Early Morning

Artist Romare Howard Bearden (1911 - 1988)

Date1964

MediumCollage on board

DimensionsSheet Dimension: 9 1/2 × 10 7/8 in. (24.1 × 27.6 cm)
Frame Dimension: 15 5/8 × 17 × 1 in. (39.7 × 43.2 × 2.5 cm)

ClassificationsMixed Media

Credit LineFriends Purchase Fund

Terms

Object number1985.1

Description"Early Morning" is a breakfast scene set in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where Bearden spent his earliest years. The interior shows three figures: a woman serving breakfast to a young man at the table and an older man seated in the background. The painting is an excellent example of the subject matter, Cubist-inspired composition, and handling of color that preoccupied Bearden in his earliest collage work. and for the next two decades. (1)

Although Bearden sought to avoid the illusion of three-dimensional space, preferring to bring the elements up against the frontal picture plane, the viewer is struck by the young man, whose upper torso dominates the center. (2) He seems to be the only figure looking straight at us. His left eye has color, while his right is cut from black-and-white photographic material; both eyes are superimposed on an African mask that occupies the lower portion of his head.

The head of the woman is cut horizontally in much the same manner: the bottom section is an African mask and the eyes and forehead are cut from photochemical material. (3) She looks down at him, her arms raised to adjust her white-gray bonnet. One of her arms is reddish brown, while the other is a dark green used nowhere else in the picture. Her dress in white and colored hues descends behind the table, but Bearden carries down its front angle as if through a piece of brown bread on the table.

In addition to these surprising juxtapositions of color and of disparate photographic elements to create striking unities, Bearden masterfully improvised the handling of scale. The man's left hand, which holds a fork, is a decidedly human hand, cut from colored photographic material. But his Picassoesque right hand, which holds a huge cup, is outsized. Bearden emphasizes the hand the man is using, just as he does the cup from which he will drink. This is a world filled with jarring surprises, but is a decidedly "human" world.

The older man wears a hat and a pair of overalls. Bearden has shorn away the right edge of the picture so that the man is cut vertically, showing only half a hat, face, and upper body and one let. Thus he is less prominent than the other two figures. If indeed they are mother and son, they share a closer bond compositionally, perhaps reflecting family ties.

"Early Morning" is an important early statement of Bearden's artistic identity as a collagist Charles Childs likened Bearden's new work to "a personal dictionary whose self-definition is its own voice and its own authority." (4) The works of 1964, so powerful in their initial impact, have transcended the social and political milieu in which they were created and have endured as universal in their humanity.

Romare Howard Bearden Papers, 1945-1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Romare Bearden, "Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings," "Leonardo 2"(January 1969): 11-19; Ralph Ellison, "Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections," "Leonardo 2" (January 1969):11-19; Ralph Ellison, "Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections," "Crisis 78" (March 1970): 80-86; Jerald L. Melberg and Milton J. Bloch, eds., "Romare Bearden, 1970-19 80", exhib. cat. (Charlotte, N.C.: Mint Museum, 1980); Myron Schwartzman, "Romare Bearden: His Life and Art" (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990)

Notes:
(1) In the mid-1950s Bearden began painting in an increasingly nonrepresentational manner and giving free rein to color: "I began to put color down in big marks, and I found that using the color in this mosaic-like way destroyed the form, opened up the form. And I felt that by using these tracks of color up and down and across the canvas I learned a great deal more about color's action"(Schwartzman, "Romare Bearden", p.107() The colors could now "walk like free men" because Bearden had found a way of using the advice of his friend and mentor, the modernist Stuart Davis: "In a painting color has a position and a place and it makes space"(Bearden, interview with Henri Ghent, transcript, June 29, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reel 3196).
(2) "The physicality of the medium did not attract me to collage....Rather, I would like to think of it within the context of Cubism....I prefer to bring things forward and not just for the sake of making Cubism but to make flat painting and not fool the eye with depth and perspective. And that is achieved by having the collage sit on the surface" (Bearden, interview, December 9, 1984, quoted in "Since the Harlem Renaissance: Fifty Years of Afro-American Art", exhib.cat. [Lewisburg, Pa.: Center Gallery, Bucknell University, 1985], p.14).
(3) "In most instances in creating a picture, I use many disparate elements to form either a figure, or part of a background. I build my faces, for example, from parts of African masks, animal eyes, marbles, mossy vegetation, etc. I then have my small original works enlarged so the mosaic-like joinings will not be so apparent, after which I finish the larger painting. I have found when some detail such as a hand or eye is taken out of its original context and is fractured and integrated into a different space and form configuration, it acquires a plastic quality it did not have in the photograph"(Bearden to Michael Gibson, "International Herald Tribune", June 15, 1975).
(4) Charles Childs, "Bearden: Identification and Identity", Art News 63 (October 1964): 24, 54, 61.

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