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14/3/05
The Art of Romare Bearden
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
14 October 2004-9 January 2005
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
29 January-24 April 2005
'The Art of Romare Bearden' commenced its run
in September 2003 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and
travelled to San Francisco and Dallas. It showed at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York before moving to its final venue
in Atlanta. This is the first comprehensive exhibition of Bearden's
work, revealing to many for the first time his significant and profound
contribution to American art in the 20th century. It includes some
150 works in collage (perhaps his most important medium), oil, gouache,
watercolours, drawings, photographs, monotypes and edition prints,
designs for record covers, book illustrations and the ballet, as
well as his only known sculpture. Many important works have been
borrowed from private collections and this is the first time that
they have been widely exhibited.
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Ruth Fine, the National Gallery's Curator of Special
Projects in Modern Art, who has previously completed studies of
major 20th century artists including Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler,
Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Martin and Georgia O'Keeffe,
is largely responsible for the exhibition. Her work began shortly
after Bearden's death in 1988, when his widow, Nanette, approached
the National Gallery for advice on the preservation of his work.
Fine has written a thorough, scholarly essay for the superb, fully
illustrated catalogue, in which she states the importance of Bearden's
work:
One great legacy of Bearden's art is its insight that what we share
as a global community is equal, in both interest and importance,
to what makes each of us unique. He achieved this by embracing themes
and practices from diverse times and places, and by imbuing them
with an imaginative character and physical presence that is distinctively
his own. In the materiality of his expansive expression, method
and message become one.1
Romare Bearden was born in 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The
city of Charlotte prospered on the growth of the railways and cotton.
His father (Richard) Howard Bearden, an inspector for the health department,
belonged to the African-American middle class that established itself
at the end of the Civil War. His mother, Bessye Johnson Bearden, was
a political activist and New York correspondent for the Chicago Defender,
an important African-American newspaper. Bessye's family owned property
and both she and Romare's father were college educated, but even with
these relative advantages, life became difficult for the family and
they took part in the Great Migration north when Romare was still
a child. They settled in New York City, where Romare lived for the
rest of his life.
The Bearden home was a meeting place for intellectuals, artists
and the politically involved. The group included such names as musicians
Duke Ellington and Thomas 'Fats' Waller. Romare attended school,
but the most significant aspect of his education was his attendance
at drawing classes given by German artist Georg Grosz at the Art
Students League. Grosz introduced Bearden to the work of a wide
range of European artists, notably Giotto, Ducchio, Dürer,
Bosch and Kollwitz. From 1932-1935, Bearden took art classes at
New York University and throughout the 1930s he published political
cartoons, taking inspiration from artists such as William Hogarth,
Honoré Daumier and Francisco de Goya. He also greatly admired
the political work of Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz. In contemporary
American caricature he saw the potential to sway public opinion
and bring about social change. He wrote essays for magazines and
political journals such as The Negro Artist and Modern Art and in
December 1934, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, for which he
also produced the cover design, a strong graphic image of 'architectural
density of lower Manhattan, a popular motif among painters and photographers
of this period'.2
During the 1930s, Bearden's imagery addressed issues relating to
the Ku Klux Klan, Depression soup kitchens, inequality in job opportunities,
the rise of Nazism in Europe and racial equality. At the same time,
the radical painting of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José
Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had a profound impact
on American art, with public projects such as the Rockefeller and
other major exhibitions in New York.
The social realist style of Bearden's work in the late 1930s represented
his commitment to social change and the belief that art was primarily
a means of communicating ideas. Christian iconography, present from
his early work, also played an important role in establishing universal
appeal for the social context of his work. During this period, the
physical quality of his paintings was established - the sensual,
rich colours between abstraction and figuration became characteristic
of his whole oeuvre. He took part in a dialogue with Picasso, who
used cubism and Negro art itself, of which he wrote:
Of great importance has been the fact that the African would distort
his figures, if by so doing he could achieve a more expressive form.
