164
Romare Bearden
Firebirds (G. 83)
- Estimate
- $2,000 - 3,000
S. 28 1/8 x 20 7/8 in. (71.4 x 53 cm)
Further Details
First united by their love of editions, Carole and Alex Rosenberg cultivated an outstanding New York collection of graphic art, a reflection of their decades-long engagement with the art world and living artists. In 1969, Alex began to publish artists’ prints under the name Transworld Art, pivoting to the art world after selling the telephone answering service he co-owned, Anserphone. Carole Halsband soon joined the venture as an Associate Editor in 1973, after the two became acquainted at her Upper West Side gallery; her first exhibition featured Salvador Dalí’s Memories of Surrealism, the first print portfolio that Alex published. From 1968 to 1988, Transworld Art published more than 700 editions by over 60 artists, many of whom the couple also represented as partners at Alex Rosenberg Gallery. Married in 1977, Carole and Alex Rosenberg’s collection of prints and multiples reifies their personal and professional relationships with great names in modern and contemporary art, including Alexander Calder, Romare Bearden, Salvador Dalí, and Willem de Kooning.
Alex and Carole Rosenberg
Alex, who developed a reputation as an expert in the field of prints, passionately worked as a lauded art appraiser from 1986 until the day he died, passing away at the mighty age of 103 in 2022. His over 60-year career across art and business was ripe with great honors and accomplishments – serving as a pilot in World War II, advancing a plethora of progressive political and social causes, and serving as president of the Appraisers Association of America, to name a few. In the context of these many impressive feats, publishing editions through Transworld Art still stood out to Alex as one of his greatest and most meaningful. “I can’t avoid a feeling of extreme nostalgia over my chance of having been able to work with so many gifted artists,” he recounted. “That was perhaps the greatest privilege of my life.”
“Romy [was] a sensitive person, a warm poet, and a good friend.”—Alex Rosenberg
Alex Rosenberg was an early supporter of Romare Bearden at a time in which few African American artists succeeded in achieving national recognition. Following their first meeting in 1970, the two became “fast friends” according to Alex, and from this friendship grew Bearden’s collaboration as a printmaker with Transworld Art. Of the four Bearden editions published by Transworld Art featured in the present sale, Alex first commissioned The Train, which saw Bearden break new ground in techniques of printmaking, becoming one of the artist’s most lauded prints. With the encouragement of master printer and longtime friend Robert Blackburn, Bearden began to engage his collage process into printmaking in unusual and inventive ways.
Alex Rosenberg with Romare Bearden signing his etchings, The Train at Transworld Art in Rockefeller Center. Image courtesy of Carole Rosenberg.
Starting with The Train, Bearden adopted a technique of cutting up his photogravure plates so that colored areas could be inked separately then reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle for printing, utilizing a combination of etching and photoengraving to better recreate the images of his collages. The inventiveness of the print led John Loring, writing in Arts Magazine in 1975, to call The Train one of the ten most important prints of our time. Based on the critical success and ingenuity of The Train, Alex Rosenberg requested Bearden create more prints for Transworld Art, including The Conjunction, The Family, and Firebirds.
Carole and Rosenberg standing in front of Firebirds, published by Transworld Art at the 1995 Brooklyn Museum exhibition A Graphic Odyssey, Romare Bearden as Printmaker. Image courtesy of Carole Rosenberg.
Full-Cataloguing
Romare Bearden
American | B. 1911 D. 1988A master of collage, Romare Bearden has become synonymous with his layered scenes of black life – past, present, and imagined. Born in North Carolina in 1911, Bearden was raised in New York in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s, he studied at the Arts Student League with George Grosz and was involved with 306, a Harlem art school and workshop where his cousin by marriage, fellow artist Charles Alston, was a leading instructor. Though Bearden won major recognitions in his lifetime, Time art critic Robert Hugues proclaimed in 1991 that “Bearden got left out of the history books” – an oversight that has since been rectified with major retrospectives worldwide. In 2003 the National Gallery of Art held a retrospective of Bearden’s work, the first for an African-American artist in the museum’s history, with the exhibition firmly cementing his legacy as one of the great innovators of the 20th century.
Bearden started making two-dimensional collages in the early 1960s as "an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the Black experience”. Bearden’s collages seamlessly integrate painting, magazine clippings and old paper like a jigsaw puzzle into evocative images that fuse snippets of Harlem life with images of the American South, with references to art history, Classical myth, religion and popular culture. "When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me," Bearden explained. "Because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time." The way Bearden employed collage came out of his life and culture. In a 1977 interview with New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins, Bearden described how as a young man, “I’d take a sheet of paper and just make lines while I listened to records, a kind of shorthand to pick up the rhythm and the intervals.” The improvisational nature of jazz music, Christian iconography, patchwork quilts, rooms wallpapered with old newspaper recalled from childhood summers in North Carolina, his lifelong study of both Western and African art art –all infused in Bearden’s collages.
Roberta Smith pointed out Bearden’s enduring relevance and unusual “of-the-moment” in her 2011 The New York Times review: “For one thing the improvisational cross-fertilizing of art mediums that Bearden helped pioneer via collage is more and more the norm; for another, paper has probably never been more popular as an art material, for work in both two and three dimensions. Most obviously the scaled-up version of collage that he favored and his propensity for pieced-together, abstraction-infused figures have many echoes in the work of contemporary artists, from Mark Bradford to Anya Kielar to Matthew Monahan.” His enduring legacy also continues to live on in The Studio Museum in Harlem, of which he was an active founding member in 1968.