
“Art Is Always Made from Other Art”: Romare Bearden’s Multiplicity
A curator revisits the artist’s radical collages of Black life.
Esther Adler
Nov 1, 2022
In 1971, The Museum of Modern Art presented the exhibition Romare Bearden: Prevalence of Ritual. Images from the opening party show the “celebrity-starred throng” described in the press, with a dapper and relaxed Romare Bearden greeting well-wishers. The artist was not new to MoMA—in fact, his drawing He Is Arisen (1945) entered the collection the year it was made (the artist’s first acquisition by any museum), followed by the experimental abstract painting The Silent Valley of Sunrise (1959) in 1960. The large-scale paper and fabric collage Patchwork Quilt (1970) was acquired just prior to the exhibition’s opening, and graced the catalogue cover. While Prevalence of Ritual was on view, the Museum acquired two small collages that were included: The Conjur Woman and The Dove. Both date to 1964, and both were part of Bearden’s breakout exhibition that year at Cordier and Ekstrom gallery. Celebrated at their debut, these collages have since come to be recognized as some of the most radical and important works of Bearden’s career, and of postwar American art. Both were recently installed on the Museum’s fourth floor, in a gallery titled In and Around Harlem, providing a rare opportunity to see them together again—and juxtaposed with the large-scale photographic reproductions they developed into.
A Career Before Collage
Although Bearden is best known today for his work in collage, he had a full career before adopting it as his principal medium. He worked as a cartoonist in the 1930s, drawing both comical scenarios and illustrations linked to more serious issues of the day. In the early ’40s, he made a series of large-scale gouache paintings on brown paper, genre scenes of figures with strong religious undertones, which were also prominently featured in his MoMA exhibition. The Visitation shows two women in a rural landscape, perhaps deep in conversation. The title, however, clarifies that we are looking at the Virgin Mary, pregnant with Jesus, and her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. Bearden’s stylistic development at mid-century reflects an increasing interest in abstraction, as well as the artist’s attempts to balance his career with changing life circumstances: an influential trip to Paris, success as a popular music composer, and marriage to Nanette Rohan.

Installation view of the exhibition Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of the Ritual, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 25–June 7, 1971
Visually, the collages are expertly balanced arrangements of found imagery from magazines and photographs, with defined figures emerging from the composition’s wild mix of color, pattern, and texture.
Collage and the Civil Rights Movement
The collages that Bearden made in 1964 were not his first, but they are the first to reveal his serious dedication to the technique. The story surrounding their creation has taken on mythical proportions, in part because of its incidental beginnings. Having gathered a number of Black artists together with the goal of supporting and engaging with the Civil Rights movement, Bearden suggested that the group, known as Spiral, make a collaborative artwork using collage. In the end, he was the only one to embrace this technique in earnest, and he used it to reflect the complex facets of Black life in America. The Conjur Woman is among his works that depict a familiar figure within Southern Black communities, recognizable to those who had migrated to Harlem. As Bearden himself described her, “From these women, now hardly any more exist, who were part of the Afro-American community, especially in the rural South. . . . The Conjur Woman was essential, people went to her for medication and advice on health and personal affairs, but she was also feared, in that through her knowledge of certain herbs, roots, and mysterious practices, she could put a spell, or a ‘conjur’ on a person. Yet, one would go to her for help in removing such a spell.” The Dove, with its peaceful bird perched above a doorway, is in fact a frenetic depiction of an active Harlem Street. Figures in various states of completion and scale weave in and out of fractured buildings and sit on stoops. Manicured nails hold a cigarette; a white sneaker floats above the crosswalk; the face of the artist William T. Williams peers thoughtfully out of a window in the work’s upper-right quadrant. Visually, the collages are expertly balanced arrangements of found imagery from magazines and photographs, with defined figures emerging from the composition’s wild mix of color, pattern, and texture.

Romare Bearden. The Dove. 1964

Romare Bearden. Prevalence of Ritual/Conjur Woman No.1. 1964
From Collage to Projections
As magnificent as these small-scale, heavily worked collages are, they were not ultimately what Bearden considered the final works from this series. Throughout his career, he had made a practice of copying, redrawing, and reworking his own images, and he continued that practice by making large-scale photo reproductions (called Photostats, after the machine used to make them) of these collages. The results are significantly larger, in black and white, and flatter, with the edges of the disparate paper pieces muted. They are also more cinematic than the collages, occupying the viewer’s space rather than drawing them in to examine fine details. It was these large-scale photographs, which Bearden called Projections, that his gallerist Arne Ekstrom pushed the artist to exhibit in 1964, noting, “They are really extraordinary and constitute a sort of re-living and re-telling of his memories as a Negro. . . . In these days of civil rights strife they are, on the sociological side, a unique statement of pride in tradition, dramatic in many instances but never a form or protest of agitation. Artistically they are most remarkable.”
MoMA’s rich holdings of Bearden’s work include not only two of these 1964 collages, but the Projections made from them as well, and the current installation provides the opportunity to compare them directly. Conjur Woman is present in both the original collage and the Photostat formats, highlighting the development of Bearden’s imagery across mediums. Also included are the collage The Dove and the 1964 projection Other Mysteries. Centered within a gallery dedicated to the cultural energy and artistic influence of Harlem, where Bearden spent parts of his childhood and a significant amount of his adult life, they represent the multiplicity of narratives explored by artists working there, both through their subject matter and their materiality.
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