Art Class #12 (Romare Bearden)

“Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible.”

Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an African-American artist and author of a history of his people’s art. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from NYU in 1935.

He began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he worked to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front. He returned to Paris in 1950 and studied Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Bearden’s early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community. After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s. New York Times described Bearden as “the nation’s foremost collagist” in his 1988 obituary.[1] Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the civil rights movement.

Bearden was the author or coauthor of several books. He also was a songwriter, known as co-writer of the jazz classic “Sea Breeze”, which was recorded by Billy Eckstine, a former high school classmate at Peabody High School, and Dizzy Gillespie. He had long supported young, emerging artists and he and his wife established the Bearden Foundation to continue this work, as well as to support young scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Education

Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bearden’s family moved with him to New York City when he was a toddler, as part of the Great Migration. He was educated in high school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania[2], and then returned to New York City. The Bearden household soon became a meeting place for major figures of the Harlem Renaissance.[3] Romare’s mother, Bessye Bearden, played an active role with New York City’s Board of Education, and also served as founder and president of the Colored Women’s Democratic League. She was also a New York correspondent for The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper.[4]

In 1929 he graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He enrolled in Lincoln University, the nation’s first historically black college, founded in 1854. He later transferred to Boston University where he served as art director for Beanpot, Boston University’s student humor magazine.[5] Bearden continued his studies at New York University (NYU), where he started to focus more on his art and less on athletics, and became a lead cartoonist and art editor for The Medley, the monthly journal of the secretive Eucleian Society (a student society at NYU).[6] Bearden studied art, education, science, and mathematics, graduating with a degree in science and education in 1935.

He continued his artistic study under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. During this period Bearden supported himself by working as a political cartoonist for African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, where he published a weekly cartoon from 1935 until 1937.[7]

Career as an artist

Patchwork Quilt, cut-and-pasted cloth and paper with synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 1970, Museum of Modern Art

Bearden grew as an artist by exploring his life experiences. His early paintings were often of scenes in the American South, and his style was strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1935, Bearden became a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services.[4] Throughout his career as an artist, Bearden worked as a case worker off and on to supplement his income.[4] During World War II, Bearden joined the United States Army, serving from 1942 until 1945, largely in Europe.[8]

After serving in the army, Bearden joined the Samuel Kootz Gallery, a commercial gallery in New York that featured avant-garde art. He produced paintings at this time in “an expressionistic, linear, semi-abstract style.”[4] He returned to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy with Gaston Bachelard and art history at the Sorbonne, under the auspices of the GI Bill.[4][8] Bearden traveled throughout Europe visiting Picasso and other artists.[4]

Making major changes in his art, he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human, specifically scenes from the Passion of the Christ. He had evolved from what Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York Times, called a “debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns” to what became known as his stylistic approach, which participated in the post-war aims of avant-garde American art.[9] His works were exhibited at the Samuel M. Kootz gallery until it was deemed not abstract enough.

During Bearden’s success in the gallery, however, he produced Golgotha, a painting from his series of the Passion of the Christ. Golgotha is an abstract representation of the Crucifixion. The eye of the viewer is drawn to the middle of the image first, where Bearden has rendered Christ’s body. The body parts are stylized into abstract geometric shapes, yet are still too realistic to be concretely abstract; this work has a feel of early Cubism. The body is in a central position and darkly contrasted with the highlighted crowds. The crowds of people are on the left and right, and are encapsulated within large spheres of bright colors of purple and indigo. The background of the painting is depicted in lighter jewel tones dissected with linear black ink. Bearden used these colors and contrasts because of the abstract influence of the time, but also for their meanings.

Bearden wanted to explore the emotions and actions of the crowds gathered around the Crucifixion. He worked hard to “depict myths in an attempt to convey universal human values and reactions.”[10] According to Bearden, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are the greatest expressions of man’s humanism, because of the idea of him that lived on through other men. It is why Bearden focuses on Christ’s body first, to portray the idea of the myth, and then highlights the crowd, to show how the idea is passed on to men.

Bearden was focusing on the spiritual intent. He wanted to show ideas of humanism and thought that cannot be seen by the eye, but “must be digested by the mind”.[11] This is in accordance with his times, during which other noted artists created abstract representations of historically significant events, such as Robert Motherwell’s commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, Jackson Pollock’s investigation of Northwest Coast Indian art, Mark Rothko’s and Barnett Newman’s interpretations of Biblical stories, etc. Bearden depict humanity through abstract expressionism after feeling he did not see it during the war.[6] Bearden’s work was less abstract than these other artists, and Sam Kootz’s gallery ended its representation of him.

