: Painter, collagist, printer and writer, Romare Bearden is among
the most interesting figures and innovative artists in Twentieth
Century American art. One of the greatest African American
artists of his time, he may well be the foremost collagist in our
art history.
Bearden's ability to manipulate photographs, colored paper and
paint into vivid artistic compositions portraying the black
experience in America is on full display in this large and
rewarding exhibition. With some 130 works in diverse media, "The
Art of Romare Bearden" is the most comprehensive retrospective
every assembled of the artist's work.
Organized by the National Gallery of Art, where it will be on
view through January 4, the show travels to the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (February 7-May 16); Dallas Museum of Art
(June 20-September 12); Whitney Museum of American Art (October
14-January 9, 2005), and High Museum of Art (January 29-April 24,
2005).
Curated by Ruth E. Fine, the National Gallery's prolific curator
of special projects in modern art, the show is displayed
thematically in a roughly chronological sequence. Many images are
drawn from places Bearden lived and worked in the rural South,
Pittsburgh, New York's Harlem and the Caribbean Island of St
Martin. The works reflect the artist's wide and often overlapping
interest in the everyday lives of African Americans, including
rituals, religion, jazz clubs, brothels, history, mythology and
literature. The accompanying catalog provides context for
Bearden's oeuvre and insights into the origins of his art.
Bearden (1911-1988) was born in Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County,
N.C., but moved with his family to Harlem in 1914. His father,
Howard, was a sanitation inspector for the New York City
Department of Health and played piano in his spare time with the
likes of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. His dynamic
mother, Bessye, became New York correspondent for the Chicago
Defender, an influential black newspaper.
Growing up during the Harlem Renaissance, Bearden's family home
was a gathering place for such important figures as painter Aaron
Douglas, writer Langston Hughes, and many prominent musicians.
Those associations and visits to Harlem nightspots led to the
artist's strong attachment to jazz, inspiring some of his best
work.
Bearden took art courses at New York University, graduating in
1935. He studied briefly at the Art Students League, where
German-born artist George Grosz introduced him to a broad range
of Western art history. Bearden's collage of 1967, "Backyard,"
was inspired by Seventeenth Century Dutch genre painting. Grosz,
with his ties to the Dada movement, also sparked Bearden's
interest in collage work, and encouraged inclusion of political
and social themes in his art. Bearden also picked up ideas from
visits to New York museums and galleries, where he was exposed to
everything from African art to European modernism, especially
Pablo Picasso.
From the late 1930s into the 1960s Bearden worked for the New
York City Department of Social Services. His artwork was limited
to nights and weekends. He served in the Army in World War II and
traveled in Europe on the GI Bill in 1950. Not until he was in
his late fifties was he able to work full-time as an artist.
In 1954 Bearden married Nannette Rohan. They soon moved to an
apartment downtown on Canal Street, their home for the rest of
their lives. In the early 1970s the Beardens established a second
residence on St Martin, Ms Bearden's ancestral home.
Bearden began to paint seriously around 1935, urged on by friends
active in the Harlem Renaissance. His affiliation with such major
figures as Douglas, Hughes, Charles Alston, Augusta Savage and
Carl Van Vechten prompted him to focus on work that explored and
celebrated African American history, oral traditions and personal
experiences, with touches of Grosz-inspired social commentary.
Starting in the early 1940s Bearden created a number of large
works in gouache on brown paper, highlighted by "The Family,"
1941. These works, reflecting his admiration for Mexican mural
painters such as Diego Rivera, achieved a kind of strength and
monumentality.
Bearden experimented with abstract compositions in several
narrative series of paintings based on biblical motifs and the
poetry of Spaniard Frederico Garcia Lorca. A standout is the
Picasso-inspired oil, "Now the Dove and the Leopard Wrestle,"
1946.
Bearden was a founder of "Spiral," a group of black artists
committed to promoting civil rights in the art world. To support
the March on Washington in August 1963, Bearden proposed that the
group make a collaborative statement in collage. When his
colleagues declined to participate, he set aside his oil painting
and began creating his own collages, employing a photomontage
style derived from Cubism. Using clippings from newspapers and
magazines, he turned out more than a score of densely layered,
complicated compositions that presaged his mastery of the genre.
As he went along, Bearden innovated and integrated many
techniques into a vibrant, modernist style. In his hands,
collages proved well suited to capturing the fractured existence
and disconnected status of blacks in the United States. He
excelled at exploiting the fragmentation and artistic
complexities of collage to create a visual language of narrative
and metaphor that portrayed the African American experience.
Blending childhood memories and art historical knowledge, Bearden
created an original and exciting narrative of black history and
the lively world of contemporary music. His use of form, light,
color and spatial perspective in these two-dimensional works
reflected artistic influences ranging from primitive work of
Giotto to genre scenes of Breughel and Vermeer to abstractions of
Léger, Matisee and Picasso to the historical sweep of Douglas and
Jacob Lawrence.
Among early collages that refer to his Mecklenburg County roots
is Bearden's "Watching the Good Trains Go By," 1964. This and
other works use the railroad train as a symbol of the Great
Migration of African Americans from South to North, in which he
participated. Similarly, references to rural cabins, harvesting
in fields, a speeding train and a seated man perhaps ready to
move north make up a relatively large -- 46 by 56 inches -
collage, "Tomorrow I May Be Far Away," 1966-67, owned by the
National Gallery.
