Emblematic of the final decade of Romare Bearden’s celebrated life, The Cardplayers, created in 1982, displays a mature, confident and gestural expression found only in Bearden’s most prized collages, which act as pictorial illusions into the art historical, autobiographical and mythological sources of the composition. The iconic subject of The Cardplayers is instantly identifiable within the canon of art history, examples from Caravaggio (The Cardsharps, circa 1594), Paul Cézanne (The Card Players, Les Joueurs de cartes, 1890-92) and Jacob Lawrence, (The Card Game, 1953), showcase the singularly enduring motif of The Cardplayers as an evolutionary pictorial vehicle for Bearden’s repositioning of social and cultural narratives surrounding race, identity and the artistic regeneration of Harlem.

Amongst the very titans of card playing scenes, The Cardplayers elevates its own a pictorial practice via masterful control of the colorful collaged surface, the three black figures huddled around the card table create an immediacy, intimacy and richness to the complexly layered and hand-painted scene. Notable not only for its unparalleled technical execution, The Cardplayers bears impressive provenance and distinguished exhibition history.

Bearden’s groundbreaking aesthetic formula of social realism and geometric abstraction evidenced in The Cardplayers was identified by the prescient eye of the dealer Sheldon Ross, an early advocate and enduring supporter, who classified it as one of the most seminal examples by the artist. Sheldon Ross attended the 1967 exhibition of Romare Bearden’s new collages at J.L. Hudson Gallery in Detroit with his high school friend and esteemed collects or, David Lebenbom; overwhelmed by Bearden’s fervent desire to defy the limits of artistic and cultural categorization, they decided to dedicate themselves to acquiring Bearden. The synergy of artist, dealer and collects or was developed over decades and acquiring new works became a highly personal exercise, The Cardplayers was identified by the artist, Sheldon Ross and David Lebenbom as one of the most important examples Bearden created of African-American subjectivity and was promptly selected for David Lebenbom’s personal collects ion. The inclusion of The Cardplayers in the National Gallery exhibition further illustrates the enduring importance of this masterwork.

The exquisite depiction of the card table encircled by three black figures, the flickering gas lamp, the swish of the dog’s tail and splash of red wine in The Card Players articulate Bearden’s most sensitive and intimate portrait of African American subjectivity. The Cardplayers illuminates Bearden’s revolutionary technique of replicating and transforming images, a reproduction of Cézanne’s Card Players hung on Bearden’s studio wall forty years prior to the creation of the subject work. While Bearden embodies Cézanne’s tremendous structural control and constantly shifting relationships in his collage, The Cardplayers revolutionizes the motif of card playing with its saturated palette and painterly application of distinctive details that radiate energy. The Cardplayers is a powerful revision of stereotyped representations of race and acts as a memorialization of the Harlem Renaissance, the card table was a popular past.mes for Bearden and his contemporaries, who frequented the back rooms of Harlem nightclubs. The almost surreal quality of the enlarged hands of the black card players and the exaggerated bow of the Uncle Sam figure in The Cardplayers implies the imagined world within Bearden’s collages, in which there is no limitation to the rich, complex and distinct representation of the African American subject.