A series of silhouetted musicians and their instruments crowd the picture plane of Romare Bearden’s Of the Blues: After Hours of 1975. Thrumming with vibrant greens, rich blues and pops of orange, Bearden’s treatment of color aptly mimics the dissonant harmony of a jazz performance. His figures, carefully layered within the collaged composition, come in and out of focus, illuminated only by a single overhead lamp that dangles down from the top edge of the work. This symphony of color and form is resoundingly abstract, while maintaining distinctive materialization of forms which grounds the work in time and space. The brilliance of Bearden’s artistic output lies in this masterful achievement, combining elements into the perfect blend of synesthetic and visual, abstract and figurative.
In both his artistic pursuits and his personal life, Romare Bearden was deeply connected to and influenced by the jazz scene in Harlem. He was friends with many of the leading musicians of the mid-twentieth century, including Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Much of his work pays tribute to these musicians and their effect on the larger socio-artistic developments of the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, the present work likely takes its title from the song, “After Hours,” originally composed by Avery Parrish in 1940 and performed by many great jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie. This deep-rooted connection to jazz not only shaped Bearden’s subject matter, but also informed the very rhythm, improvisation, and layered complexity of his collage technique—making music an inseparable part of his artistic language.
“Bearden’s meaning is identical with his method. His combination of technique is in itself eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history. Through an act of creative will, he has blended strange visual harmonies of the shrill, indigenous dichotomies of American life, and in doing so has reflected the irrepressible thrust of a people to endure and keep its intimate sense of its own identity.”
While Bearden’s artistic pursuits also included painting and writing music, his collages encompass some of his most celebrated works today. With each collage element placed with equal amounts of intentionality and instinctual feeling, Bearden’s collages evoke a powerful symbolism about the reality of Black American life. As African American culture and jazz scholar, Robert O’Meally, writes: “So many people writing about Bearden’s collages emphasize their presentation of fragmented Black selves and communities: the pulverizing effects of life under the long cannons of American racism.” However, O’Meally also counters this point, explaining that while these scholars “are right to regard Bearden’s collages as indicating not only the fragmentation of black selves and communities but their complex layeredness, their refusal ever to be only one thing” (Robert G. O’Meally, “Pressing on Life Until it Gave Back Something in Kinship,” The Romare Bearden Reader, p. 23). This layering within Bearden’s work not only reflects the multifaceted nature of Black identity and experience, but also asserts a sense of wholeness forged through complexity. As such, Bearden’s work stands as a visual testament to the resilience, richness, and irreducible depth of Black life.
Further testifying to its significance, the present work was acquired by the present owner only a year after its completion, and has remained in the same private hands for nearly fifty years.
