Romare Bearden Made a World

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor

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A startling vision greets visitors to "The Art of Romare Bearden," the awe-inspiring retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. At the airy mezzanine entrance to the show, a photograph of Bearden's remarkable 1972 collage, "The Block," has been blown up to the size of a mural, supersizing patchworked faces and Harlem tenements and illustrating, in a big way, Bearden's making of a world.

You see how Bearden takes scraps of assorted images and makes them into bigger and bigger images—a boy sitting on a stoop, a stylized mother and child, an entire altered cityscape, void of scale, that is very real. And you think you get it (and that you've gotten it first): Bearden's technique of piecing together seemingly contradictory pieces of the world, and making them into a new whole, is nothing short of a metaphor for the African American experience.

But, on entering the show, you see that the writer Ralph Ellison had this same idea a long time ago. "Bearden's combinations of technique is eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of the Negro American history," Ellison wrote in 1968.

Oh well. So much for "getting," in 2003, anything new about Bearden. Leaf through more than 300 pages of the exhibition's catalogue, view the new 30-minute video or survey a list of the special programs associated with the show and it is obvious that few rocks have been unturned when it comes to this celebrated American artist and visionary. But what each visitor to this show can get that is new, in DC or in the five cities to which it will travel, is their own appreciation of Bearden's grand metaphor, as well as seeing Bearden's art as a story about his own remarkable life and vision. There are 130 works to see and maybe you will be taken by the artist's repeated guitars and trains, the music and movement of African Americans in his era. Maybe you will be drawn to his references to traditional African religions. Maybe, knowing how we Black folks joke about the size and shape of the human cranium, you might laugh at his oft-repeated motif of half-melon shaped heads.

Romare Bearden was a husky, redbone man of many passions and joys. He was born Fred Romare Harry Bearden on Sept. 2, 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina but, while still a toddler, moved to Harlem with his parents, Bessye Johnson Bearden and Howard Bearden. The family's Harlem circle included artists and intellectuals of the day such as Paul Robeson, Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas and W.E.B. DuBois. His early roots in the South, in Harlem and at his maternal grandparent's home in Pittsburgh, Pa., forever shaped his vision as an artist and man. He loved literature and loved to tell stories. He would eventually compose music and songs. While still in college, he pitched with the Boston Tigers from the old Negro baseball leagues and was offered a position on the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team—and a place in the major leagues—if he would pass for White. He declined. He took part in important movements of Black artists, including Harlem's 306 group during the 1940's and the Spiral group of the 1960's. At the age of 43 he married Nanette Rohan, who was his partner and confidant until he died of bone cancer in 1988 at the age of 76. "The function of the artist," he said, "is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination."

The curator of the show, Ruth Fine, has organized it into nine manageable sections that naturally fit the flow of Bearden's life. The first, "Origins," begins with Bearden's work in the 1940's. Omitted from display, and only briefly referenced in the catalogue, are his social-realist paintings from the Depression, which covered subject matter such as soup kitchens. In the 1930's, he also published political illustrations and cartoons in periodicals such as the Baltimore Afro-American, The Crisis and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. By the 40's, his work was less "realist" and moved closer to his signature style that married abstraction and representation. The influence of cubism, Picasso and African art is obvious but his subject matter and inspiration are rooted in the Black church of both the South and North. Most of the paintings in this section, including "The Visitation," "The Family," "They That are Delivered from the Noise of the Archers" and "Presage" have biblical references and, with their cubist influence, could easily be re-imagined as stained glass windows in a church.

Special attention is given in the next section, "Circa 1964," to the small-scale collages Bearden created while with the Spiral group, to comment on the Civil Rights movement and struggles of African Americans. Using cut-outs from magazines like Ebony and Jet, and combining them with other paper and materials such as paint, graphite and ink, he created a signature style that would evolve with ever-more complexity to include assorted papers, original photographs, photostats and manipulations of scale, proportion and color.

His collages grew in size after this period as he reconnected, as he would throughout his life, with his Mecklenburg County roots in North Carolina. Dedicated to the county, the show's next section includes large-scale collages such as the warm and welcoming "Old Couple,' rhythmic, complex works such as "Three Men" and "Three Folk Musicians" and the well-known "Palm Sunday Procession." The exhibit is housed on two floors at the gallery and as your climb the stairs from one to the next, you sense a blossoming of ambition and confidence in his approach. In the next sections, "The City and its Music" and "Stories," the emphasis has moved away from printed images in magazines and toward the creation of images with various vividly colored papers. He also began to intersperse images of African masks with Black faces, referencing both our African roots and the root that modern art has in African sculpture.

There are still fewer "found" images in the sections "Women," "Monotypes" and "Collaborations" By the time the show winds up with his late work, completed primarily when he and his wife relocated to St. Martin, the canvases of water-colored fragments are brilliantly alive with a dense, breath-taking landscape. Bearden worked up until the last months of his life. In this final section, the works "In a Green Shade," a glorious rendering of the earth's splendor, and "Mecklenburg Autumn," which references again his place of birth, are like the artist closing the circle on his vision and world, which this exhibit captures for us all to see.

This article first appeared on www.BET.com.

-- October 20, 2003

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