Bearden turned to music, co-writing the hit song “Sea Breeze”, which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie; it is still considered a jazz classic.[12] In 1954, at age 42, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, a 27-year-old dancer from Staten Island, New York.[13] She later became an artist and critic. The couple eventually created the Bearden Foundation to assist young artists.

In the late 1950s, Bearden’s work became more abstract. He used layers of oil paint to produce muted, hidden effects. In 1956, Bearden began studying with a Chinese calligrapher, whom he credits with introducing him to new ideas about space and composition which he used in painting. He also spent much time studying famous European paintings he admired, particularly the work of the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Rembrandt. He began exhibiting again in 1960. About this time he and his wife established a second home in the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. In 1961, Bearden joined the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York City, which would represent him for the rest of his career.[4]

In the early 1960s in Harlem, Bearden was a founding member of the art group known as The Spiral formed “for the purpose of discussing the commitment of the Negro artist in the present struggle for civil liberties, and as a discussion group to consider common aesthetic problems.”[14] The first meeting was held in Bearden’s studio on July 5, 1963 and was attended by Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and James Yeargans, Felrath Hines, Richard Mayhew, and William Pritchard. Woodruff was responsible for naming the group The Spiral suggesting the way in which the Archimedes spiral ascends upward as a symbol of progress. Over time the group expanded to include Merton Simpson, Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon, Alvin Hollingsworth, Calvin Douglas, Perry Ferguson, William Majors and Earle Miller. Stylistically the group ranged from Abstract Expressionists to social protest painters.[14]

Bearden’s collage work began in 1963 or 1964.[4] He first combined images cut from magazines and colored paper, which he would often with further alter with the use of sandpaper, bleach, graphite or paint.[4] Bearden enlarged these collages through the photostat process.[4] Building on the momentum from a successful exhibition of his photostat pieces at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in 1964, Bearden was invited to do a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. This heightened his public profile.[4] Bearden’s collage techniques changed over the years and in later pieces, he would use blown-up photostat photographic images, silk-screened, colored paper, and billboard pieces to create large collages on canvas and fiberboard.[4]

In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of Bearden’s work.[4]

Early works

His early works suggest the importance of African Americans’ unity and cooperation. For instance, The Visitation implies the importance of collaboration of black communities by depicting intimacy between two black women who are holding hands. Bearden’s vernacular realism represented in the work makes The Visitation noteworthy; he describes two figures in The Visitation somewhat realistically but does not fully follow the pure realism, and distorts and exaggerates some parts of their bodies to “convey an experiential feeling or subjective disposition.”[15] Bearden said, “the Negro artists […] must not be content with merely recording a scene as a machine. He must enter wholeheartedly into the situation he wishes to convey.”[15]

In 1942, Bearden produced Factory Workers (gouache on casein on brown kraft paper mounted on board), which was commissioned by Forbes magazine to accompany an article titled The Negro’s War.[16] The article “examined the social and financial costs of racial discrimination during wartime and advocated for full integration of the American workplace.”[17] Factory Workers and its companion piece Folk Musicians serve as prime examples of the influence that Mexican muralists played in Bearden’s early work.[16][17]

Collage

The Calabash, collage, 1970, Library of Congress

Bearden had struggled with two artistic sides of himself: his background as “a student of literature and of artistic traditions, and being a black human being involves very real experiences, figurative and concrete”,[18] which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century “exploration of abstraction”.[19] His frustration with abstraction won over, as he himself described his paintings’ focus as coming to a plateau. Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country.

During the civil rights movement, Bearden started to experiment again, this time with forms of collage.[20] After helping to found an artists group in support of civil rights, Bearden expressed representational and more overtly socially conscious aspects in his work. He used clippings from magazines, which in and of itself was a new medium, as glossy magazines were fairly new. He used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how African-American rights were moving forward, and so was his socially conscious art. In 1964, he held an exhibition he called Projections, where he introduced his new collage style. These works were very well received and are generally considered to be his best work.[21]

Bearden had numerous museum shows of his work since then, including a 1971 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Prevalence of Ritual, an exhibition of his prints, entitled A Graphic Odyssey showing the work of the last fifteen years of his life;[22] and the 2005 National Gallery of Art retrospective entitled The Art of Romare Bearden. In 2011, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibited its second show of the artist’s work, Romare Bearden (1911–1988): Collage, A Centennial Celebration, an intimate grouping of 21 collages produced between 1964 and 1983.[23]

One of his most famous series, Prevalence of Ritual, concentrated mostly on southern African-American life. He used these collages to show his rejection of the Harmon Foundation’s (a New York City arts organization) emphasis on the idea that African Americans must reproduce their culture in their art.[24] Bearden found this approach to be a burden on African artists, because he saw the idea as creating an emphasis on reproduction of something that already exists in the world. He used this new series to speak out against this limitation on Black artists, and to emphasize modern art.

