A Walk in Paradise Gardens

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

Romare Bearden is best known for his collages that celebrate African life and community. However, earlier in his career, his work was firmly integrated within the school of American abstraction. Recalling that period, he stated, "I began experimenting in a radically different way. I started to play with pigments, as such, in marks and patches, distorting natural colors and representational objects." At this juncture, Bearden started to incorporate a range of elements: mathematics, jazz, his studies of classical Japanese portrait painters, and Western painters such as 17th-century Dutch artists Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. These all served as sources of inspiration for the flatness of his abstraction and his approach to organizing his images within a pictorial space. This oil painting depicts three abstract figures. Formed out of small rectilinear shapes in bright colors, the figures appear to be moving across an equally abstracted background.

Catalog date

1955

Recorded places

New York City, New York, United States, North and Central America

Recorded subjects

African American; Abstraction; Art; Communities; Urban life

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