This is one of the cardinal principles of the modern artist.3
He believed the Negro artist had a calling to portray present day
life with passion.
The first solo exhibition of Bearden's work outside of Harlem took
place in 1944. However, he was still unable to support himself through
his art and for the next 20 years he continued to work in the welfare
department and to paint at night and at weekends. In 1945, he visited
a retrospective of Georges Rouault, the great French religious painter,
at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. This was of great
importance to his work and in the view of others, it was possible
to place Bearden's painting in the tradition to which Rouault held
a major position. Classical mythology, literary and biblical themes
remained central to his work. 'The Passion of Christ' (1945-1946)
shows his early dialogue with universal themes and figurative and
abstract imagery. The religious works of the 1940s are marvellous
in their immediacy and authentic personal response, often employing
black outlines in the style of Rouault. In 1945, MoMA bought two
of these religious paintings.
Bearden continued his narrative work using powerful literary themes
from a diverse number of writers throughout history, including Spanish
poet/playwright Federico García Lorca's bullfight works,
16th century French humanist François Rabelais' political
satire and Homer's Iliad-inspired war paintings. For these exciting
and beautiful works, Bearden used watercolour, gouache and oil paint.
In the late 1940s, he spent some two years working primarily from
the masters to compensate for what he claimed was a lack of formal
training. These works encompass a range of styles, such as Italian
primitive, Northern Renaissance, 17th century Dutch and 19th/20th
century works by Degas and Matisse.
In 1949, Bearden's dealer, Samuel M Kootz, excluded him from his
gallery, in favour of Abstract Expressionist artists. He did not
paint for several years, a period of conflict and self-scrutiny.
Ruth Fine observes:
There can be no doubt ... that Bearden maintained the social,
intellectual and cultural commitments he had so strongly conveyed
in his editorial cartoons of the mid-1930s. This is evident in the
way he constructed his life and his work, in his efforts to bring
the work of African-American artists into the mainstream and in
the power of his art to bridge diverse cultural experience.4
Bearden had a passion for art of all periods. During the hiatus
in which he did not paint, he travelled to Paris, where he studied
French and philosophy and visited museums in both France and Italy.
Gothic stained glass in France, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and
the mosaics at St Maria Maggiore in Rome were particularly singled
out for his admiration. In Paris, he met artists and intellectuals
including Constantin Brancusi and Gaston Bachelard.
In the mid-1950s, with the encouragement of friends, Bearden returned
to the visual arts; he had an exhibition of relatively abstract
work in 1955 at the Barone Gallery, New York. He married Nanette
Rohan in 1954. During this period his new mentor, Chinese calligrapher
Mr Wu, introduced Bearden to Chinese landscape painting. Like other
artists at the time, such as Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and the
French artist Jean Dubuffet, whose paintings and collages he greatly
admired, Bearden found a more subtle route to abstraction through
an interest in Zen Buddhism. Fine writes:
The co-ordination of elements from classical Chinese painting with
others from contemporary international Modernism provided Bearden's
abstract Expressionism with a beauty and energy that was distinctly
its own.5
The canvas collage 'North River' (1962) is a primal and elegant
work. Having withdrawn from public life in 1956 after a breakdown,
Bearden did not exhibit for five years. Between 1963 and 1964, he
moved back to figuration, with periodic returns to lyrical abstraction.
Inspired by Matisse's cut-outs and 'The Art of Assemblage', an exhibition
at MoMA in 1961 featuring work by Dubuffet, Bearden moved from painting-based
art to collage-based practice, in which he combined layers of paper
with paint, ink and graphite.6. By now, he was also involved in
the civil rights movement and a member of the activist group Spiral.
He believed:
Western society, and particularly that of America, is gravely ill
and a major symptom is the American treatment of the Negro. The
artistic expression of this culture concentrates on themes and 'absurdity'
and 'anti-art' which provide further evidence of its ill health.
