Sunday Morning
Artist
Romare Bearden
(American, 1911-1988)
Date1971
MediumCollage and mixed media on paper
DimensionsFrame Size: 24 × 26 1/4 in. (61 × 66.7 cm)
Image Size: 10 3/4 × 13 in. (27.3 × 33 cm)
ClassificationsCollage
Credit LineBequest of Michael Tolan, 2011
Object numberUAC5033
DescriptionRomare Bearden was a prolific 20th-century artist and one of the early pioneers of collage art in the United States. By use of the cut and paste medium, Bearden quilted together images from mundane ephemera– newspapers, magazines, colored paper, and so forth– in order to depict scenes of African American life. Specifically, Bearden reconstructed his childhood memories in Charlotte, North Carolina. In some of these collages, he recounts aspects of religious ritual and ways of life embedded in the rural south.In Sunday Morning, Bearden fills the page with bits and pieces of paper, out from which an environment forms and figures emerge. This is not just any morning, but specifically a Sunday morning, as alluded to by the title. For many people of the Catholic faith, Sunday mornings are family and communal occasions dedicated to church. Bearden may very well be conjuring up not only his own memories of church-going but also those for many other African Americans.
What throws off the pious attitude, however, is the body language of the woman reclining on the floor in the bottom right of the composition. Her legs are bare, and as her body lies back, she brings one knee up to allow her arms to reach it. The image of the body seems as though it once belonged to a model in a beauty ad, but here, oddly enough, Bearden tops it off with the head of a child. This young girl is the only person to meet the viewer’s gaze. Two other figures occupy the space. One is another female dressed in a blue floral blouse and striped skirt (most likely patterns that are taken from non-specific magazine spreads). She looks down to something she plays with in her hands. In the back, another person sits seemingly in another room just in the back of the dwelling. The bold greens, reds, and blues allow our eyes to distinguish between spaces and shadows in the midst of the grey and tan base– most of which derive from black and white imagery of newspapers and other magazines.
Bearden had begun experimenting with the collage medium in the 1960s. In the same year Sunday Morning was created, 1971, New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of his work. This collage was a gift to the Wayne State University Art Collection in 2011, from Michael Tolan.
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