Throughout the latter part of his career Bearden over and over
evoked memories and places associated with favored themes. He
frequently depicted scenes in Pittsburgh, recalling visits there
to his grandparents. His friendship with a sickly artist who died
young is recalled in the densely populated and colorful
"Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Pittsburgh Memories, Farewell
Eugene," 1978. Suggesting the complexity of Bearden's technique,
this small work incorporates collages on various papers with
paint, ink, graphite and bleached areas on fiberboard.
Jazz and the blues, emanating from both north and south sources,
were recurring themes in Bearden's art. In a series entitled "Of
the Blues," created in 1974, Bearden used clear forms and bright
colors to depict musical scenes in New York, Kansas City and
Mecklenburg County. Highlights are "At the Savoy," reflecting the
exuberant dancing and syncopated sounds of that framed Harlem
ballroom, and "Wrapping It Up at the Lafayette," recording the
crowded scene at that Harlem theater.
One of Bearden's brilliantly hued late collages, "Piano Lesson,"
1983, featuring odd perspectives and profiled figures, puts one
in mind of Lawrence's work.
In image after image Bearden conveyed the vitality, energy,
round-the-clock activities and crowded living conditions of
Harlem. A star of the exhibition is "The Block II," 1972, a
fascinating montage of brick structures with their facades
removed to reveal myriad activities inside. Measuring 251/2 by 72
inches, it is composed of 18 fiberboard and wood panels that
suggest the complexities of the lives of people residing within
one block of the vast city.
"The Block" inspired a commission for a huge mural for the City
Council Chambers in Berkeley, Calif., commemorating the history
and evoking the heritage of that variegated university community.
Drawing on photographs and tours of the city, Bearden composed an
entirely nonautobiographical collage of seven panels that
incorporated such elements as Buddhist worship service and
political rallies, sailing vessels and Native Americans, and
white historical figures, all specific to the area.
"An amazing response to a community spirit, 'Berkeley -- The City
and Its People' embodied the diverse factions in that complex
city," says Fine. Completed in 1973 and measuring a whopping 10
by 16 feet, it is being displayed at the National Gallery for the
first time outside Berkeley.
The beauty and dignity of black women was an abiding motif in
Bearden's oeuvre. He depicted such women in varied personas, from
nudes to lovers to relatives to spiritual healers from the South
and the Caribbean. "Woman and Child Reading" (recto), 1984,
celebrates the mother and child relationship in an overlapping
collage image. A standout in the National Gallery show is the
highly sensual, minimally outlined figure, "Reclining Nude,"
circa 1977, a collage that reflects the artist's admiration for
the work of Henri Matisse.
For a decade beginning in 1974 Bearden produced dozens of oil
monotypes on a variety of themes, especially the blues, as
exemplified by the vague and evocative "Mirror and Banjo," circa
1983.
Toward the end of his life Bearden turned to landscapes, often
devoid of figures, with especially effective works recalling the
area of North Carolina where he was born. "Mecklenburg Autumn:
October -- Toward Paw's Creek," 1983, reflects a new-found,
"loose, expressionistic coordination of paint and collage
in...effusive landscapes," as Fine puts it. He also depicted the
luxuriant vegetation, rock-bound pools and views of the sea from
his part-time home on St Martin.
In the last decade of his life Bearden created several
autobiographical narratives or "Profiles" that mined memories of
people and places that had been important in his life. Collage
offered an approach conducive to pulling together bits and pieces
from a lifetime of varied experiences.
Works in autobiographical series particularly recalled
Mecklenburg County and Harlem in complex collage-and-paint
images. A highlight is "Profile/Part III, The Thirties: Artist
with Painting and Model," 1981, Bearden's only known
self-portrait. In depicting himself at work on a painting with a
nude model standing by, he paid homage to a work of one of his
artistic heroes, French realist Gustave Courbet's "The Painter's
Studio," 1855.
Prolific as a political activist and writer, as well as artist,
Bearden received a good deal of recognition for his humanitarian
and civil rights endeavors and his publications, notably the
pioneering A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to
the Present. Co-authored with Harry Henderson, it was
released posthumously in 1993, and is a valuable text in the
field.
Bearden was the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including
a traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art
in 1971 and a posthumous retrospective at the Studio Museum in
Harlem in 1991. Among his awards and honors was the National
Medal of Arts, conferred by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
Reflecting an enormous amount of insightful research and study by
curator Fine and her colleagues, "The Art of Romare Bearden" will
be the definitive Bearden show for a long time. It captures the
breadth, richness and depth of the oeuvre of this outstanding,
idiosyncratic artist.
The exhibition and catalog suggest that the artist's genius lay
in assembling collages and photomontages of varied textures that
evoke the reality, traditions, serenity and tensions of the
African American experience. In the final analysis, Bearden was
the master of the sensual, lively image posed in dramatic balance
between illusion and reality.
The retrospective does justice to Bearden's intellect, talent,
imagination and humanism, and is bound to encourage further close
examination of his body of work. Complete and rewarding as this
exhibition and catalog are, Fine has it right when she concludes,
"We have merely begun to scratch the surface of what Bearden
offers us."
The 334-page catalog, with 200 color and 100 black and white
illustrations, is available in hardback (published by the
National Gallery and Harry N. Abrams) for $50, and in softcover
(published by the National Gallery) for $35.
The National Gallery of Art is located on the National Mall
between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For
information: 202-737-4215 or www.nga.gov.
