After Church

Romare Bearden’s After Church depicts the vibrant religious and social life of African Americans in the South between the World Wars. Completed in 1941 after a prolonged visit to the region, After Church, painted in gouache on paper, represents a transitional moment in Bearden’s career. Having spent much of the 1930s creating artwork that looked to social realism and American scene painting, After Church and other works from this period mark the beginning of Bearden’s engagement with African American subjects and his exploration of compositional abstraction.

Born in the South but raised in New York, Bearden returned to the region of his birth in 1940. Struggling with his painting practice, he toured his home state of North Carolina and enjoyed an extended visit with the artist Hale Woodruff in Atlanta. It was this trip that inspired After Church,  and other works he created between 1941 and 1942. Directly addressing the African American world for the first time, Bearden also explored the social rhythms of Southern life, which revolved around farm, family, and faith. In the 1980s Bearden would describe the significance of the American South to his work, saying, “The South seems to me . . . to be more in my work than any other place.” ("Inscription at the City of Brass: An Interview with Romare Bearden," Callaloo, No. 36 (Summer, 1988) 430.) Depicting the gathering of congregants before the whitewashed frame of a wooden church, After Church,  exemplifies the significance of the South to Bearden’s work, his understanding of the power of religion in rural Southern communities, and a newly-formed dedication to the representation of Black community life.

After Church depicts a distinctly African American subject matter, but it is also notable in its regional specificity. Immersed in the milieu of Black artistic New York, Bearden’s work takes on added significance when compared to Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, completed in the same year. That epic body of work visually narrated the diaspora of African Americans who migrated from the South to the North fleeing harsh treatment and biased legal systems in pursuit of a better life. While not intended as a response to the Migration Series, After Church nonetheless stands as a counterpoint to its perspective, depicting a Black South that remained vibrantly alive even with the steep population drop that followed this exodus.

Stylistically distinct from Bearden’s collage work, After Church provides a bridge from the artist’s early social realist imagery to his later engagement with abstraction and collage. Combining sketched lines, abstracted figures, and the application of color in large swathes, After Church moves away from strictly representational imagery toward a transitional hybrid of figurative and abstract painting. The flattened planes of the work, particularly evident in the figures crowded in the foreground, speak to the shortened perspective of collage, while the patchwork quality of the painted masses is only a few steps removed from Bearden’s later assemblages. After Church represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, grounding his practice in the African American experience even as it highlights the creative tension between representational imagery and abstraction that Bearden would continue to emphasize throughout his career.

American Negro Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, The Downtown Gallery, New York, New York (organizer). Venue: The Downtown Gallery, New York, New York, December 9, 1941–January 3, 1942.

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One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (organizers). Venue: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, April 3–September 7, 2015. [exh. cat.]

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Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865-1945. (exh. cat. Shanghai Museum with Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art). Shanghai: Shanghai Museum, 2018. Text p. 160; ill. p. 161 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text pp. 183–185, 222, 223; fig. 8, p. 185; ill. p. 222, detail pp. 223–224 (color).

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