Romare Bearden's The Baptism, created in 1964 as part of his pioneering Projections series, is among the most significant works of sacred art produced in 20th-century America. It belongs to a remarkable moment in Bearden's career when, at the age of fifty, after decades of commercial illustration and conventional painting, he began working with photomontage in a studio session that would transform American art. The Baptism brings the sacramental tradition of the African-American church - one of the defining cultural institutions of Black American life - into the visual language of radical modernism.
The Biblical Source
The sacrament of baptism is rooted in Romans 6:3-4: 'Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.' Acts 2:38 records Peter's command at Pentecost: 'Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.' In the African-American church tradition, baptism - particularly full immersion in rivers and lakes - carried additional layers of meaning: a rite of passage, a communal affirmation, a moment of individual testimony before the congregation, and (in the spirituals tradition) an echo of the crossing of the Jordan that was also the crossing to freedom.
Romare Bearden: Life and Method
Romare Bearden (1911-1988) grew up in Harlem and spent his career navigating the worlds of African-American intellectual life (he was close to the Harlem Renaissance figures), jazz music (he was a close friend of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn), and the broader American and European art world. His Projections series of 1964 was created by making small photomontages from magazine photographs and then photographing them and projecting the photographs onto large sheets of paper - hence 'Projections.' The method produced images of fractured, fragmented, superimposed Black faces and bodies that were simultaneously tribal, spiritual, and contemporary: ancient African mask traditions meeting Life magazine photographs of Harlem congregations.
Iconographic Analysis
The Baptism assembles faces and hands and water into a composition that refuses both classical decorum and photographic realism. Figures are fragmented, their scale inconsistent, their faces drawn from multiple cultural registers. The water suggests both the Jordan of John the Baptist and the rivers of the American South where baptisms were performed. The hands - reaching, blessing, immersing - are the visual center of the work, as the physicality of the sacrament (touch, water, voice) was the center of its experience. Bearden's collage method itself enacts the theology of baptism: disparate fragments brought together into a new unity, the old images transformed by their new context.
Theological and Cultural Significance
The Projections were created in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act - a moment when the African-American church was the organizational and spiritual backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. The Baptism cannot be separated from this context: to depict the sacrament of death and resurrection in 1964 was to invoke the deaths of Medgar Evers, the four girls in Birmingham, and the daily martyrdom of those facing fire hoses and police batons. The baptismal theology of dying with Christ in order to rise with him (Romans 6:3-4) was not abstract doctrine but lived experience. Bearden's sacred art is therefore inseparably also protest art.
The Spirituals and Biblical Interpretation
Bearden's Baptism draws on the tradition of African-American sacred song - the spirituals - which had for two centuries developed a unique hermeneutic of the biblical text. The spirituals read the Bible through the lens of slavery and liberation, identifying enslaved people simultaneously with the Israelites in Egypt and with the suffering Christ, and finding in both identifications the ground of hope. 'Go Down, Moses' is a political demand as much as a devotional song; 'Steal Away to Jesus' is coded communication about escape as well as spiritual aspiration. The baptism in this tradition was not simply the ecclesiastical rite of Romans 6:3 but a social and political event: the moment when a human being, declared property by one law, was received as a child of God by another. Bearden's collage method - assembling fragments of the dominant culture's visual language into new configurations that testify to a different reality - is formally analogous to this hermeneutic: using the materials available in a hostile environment to make a statement of dignity and hope that the environment did not intend to permit.
The Legacy of the Projections
The Projections series was exhibited at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York in October 1964 to immediate critical acclaim. Bearden was fifty-three years old; it was as if his entire previous career had been preparation for this breakthrough. The biblical and liturgical subjects in the series - The Baptism, The Annunciation, The Resurrection, The Adoration of the Magi - demonstrate that the African-American sacred tradition was for Bearden not merely cultural heritage but a living theological resource. Each collage is both a formal innovation and a devotional act: the fragmented, reassembled image of Black bodies in baptismal water is an image of what Paul calls 'a new creation' (2 Corinthians 5:17) - the old fragments of a broken history gathered up and transformed into a new unified whole by the grace that the sacrament embodies.
Visiting
Bearden's work is widely held in American collections. The Romare Bearden Foundation in New York manages his legacy. Major holdings are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Mint Museum in Charlotte (near Bearden's birthplace), and the Newark Museum of Art. The Studio Museum in Harlem holds significant examples of his work and is the essential institutional context for understanding Bearden's place in African-American cultural history.