In this series, one of the pieces is entitled Baptism. Bearden was influenced by Francisco de Zurbarán, and based Baptism on Zurbarán’s painting The Virgin Protectress of the Carthusians. Bearden wanted to show how the water that is about to be poured on the subject being baptized is always moving, giving the whole collage a feel and sense of temporal flux. He wanted to express how African Americans’ rights were always changing, and society itself was in a temporal flux at the time. Bearden wanted to show that nothing is fixed, and expressed this idea throughout the image: not only is the subject about to have water poured from the top, but the subject is also to be submerged in water. Every aspect of the collage is moving and will never be the same more than once, which was congruent with society at the time.

In “The Art of Romare Bearden”, Ruth Fine describes his themes as “universal”. “A well-read man whose friends were other artists, writers, poets and jazz musicians, Bearden mined their worlds as well as his own for topics to explore. He took his imagery from both the everyday rituals of African American rural life in the south and urban life in the north, melding those American experiences with his personal experiences and with the themes of classical literature, religion, myth, music and daily human ritual.”[citation needed]

In 2008 a 1984 mural by Romare Bearden in the Gateway Center subway station in Pittsburgh was estimated as worth $15 million, more than the cash-strapped transit agency expected. It raised questions about how it should be cared for once it is removed before the station is demolished.[25]

“We did not expect it to be that much,” Port Authority of Allegheny County spokeswoman Judi McNeil said. “We don’t have the wherewithal to be a caretaker of such a valuable piece.” It would cost the agency more than $100,000 a year to insure the 60-foot-by-13-foot tile mural, McNeil said. Bearden was paid $90,000 for the project, titled Pittsburgh Recollections. It was installed in 1984.[25]

Before his death, Bearden claimed the collage fragments aided him to usher the past into the present: “When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.”[26]

The Return of Odysseus, one of his collage works held by the Art Institute of Chicago, exemplifies Bearden’s effort to represent African-American rights in a form of collage. This collage describes one of the scenes in Homer’s epic Odyssey, in which the hero Odysseus is returning home from his long journey. The viewer’s eye is first captured by the main figure, Odysseus, situated at the center of the work and reaching his hand to his wife. All the figures are black, enlarging the context of the Greek legend. This is one of the ways in which Bearden works to represent African-American rights; by replacing white characters with blacks, he attempts to defeat the rigidity of historical roles and stereotypes and open up the possibilities and potential of blacks. “Bearden may have seen Odysseus as a strong mental model for the African-American community, which had endured its own adversities and setbacks.”[27] By portraying Odysseus as black, Bearden maximizes the potential for empathy by black audiences.

Bearden said that he used collage because “he felt that art portraying the lives of African Americans did not give full value to the individual. […] In doing so he was able to combine abstract art with real images so that people of different cultures could grasp the subject matter of the African American culture: The people. This is why his theme always exemplified people of color.”[28] In addition, he said that collage’s technique of gathering several pieces together to create one assembled work “symbolizes the coming together of tradition and communities.”[27]

Legacy

Romare Bearden died in New York City on March 12, 1988, due to complications from bone cancer. The New York Times described Bearden in its obituary as “one of America’s pre-eminent artists” and “the nation’s foremost collagist.”[1]

Two years after his death, The Romare Bearden Foundation was founded. This non-profit organization not only serves as Bearden’s official Estate, but also helps “to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of this preeminent American artist.”[29] Recently, it has begun developing grant-giving programs aimed at funding and supporting children, young (emerging) artists and scholars.[30]

In Charlotte, a street was named after Romare Bearden, intersecting West Boulevard, on the west side of the city. Romare Bearden Drive is lined by the West Boulevard Public Library and rows of townhouses.

Inside the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Main Library (310 N. Tryon Street) is Bearden’s mosaic, Before Dawn.[31] After Bearden’s death, his widow selected a 12″ x 18″ collage by him to be recreated in smalti (glass tiles) by Crovatto Mosaics in Spilimbergo, Italy, for the Grand Reopening Gala (18 June 1989) of the ‘new’ library. She was publicly honored at the ceremony for her contribution. The reinterpreted work is 9 feet tall and 13.5 feet wide.

Ground breaking for Romare Bearden Park in Charlotte, took place at 9 am on September 2, 2011 and the completed park opened in late August 2013. It is situated on a 5.2-acre parcel located in Third Ward between Church and Mint streets. The artist lived near the new park for a time as a child, at the corner of MLK Boulevard and Graham Street. The park design is based on work of public artist Norie Sato.[32] Her concepts were inspired by Bearden’s multimedia collages.

