Patchwork Quilt

Romare Bearden, 1970 · Gallery 416 · Floor 4

She’s all stretched out, with that pink wrap on her head. One arm straight out, fingers spread. And those legs are parted, almost like she’s walking in her sleep. Romare Bearden made her in 1970. Calls it Patchwork Quilt. So for about thirty years, he’s a caseworker for the city. Makes his art at night and on weekends. When he was at art school, the other students start calling him Petey. After the old Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel. Bruegel made pictures of peasants eating, working, throwing a party. Bearden can’t get enough of him. Says he wants to paint his people the way Bruegel painted his. So he’s looking at all this art. And thinking about the world he grew up in. Eventually, he gets into cutting up photographs and paper, putting pieces together. So, look what comes together here. That walking pose? He’s been looking at old Egyptian tomb carvings. And here she is, lying on what looks like a worn household cloth. Maybe an old bedsheet. He’s gone over some of the faint stripes to make them stronger. Above her, the kind of quilt he remembers as a kid. It’s actual cloth, pasted down. She’s a patchwork too. Even her arm comes in pieces. Brown forearm, gray upper arm. And that pink stripe at her waist carries on a pattern from the quilt. So MoMA buys the picture the year he makes it. Gives him a solo show the next. He’s only the second Black artist to get one. This one goes on the cover of the catalogue. Years later, somebody asks what he was after. He brings up Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, that woman asleep with a lion looking at her. And he talks about the quilts that were all around him as a boy. Put his own woman on a quilt like that, he says, and she’s back in the world he grew up in. He calls her a woman lying down. But more than just a nude. Something else. And then: “But I don’t know what.”

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