Romare Bearden
1911-1988
Byzantine Frieze from the Ritual Bayou series
1971
lithograph collage
17-7/8 x 21-1/4 inches
signed and numbered 32/75

In the early 1970s, Bearden set out to make a few editions of collages from photo-lithographs printed from unique collages he had exhibited earlier at the Museum of Modern Art and the Everson Museum of Art. The overall image is not a single lithograph, but constructed with actual clippings arranged to form the composition. The project was commissioned by Sam Shore, a collector, but was likely overly-ambitious and Bearden did not finish it.

Grant Hamming, PhD, American Art Research Fellow, writing for the Rollins Museum of Art, discusses Byzantine Frieze, included in the museum's collection:

Byzantine Frieze is particularly interesting, because it highlights one of the most striking aspects of Bearden’s work. At the Art Students League in the 1930s, Bearden had studied with the German-American painter George Grosz, one of the foremost participants in the neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movements of interwar Germany. Grosz and his colleagues were pioneers of socially conscious art, which was also dominant in the United States during the Great Depression. Bearden long believed, however, that Grosz’s most important contribution to his development as an artist was his emphasis on art history. In between painting demonstrations Grosz showed his students slides of works from the Renaissance to more recent times, and Bearden always returned to Old Masters such as Johannes Vermeer as well as more recent artists, including Pablo Picasso and Hannah Höch. In Byzantine Frieze he combines all of these interests, presenting his images of Black women and children in a flat, orderly procession reminiscent of the mosaics of the Roman Empire. The combination of the strong figures of the women with knives, blood, and other hints of violence demonstrates Bearden’s commitment to showing both the triumphs and tribulations of the African American experience, always with his eye to the history of art. (source: blogs.rollins.edu)