DC Moore Gallery currently represents the Estate of Romare Bearden. The first exhibition of his works at the gallery was in September 2008.[33] In 2014-2015, Columbia University hosted a major Smithsonian Institution travelling exhibition of Bearden’s work and an accompanying series of lectures, readings, performances, and other events celebrating the artist. On display at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery on Columbia’s Morningside campus, and also at Columbia’s Global Centers in Paris and Istanbul, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey focused on the cycle of collages and watercolors Bearden completed in 1977 based on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey.[34]

In 2011, the U.S. Postal Service released a set of Forever stamps featuring four of Bearden’s paintings during a first-day-of-issuance ceremony at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.[35]

In 2017, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond announced acquisition of Romare Bearden’s collage, Three Folk Musicians, as part of the museum’s permanent collection. The collage, which shows two guitar players and a banjo player, is often cited in art history books. It was shown at the VMFA for the first time in February 2017 in the museum’s Mid to Late 20th-Century Galleries.[36]

Published works

Romare Bearden is the author of:

  • Lil Dan, the Drummer Boy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Romare Bearden is the coauthor of:

  • with Harry Henderson, Six Black Masters of American Art, New York: Doubleday, 1972[8]
  • with Carl Holty, The Painter’s Mind, Taylor & Francis, originally published in 1969[8]
  • with Harry Henderson, of A History of African-American Artists. From 1792 to The Present, New York: Pantheon Books 1993[8]

Honors achieved

  • Founded the 306 Group, a club for Harlem artists
  • In 1966 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • In 1972 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters
  • In 1978, Bearden was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member
  • In 1987, the year before he died, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts
  • In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Romare Bearden on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[37]

Awards

  • American Academy of Arts and Letters Painting Award, 1966[8]
  • National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1966[8]
  • Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1970[8]
  • Ford Foundation Fellowship, 1973[8]
  • Medal of the State of North Carolina, 1976[8]
  • Frederick Douglas Medal, New York Urban League, 1978[8]
  • James Weldon Johnson Award, Atlanta Chapter of NAACP, 1978[8]

Works of Art

  • Abstract (painting)
  • The Blues (collage) – 1975, Honolulu Museum of Art
  • The Calabash (collage) – 1970, Library of Congress
  • Carolina Shout (collage) This is eponymous with the musical composition by Bearden family friend, the “dean of jazz pianists” and composer, James P. Johnson. This appears to be more than a coincidence, as the name of Bearden’s mother, Bessye (sic), is listed on the letterhead of an organization called, ” Friends of James P. Johnson” An audio recording of Carolina Shout, featuring Harry Connick Jr. on piano, is included on the companion CD to the National Gallery of Art Exhibition, Romare Bearden Revealed, by Branford Marsalis. – The Mint Museum of Art
  • The Dove
  • Falling Star (painting)
  • Fisherman (painting)
  • “Jammin’ at the Savoy” (painting)
  • The Lantern (painting)
  • Last of the Blue Devils
  • Morning of the Rooster
  • Patchwork Quilt (collage) – 1970, Museum of Modern Art
  • Piano Lesson (painting) – Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, inspired the play The Piano Lesson
  • Pittsburgh Memory (collage) – 1964, Collection of w, New York.[38] Used as album art for The Roots album …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin.
  • Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings (collage)
  • Recollection Pond (tapestry) – 1974–1990, 7 plus 1 artist’s proof/8 made, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum; Port Authority of NY & NJ; York College, City University of New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art[39]
  • Return of the Prodigal Son – 1967, Albright-Knox Art Gallery
  • Rocket to the Moon (collage)
  • She-Ba
  • Showtime (painting)
  • Summertime (collage) – 1967, Saint Louis Art Museum
  • The Woodshed
  • Wrapping it up at the Lafayette
  • The Dove 1964
  • “The Family” 1941
  • “The family” 1975

