of Black people in the American South, as well as part of the art-historical lineage of female nudes standing for strength, beauty, and wisdom:

Rowell: What were you trying to achieve with Patchwork Quilt?
Bearden: Well, the quilt that Southern people make. People are looking at that kind of art again. It was all around when I was a little boy.... It was a lady lying down, but rather than just a nude it was something else. But I don’t know what. I’m not saying a queen or something; it was something other...
Rowell: ...than “the nude reclining”?
Bearden: Yeah, like a Rousseau, the great Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, with the lion looking at her. She’s something else, and to put her into that environment of the patchwork quilt is to bring it back to the experience you’ve talked about.⁵

From left: Henri Rousseau. The Sleeping Gypsy. 1897. Oil on canvas; The Dream. 1910. Oil on canvas

Although Rousseau’s reclining women—in The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) as well as in The Dream (1910), whose subject sleeps on a couch, no less—do seem to have surfaced in Bearden’s collage, the artist’s comments reflect his conceptual approach to Patchwork Quilt rather than just his source material. While his earlier collages were assembled predominantly from snippets of reproduced photographs, the woman at the center of Patchwork Quilt was formed, like Matisse’s Blue Nude II, almost entirely of large cut pieces of colored paper (in Bearden’s case, commercially produced rather than hand painted). The mostly unbroken form of her body shows mottling around her bust and torso as the result of the surface having been worked, possibly with sandpaper or an electric eraser, to add texture to it. Without found imagery intruding on her form, Bearden’s figure becomes, as he said, “something else”—something solid, like an ancient sculpture or a religious icon. Like [Bearden’s] The Conjur Woman, she is otherworldly, but she is also familiar, a woman lounging on a couch in a domestic interior—a theme that appeared in works both before and after Patchwork Quilt. Bearden frequently used such intimate spaces, inspired by his childhood and family in Mecklenburg County, as backdrops, and by placing this goddess within one of them, he revealed the majesty he saw in those spaces and in the women who populated them. Campbell has described the presence of “these women with their masked faces, hieratic poses, solemn gestures and eyes that refuse pity” as “almost supernatural, almost sacred.... They could live comfortably on the frescoed walls of the Pompeiian House of Mysteries or in a small town in North Carolina. All of Bearden’s women possess this sacred and profane dualism.”⁶

The quilt on which the figure lies is as much of a presence in the work as she is, another character in the story being told. By the time Bearden made Patchwork Quilt, he had fully turned to collage as his primary medium and had created a significant body of work with it. Yet this collage is a further exploration of its possibilities, both in the size of the figure and the inclusion of a material other than paper—in this case, cloth. Two large bands of assorted fabrics unfold across the composition, one beneath the figure and one above her. The lower band, excluding the brightly striped ruffle along the bottom edge, seems to be made from worn household fabric, perhaps a bedsheet. Although a faded stripe pattern is visible in the original cloth, Bearden reinforced the lines in a similar color to strengthen their rhythmic effect, especially in areas where they are obscured by a thin coat of pink paint. This somewhat muted section, which recalls the couch in Black Venus, an earlier work, contrasts with the bold patches of color in the quilt’s upper portion, where reds, pinks, and bold blues activate floral patterns, gingham, and polka dots. The patterns’ placement is deliberate: the continuity of the pink, red, and purple stripes that flow down the quilt and reappear at the figure’s belted waist demonstrates Bearden’s focus on the structural underpinnings of the composition.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Romare Bearden: Patchwork Quilt in the One on One series.

Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt is currently on view in Gallery 416: Romare Bearden.