After the Bath

1970-1973

Romare Bearden

Artist, American, 1911 - 1988

Two nude, brown-skinned people stand in an abstracted landscape in this vertical work created with watercolor, ink, and collage. The two bodies are created with fields of brown mottled with marigold orange, and narrowing waists and flaring hips suggest they are women. Both have black hair down to their necks drawn in with coiled lines. Near the lower left corner, one woman bends over, her back to us, with her legs pressed together. She holds a turquoise-blue cloth, presumably a towel, to her body. Her torso, spine, buttocks, and legs are outlined in black. Next to her, the other woman seems to face her in profile, but her featureless face is represented with an oval. She reaches toward the other woman with both arms. Closer to us, boulders are implied with rounded areas of shimmering lemon-lime and moss green along the bottom edge of the composition. The landscape beyond the pair is created with patches of tawny brown, teal, black, and grass and seafoam green. Some colors are layered over others and some are like pools of color with ruffled, irregular edges. A pale, butter yellow disk near the upper left corner suggests a sun or moon and a band of slate blue patterned with tiny dots and circles could be a pole or tree trunk to our right. Fragments of printed words are visible under some of the pools of color, especially near the lower right corner. An inscription written in black in the upper right corner reads, “Rom are bear den.”
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Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. [1952-1997], Washington, DC; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1996; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1985

  • The Art of Collage, The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Washington, DC, 1985, no. 6, as "Two Nudes"

1989

  • African-American Artists, 1880-1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection, Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, more than twenty venues, January 1989 - November 1992, no. 17, fig. 36.

2003

  • Black is a Color: African American Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio; Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota, 2003-2007

Inscriptions

upper right in black ink: Rom / are / bear / den

Wikidata ID

Q64629667


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