References

Notes

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b Fraser, C. Gerald. Romare Bearden, Collagist and Painter, Dies at 75. The New York Times. March 13, 1988.
  2. ^ Jose Jose – Amar y Querer, retrieved October 13, 2019
  3. ^ “National Gallery of Art: The Art of Romare Bearden – Introduction”. Nga.gov. Archived from the original on January 23, 2016. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m “Bearden, Romare”. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved January 19,2017.
  5. ^ “Bearden Foundation”. Archived from the original on May 23, 2013. Retrieved April 14, 2013.
  6. ^ Jump up to:a b Romare Bearden Foundation, 1990
  7. ^ “Biography”. Romare Bearden Foundation. Romare Bearden Foundation. Archived from the original on January 31, 2017. Retrieved January 27, 2017.
  8. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l Valakos, Dorothy (1997). Bearden, Romare (Howard), St. James Guide to Black Artists. Detroit: St. James Press. pp. 41–45.
  9. ^ Witkovsky 1989: 258
  10. ^ Witkovsky 1989: 260
  11. ^ Witkovsky, 1989: 260
  12. ^ [1] Archived May 10, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  13. ^ Carter, Richard (2003). “The Art of Romare Bearden: A Resource for Teachers” (PDF). nga.gov.
  14. ^ Jump up to:a b Bearden, Romare & Henderson, Harry, P. (1993). A History of African-American Artists. From 1792 to present. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 400.
  15. ^ Jump up to:a b Mercer, Kobena. “Romare Bearden, 1964; Collage as Kunstwollen.” Cosmopolitan Modernisms. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005. 124–45.
  16. ^ Jump up to:a b Armstrong, Elizabeth (2005). Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950. Orange County Museum of Art. p. 98. ISBN 0-917493-41-9.
  17. ^ Jump up to:a b “Factory Workers, Romare Howard Bearden”. artsmia.org. Retrieved January 28, 2017.
  18. ^ Witkovsky 1989: 266
  19. ^ Witkovsky 1989: 267
  20. ^ Brenner Hinish and Moore, 2003
  21. ^ Fine, 2004
  22. ^ [2] Archived February 18, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  23. ^ Oisteanu, Valery (May 2011). “Romare Bearden (1911–1988): Collage, A Centennial Celebration”. The Brooklyn Rail.
  24. ^ Greene, 1971.
  25. ^ Jump up to:a b “Bearden Subway Mural Takes Pittsburgh by Surprise”. ARTINFO. April 25, 2008. Retrieved April 28, 2008.
  26. ^ Ulaby, Neda. “The Art of Romare Bearden: Collages Fuse Essence of Old Harlem, American South”, NPR. 14 September 2003.
  27. ^ Jump up to:a b Gerber, Sanet. “Return of Odysseus by Romare Bearden.” Welcome to DiscountASP.NET Web Hosting. GerberWebWork, n.d. Web. March 3, 2012.
  28. ^ “Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionist Art.” Segmentation. SegTech., December 5, 2011. Web. March 3, 2012.
  29. ^ “The Romare Bearden Foundation – Mission”. Beardenfoundation.org. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  30. ^ “ROMARE BEARDEN FOUNDATION – Foundation Programs”. Beardenfoundation.org. Archived from the original on October 21, 2015. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  31. ^ [3] Archived January 14, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
  32. ^ “Bearden Park Design – Support Romare Bearden Park!”. Beardenfoundation.org. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  33. ^ “DC Moore Gallery, Romare Bearden artist page”. Dcmooregallery.com. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  34. ^ Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning, September 22, 2015.
  35. ^ https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_110.htm
  36. ^ Calos, Katherine (January 19, 2017). “VMFA’s Bearden acquisition called a ‘game-changer’:Three Folk Musicians’ collage will go on display in Richmond on Feb. l” (Metro). Richmond Times-Dispatch. pp. B1, B3.
  37. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
  38. ^ “NGA: The Art of Romare Bearden – Pittsburgh Memory, 1964”. Nga.gov. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  39. ^ “GFR Tapestry Program » Romare Bearden, “Recollection Pond””. Tapestrycenter.org. February 22, 1999. Retrieved November 15, 2015.

Sources

  • Bearden, Romare, Jerald L. Melberg, and Albert Murray. Romare Bearden, 1970-1980: An Exhibition. Charlotte, N.C.: Mint Museum, 1980.
  • Brown, Kevin. Romare Bearden: Artist. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.
  • East End/East Liberty Historical Society (January 16, 2008). Pittsburgh’s East Liberty Valley. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4396-3574-2.
  • Romare Bearden; Ruth Fine; Jacqueline Francis (2011). Romare Bearden, American Modernist. National Gallery of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-12161-2.
  • Romare Bearden; Ruth Fine; Mary Lee Corlett; National Gallery of Art (U.S.) (2003). The Art of Romare Bearden. National Gallery of Art. ISBN 978-0-89468-302-2.
  • Greene, Carroll, Jr., Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual, Museum of Modern Art, 1971.
  • Romare Bearden Foundation. “Romare Bearden Foundation Biography”. Archived from the original on November 24, 2005. Retrieved October 4, 2005.
  • Vaughn, William (2000). Encyclopedia of Artists. Oxford University Press, Inc. ISBN 0-19-521572-9.
  • Witkovsky, Matthew S. 1989. “Experience vs. Theory: Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism”. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 23, No. 2, Fiction Issue pp. 257–282.
  • Yenser, Thomas (editor) (1932). Who’s Who in Colored America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Persons of African Descent in America (Third ed.). Who’s Who in Colored America, Brooklyn, New York. [Provides biography of mother, Bessye J. Bearden]

External links

By Felicia R. Lee (Sept. 11, 2003)

Romare Bearden was born in segregated Charlotte, N.C., in 1911 and lived through both the Harlem Renaissance and the modern civil rights movement, creating collages of black life so stunning that he earned a reputation as a major 20th-century American artist.

