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ROMARE BEARDEN (1911 - 1988)
A Land Beyond the River
.
Collage with various colored papers, with pencil and red ink, mounted
on cream wove paper, 1957. 289x559 mm; 11x22 inches. Signed in ink,
lower right.
Provenance: gift from the artist; Loften Mitchell, New York; thence by
descent to the current owner, private collection, NewYork.
Exhibited: ACA Galleries, NewYork;Vered Gallery, East Hampton, with
the labels on the frame back.
Playwright Loften Mitchell and Romare Bearden became friends and
artistic collaborators while both were social workers in the New York
City Department of Welfare. Bearden made the collage and designed the
set for his friend’s 1957 same-titled off-Broadway play, a drama about a
South Carolina pastor who fought for desegregation. Another Bearden
collage was used as the cover illustration for Loften Mitchell’s novel
The
Stubborn Old Lady Who Resisted Change
, written in 1968 and published
in 1973, based on their experiences as social workers.
One of the earliest known collages by Romare Bearden,
A Land Beyond
the River
1957, is an important work by the artist. Romare Bearden’s
collage is typically associated as beginning with his groundbreaking 1964
photomontage and photostats, coming out of his participation with the
Spiral Group. However,
A Land Beyond the River
is one of a very scarce
group of earlier examples of his collage. The collage combines a use of
colored papers, a graphic quality and subjects that are all significant for
the artist’s ouevre.The motifs found in this Southern drama will re-appear
often in Bearden’s later work: the flattened silhouette of hands, a flame,
the seated mother and child. Other early, similar collages are Bearden’s
Harlequin
, circa 1956, and
Circus (Circus: the Artist’s Center Ring)
, 1961; both
use brown and solid colored papers similar to
A Land Beyond the River
.
Ruth Fine in a footnote to her 2004
The Art of Romare Bearden
describes
the collage as only being “known from a Polaroid photograph” at the
time. Fine p. 26, 256.
[75,000/100,000]