Romare Bearden

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it.
- Romare Bearden

During the 1970s, prints offered exciting opportunities to explore seminal themes for Romare Bearden, a North Carolina native and one of America's most important twentieth-century artists. During an outpouring of artistic activity, Bearden created etchings, aquatints, collagraphs, photo projections, lithographs, and screenprints. African American home life, daily rituals of quilting, reading, playing, and listening to music all were re-envisioned by the artist in print media. The full-color lithograph Three Women (Easter Sunday) from 1979 is one of six works now offered for sale and first presented at GreenHill in 2014 in Select Collection: Prints of Romare Bearden.

In this work, three women in bright clothes greet each other under a blue sky. The tall columnar figures of the women clad in long dresses with stripes, checks and circular prints relate to other works of female figure groups by Bearden. In Two Women (1981-82) a younger woman in a striped red dress leans in as if to speak to an older woman in a plaid dress or apron, whose arm she is holding. In this work and Three Women (Easter Sunday), Bearden employs flat cutout shapes in alternating designs and blocks of color to depict the women. Color and pattern unite the figures into a single plane, in a process evoking African American women’s quilt design, a central theme in Bearden’s art. Our eye moves across this vibrant surface directed by the figures’ hands. The importance of gesture and hands in Bearden’s work is evident in another 1979 lithograph entitled Conjunction, in which two women are seen in profile, (one in stripes and one in a patchwork garment) join hands beside a central figure who looks out frontally from their circle. Three Women (Easter Sunday) also appears to capture its subjects in a moment of reunion or conjunction. Here the arms, hands, and regard of each figure reach out to the woman next to her in a continuous ring of greeting. The additional title “Easter Sunday,” and the roof of a white building visible on the left infer the scene takes place before or after a church service. The rich ochre earth, a bird in a small bush, and three floating white clouds lend the setting a timeless quality and suggest the true ritual portrayed here lies outside the church walls, in the relationship of these three women and their central role in the transmission of culture.