Fifteen years after his death, Bearden is back on a grand stage for a new generation as the first African-American artist featured in a solo retrospective in the 62-year history of the National Gallery of Art here.

”The Art of Romare Bearden,” which opens Sunday, is considered the most comprehensive display ever of Bearden’s work. Bearden, who died in 1988, is best known for work like the 1964 collages ”Watching the Good Trains Go By” and ”Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings,” featuring newspaper and magazine snippets of black faces and images of trains and churches. But he worked in many mediums, painting landscapes and creating collages without cutouts.

The exhibition highlights his versatility and thematic range — from childhood stories to jazz musicians to the Bible — as well as his artistic influences from Vermeer to Matisse. Some 130 pieces, dating from 1941 to 1986, are on display. They include paintings, costumes and stage sets as well as Bearden’s one known sculpture, from 1969, representing Mauritius, a martyred Roman soldier from Egypt. Most are from private collections, and many have rarely been seen or reproduced.

The National Gallery has the show through Jan. 4. Then it will travel, in a slightly different form, to San Francisco, Dallas and Atlanta and to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

For some in the art world the retrospective is a chance to reconsider Bearden’s life and techniques and to expand the scholarship on an artist whose works numbered perhaps 2,000. Others hope that the show will reinvigorate the conversation about the intersection of race and art and tweak other major institutions to showcase more black artists.

”This is a big moment for American art and modernism, too,” said the art historian Jacqueline Francis, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for Afro-American and African Studies. ”This is Bearden’s biggest stage to date. The legacy is going to be expanded tremendously. Not only does this show have the largest number of objects, but the prosthetics of the exhibition — the exhibition catalog is a major scholarly publication — will help us make sense of Bearden and his trajectory and his interaction with other artists.”

Harlem Renaissance

Bearden’s place among black artists and intellectuals is secure, with August Wilson, Derek Walcott and Wynton Marsalis claiming him as inspiration. Bearden studied at the Art Students League in New York but was a social worker for decades while creating both his art and groups like Spiral, a salon for black artists devoted to social change. He often talked and wrote about the responsibility of black artists to reflect their struggles and to reflect a common humanity that transcended race.

”It’s both wonderful and kind of amazing that this is the first solo exhibition by a black artist at the National Gallery,” said Richard J. Powell, a professor of art history at Duke University. ”One hopes this show will prompt curators to go back to some of those masters like Jacob Lawrence and Aaron Douglas. This is sort of a multicultural moment we’re in, a global moment.”

It is also very much Bearden’s moment, Mr. Powell said. A 348-page hardcover edition of the show’s catalog, with biographical information and critical commentary by scholars like Ms. Francis and the show’s curator, Ruth E. Fine, corrects erroneous biographical information that has appeared in various places over the years.

For instance, it gives Bearden’s birth date as 1911, not 1914, as is widely believed, and shows that he received a degree in education, not in mathematics, from New York University. It also gives new dates for some of the work because Bearden kept few records.

The book also documents how Bearden’s collage technique changed over time, becoming more like painting, and shows that from the beginning of his career he worked in series, often approaching the same themes in different mediums. He also literally recycled his work, painting over pieces, cutting them up for collages.

”I’m trying to do a reinterpretation, and I hope that it inspires a reassessment,” Ms. Fine said, walking a visitor through the exhibition, which is arranged in roughly chronological order, with themes like ”Origins,” ”Women” and ”The City and Its Music.”

While Bearden ”has always been important,” having been connected with major galleries for much of his life and presented in important museums like the Metropolitan and the Studio Museum in Harlem, Ms. Fine said she understood the yearning of some scholars to see him better integrated into the art world.

”There are books being published called the cultural history of American art, and there are no African-American artists,” Ms. Fine said.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, said she would wait and see the meaning of the National Gallery retrospective.

”He has gone through these successive periods of revival,” said Ms. Campbell, a Bearden scholar. ”The question that always lurks for me is at what moment will this be sustained. When will we find that American history, American art, opens up so he is as woven in as Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock?

”If you look at other disciplines you can see Zora Neale Hurston becoming part of the canon, or in music someone like Charlie Parker being woven in. We haven’t gotten there with painting.”

Perhaps one reason is that more work is needed to appreciate Bearden’s broader cultural importance, suggested Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of African and African-American Studies at Harvard.

