A Rare Self Portrait of Romare Bearden: September Collection Highlight at the High

What can we learn about Bearden’s process and influences just by looking at this work? As it turns out, a lot.

By Katie Domurat, Coordinator of Museum Interpretation, High Museum of Art

Romare Bearden’s richly layered self portrait gives us a rare glimpse into his studio space and artistic practice.

In the video above, Stephanie Heydt, the High Museum of Art’s Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art, discusses the work Artist with Painting and Model (on view in the exhibition “Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series through February 2, 2020).

Romare Bearden (American, 1911–1988), Artist with Painting and Model, 1981, Collage on board. See bottom of page for credit line; Romare Bearden with his cat, striking a similar pose to the one we see in his self portrait.

Artist with Painting and Model is part of artist Romare Bearden’s autobiographical Profile series. This work is the only recognizable self-portrait of Bearden in the series, and critics consider it one of his most comprehensive works.

Bearden shows many of his art-historical influences in this piece, with the inclusion of sketched African masks at the lower center, the Renaissance-style painting at the artist’s elbow, and the collagist’s cut-outs on the chair at his side.

Behind the artists’s elbow, we see a mimeograph, or xerox, of a work by the Sienese Gothic painter Duccio di Buoninsegna taped to the wall (Duccio di Buoninsegna, Road to Emmaus, 1308–1311, Tempera on wood. In the collection of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena, Italy.) On the studio floor, we see a page of sketches of the human figure and an African sculpture of an oba, or king of Benin.

Bearden exhibited this series of collage paintings at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York — Part I in 1979 and Part II in 1981. The Profile series begins with Bearden’s earliest memories as a boy in North Carolina in the 1910s and concludes with his life as a young artist in Harlem in the early 1940s. Come see this painting in the High’s special exhibition “Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series, on view through February 2, 2020.

Want to learn more about Bearden? Join us on September 28, 2019, for a Curatorial Conversation with curator Stephanie Heydt and Columbia University professor Robert G. O’Meally, as they share insider information on bringing this exhibition to life.

This is just one of over 17,000 artworks in our rotating collection. It’s all here for you!