”Bearden is the father of African-American modernism,” Mr. Gates said. ”He universalized the African-Amerian experience of art in a way that no one has done, whether he was depicting the South or his jazz series or taking on classical myths like in the Odysseus series. Suddenly the Greek myth is African-American.”

”He was cut from the same cloth as Ralph Ellison and Duke Ellington,” he said, referring to two artists who insisted that black and American identities could not be separated.

The platform for exploring those questions has been expanded with a host of events that will accompany the Bearden exhibition. Some are at the museum and include lectures, a series of films by the black director Oscar Micheaux, programs for children, a quilt exhibition at the Textile Museum and tours of historically black sections of Washington.

And the Romare Bearden Foundation, a nonprofit organization started by his estate to perpetuate Bearden’s legacy, found in its archives a children’s book, ”Li’l Dan the drummer boy: a Civil War story,” written and illustrated by Bearden years ago but recently published, for the first time, by Simon & Schuster. Just out, too, is a new biography for all ages, ”Romare Bearden: Collage of Memories” by Jan Greenberg (Abrams, 2003). Branford Marsalis has just released a CD, ”Romare Bearden Revealed” (Marsalis Music), inspired by Bearden and meant to accompany the exhibition.

The show has also attracted some controversy. André Thibault, Bearden’s assistant and a student of his for about six years, contacted the National Gallery to claim that he collaborated with Bearden on about 22 works in the last 18 months of Bearden’s life, as he was dying of bone cancer.

The 55-year-old Canadian-born Mr. Thibault, who has a studio in Leonia, N.J., hired a lawyer in an effort to ensure that he would get credit if any of the pieces on which he worked were in the show. Because of the disputed origin of one piece, ”Gospel Morning,” the museum declined to include it in the exhibition.

Both Ms. Fine, the curator, and Tallal ELBoushi, chairman of the Romare Bearden Foundation in New York say they believe that Mr. Thibault (who calls himself ”Teabo”) was an assistant, not a collaborator. Mr. Thibault said that although he was hurt that he would not make it into the National Gallery show, he did not plan to press more claims.

Albert Murray, the cultural critic and a longtime Bearden friend, said the artist would have been proud of the museum show and would have taken everything from the speculation about its meaning to the Teabo controversy in stride. It was Mr. Murray who named many of Bearden’s pieces and introduced him to jazz. They had long talks, he said, about their vision of a black American art that made you see skyscrapers and hear the triumph of a world power.

”He’d have a sense of achievement,” Mr. Murray said of the retrospective. ”And he would hope that it would be an inspiration to other people to think beyond the province, that this could all be mine.”

School Bell Time. 1994

An Artist Talked and a World Listens

By Samuel G. Freedman

One afternoon in 1985, Russell Goings went to the Chinatown apartment of his friend Romare Bearden to give the artist a rubdown. For several years Mr. Goings had seen Bearden suffering from a persistent cold and a steady ache in his right shoulder, ailments Bearden waved off as the result of allergies and calcium deposits. The previous day he had finally gone to a specialist, and as he removed his T-shirt for the massage, Mr. Goings saw dye stains on his skin. They indicated the location of the bone cancer the doctor had discovered..

Faced with such unsparing evidence of mortality, the painter and his friend arrived at a compact, unspoken but mutually understood. As Bearden talked about art, creative process, influence, racial identity and other subjects, Mr. Goings would record the disquisitions. By the time Bearden died in 1988, Mr. Goings had accumulated 40 hours of audio tape and four handwritten diaries, as well as substantial bodies of correspondence and artwork.

“He knew he was dying, and he would often tell me, ‘I’ve got so much to say,”‘ Mr. Goings recalled in a recent interview. “He was very aware of the historical importance. He wanted to pass it on. And so he let me behind the veil. I acquired a side of him that nobody else had ever seen.”

After 16 years in Mr. Goings’s Upper West Side apartment, this collection of Bearden material, or at least a tantalizing portion of it, has reached the public as the basis for the exhibition “Romare Bearden: From the Studio and Archive” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street in Harlem. The Schomburg show (through Jan. 9) runs nearly congruently with the Whitney Museum’s major Bearden retrospective, which closes on Jan. 7.

While the Whitney displays much of Bearden’s most famous work — among them “Pittsburgh Memory” and his “Odysseus” series — the less-ballyhooed Schomburg exhibition offers insight into the ideas, methods and inspirations behind the masterpieces. And those insights have come to light primarily as the consequence of a chance encounter between two middle-aged black men in 1976.

At a Bearden show in a midtown gallery, someone pointed out a hulking figure in a business suit and told the painter: “You see that guy? He’s a football player.” An avid sports fan himself, Bearden introduced himself and suggested that he and Mr. Goings watch televised games together. Mr. Goings had, in fact, played linebacker in both the Canadian Football League and the original American Football League, but he was much more than an ex-jock. After injury ended his career in 1960, he went into finance, helped establish First Harlem Securities Corporation, the first black-owned company to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and he played a key role in assembling the initial investment for the black women’s magazine Essence.

There was also an element of mutual need. Mr. Goings had recently been ousted from First Harlem in a power struggle with partners. While Bearden’s wife led a dance company, the artist himself worked reclusively in his Long Island City studio. One morning in 1977 he asked Mr. Goings to drive him there from Chinatown, and once at the studio he asked Mr. Goings to pick up some groceries and dry-cleaning. At day’s end, Mr. Goings made the return trip with Bearden to Manhattan.

So the initial relationship developed, with Mr. Goings serving as chauffeur, go-fer, companion for watching ballgames. As the painter’s health began to deteriorate mysteriously over the succeeding years, and he asked Mr. Goings to provide massages and workouts with hand weights, their conversations turned increasingly to art.

“If people were to ask me who is the most knowledgeable person about Romare Bearden, it would definitely be Russell,” said Andre Thibault, the artist’s studio assistant from 1980 to 1988. “Russell and Romare shared an intimacy.”

Myron Schwartzman, the author of “Romare Bearden: His Life and Art,” said of the diaries and tapes: “Russell was pretty scrupulous. He made a true effort to capture what was going on with Bearden right up till the end of his life.”

Much of the men’s discussion turned on Bearden’s creative method, which was aimed at achieving a kind of practiced improvisation, much like a jazz musician’s. Even at the height of his artistic powers, Bearden put himself through exercises to train his hand to do his eyes’ bidding precisely. He drew through carbon paper so he could not see the lines until removing the sheet below, on which the image was imprinted; he did watercolors on graph paper because it absorbed so little paint that it betrayed any excess from the brush; he used felt-tip markers on porous paper so he would not be able to pause without leaving a blemish.

“He always talked about getting it ‘in the hand,”‘ Mr. Goings said, which meant surrendering to spontaneity. For Bearden, before anything got formalized, it had to be “in the hand.” In the process of training, Bearden tossed aside innumerable sketches and drawings, muttering, “I can do this better tomorrow.” Mr. Goings collected many of these outtakes, and they form part of the Schomburg exhibition.

Besides technique, the men spoke much about artistic influence, which for Bearden ranged from that of fellow African-Americans like Jacob Lawrence to Picasso, Matisse and van Gogh. Bearden often made explicit cross-cultural links, likening Vermeer’s use of observers in his paintings to Bearden’s own device of inserting animals like roosters and dogs, meant to represent the spirits of African ancestors. One day Bearden and Mr. Goings debated at length about what the black American equivalent was to Hemingway’s novel “The Old Man and the Sea.” Ultimately, they agreed on an answer: Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Deferred.”

In the advanced stages of cancer by the fall of 1987, Mr. Bearden insisted on continuing to create. He painted even as he soiled his pants, and often Mr. Goings had to bathe him. He resisted taking painkillers for fear they would dull his touch. As Bearden lost precise control of his right arm, he trained himself to draw with his left.

“The heroic thing about Bearden,” Mr. Goings said, “is that the sicker he became the more he worked. He’d say his gift was from God and it wasn’t for him to back away just because he was in pain.”

The proximity of death became yet another Bearden theme. “We talked about Blake, we talked about Plath, the poets and artists who deal with life and death, innocence and experience,” Mr. Goings said.

The paintings on display at the Schomburg juxtapose figures of skeletal men, their ribs rendered in stark black slashes, with voluptuous women in sensual oranges and greens. Nearby the works hangs a photograph of Bearden himself from that same period, shriveled from his normal 250 pounds to perhaps half that, a wraith in baggy pajamas.

On Jan. 29, 1988, Mr. Goings drove Bearden to a doctor’s appointment on the Upper East Side and then half a block to be admitted into New York Hospital. Optimistically, they made plans to watch the Super Bowl two days hence.

Instead, on that Sunday, Bearden slipped into a coma from which he never emerged.

For years afterward, Mr. Goings simply sat on his personal archive. He did not intend to sell it, and only one scholar, Mr. Schwartzman, ever made the effort to explore it. Even when the National Gallery started planning for the touring Bearden retrospective in the mid-1990’s, Mr. Goings said, curators expressed interest only in his collection of the paintings and collages, not the tapes and diaries and works in progress.

In more than one way, though, the Schomburg approached Mr. Goings about sharing his material for its own exhibition at a propitious moment. At 72, Mr. Goings has endured a stroke and walks with a pronounced limp. “It’s time,” Mr. Goings said. “The push has to be now. I’m dying, too.”

Odds & Ends

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