It is the right of everyone now to re-examine history to see if
Western culture offers the only solutions to man's purpose on earth.7
In 1963, MoMA organised the exhibition 'Americans'. As with other
key exhibitions of American art from the 1940s to the 1960s, no
African-American artists were included. Questions pertaining to
a Negro image of the 20th century were posed by civil rights activists,
for which Spiral was an important focus. Spiral artists were enraged
by their own absolute exclusion from mainstream art and culture;
central to their remit was an attempt to redress the balance for
black artists. In 1965, Bearden took part in the only exhibition
organised by Spiral, exhibiting a photostatic enlargement from a
collage/photomontage, 'a genre of picture-making that may be tracked
back to the late 19th century, historically more popular in Europe
than in America'.8 Bearden had held an exhibition the previous year,
featuring 21 photographically enlarged collages. Ruth Fine points
out the layers of interest and ideas with which Bearden managed
to infuse these works, which have their roots stylistically in the
Dada movement:
Given Bearden's intrepid curiosity, he would have been reading every
sort of art publication and viewing as many exhibitions uptown and
downtown as possible, his personal and cultural commitments continuing
to engage mainstream currents as well as those specific to an African-American
milieu. Building on these experiences and his amalgam of talent
and imagination, Bearden created collages and photostatic Projections
that take their place on the artistic cutting edge in two very different
ways. Unfortunately, despite radical differences in size, methodology
and relationships to other art, the jewel-like collages and the
powerful journalistic Projections, directly corresponding as they
do to each other in image and title, are frequently discussed interchangeably,
the distinctive qualities of each thereby diminished.9
Bearden made small collages that were then enlarged to the scale
and power of television or cinema. The strong journalistic imagery
made this an appropriate cultural language, in a society dominated
by mass media. Fine describes their significance thus:
Laden with mystery, these small, complex works reveal the dense
body of artistic and cultural knowledge Bearden had been accumulating
for three decades; they should be considered monuments in both Bearden's
oeuvre and in American art of the early 1960s. Allusion is basic
to them, and as with Bearden's later works grasping references and
possible meanings requires lengthy engagement. Gracefully intertwined
are allusions to pre-20th century Western art, African art, literature
and music of many cultures, the political and artistic anarchy of
Dada, and a multitude of other 20th century 'isms' that led from
an explosive pictorial space to the flatness central to later modernist
concerns. Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism and the fluctuation
between abstraction and representation were essential to them all
… His multi-faceted practice, including painting, drawing,
collage, and photographic processes, adds to the complexity of the
mix.10
Romare Bearden's extraordinary artistic achievements and sheer determination
were recognised when MoMA held a retrospective of his work in 1971.
Fine makes the important observation that collage, which concerns
itself with the fracturing of space and form, was appropriate for
an artist whose work addressed issues such as the prospect of nuclear
war, black segregation in American society and the conflict in Vietnam,
exacerbated by America's involvement. Segregation in various forms
is central to Bearden's message. In the late 1960s, he began creating
larger, more painterly collages in which the process of making is
celebrated and colour is of paramount importance. Coloured papers
and fabrics exude a cinematic quality and originality. Bearden said,
'I try to incorporate some of the techniques of documentary film
or the camera eye into the art of painting ... Also involved
is the interplay between the photograph and the actual painting
and I constantly find myself adjusting my colour to the grey of
the photograph so there won't be too much disparity in colour between
them'.11 Bearden continued to use collage as his primary medium
for the rest of his career, using fibreboard to support the heavier
papers and fabrics of the larger works. He also worked with other
media, including various printmaking techniques. Bearden's painterly
collages and prints are quintessentially alive with his energy and
commitment. His figures, both drawn and photographic, are manipulated
with an intense vision and a sense of commitment to a better world.
They have the energy of jazz music, the understatement and brevity
of the artists with whom he identified from all periods of history
and the sorrow and injustice of an individual forced to exist outside
of mainstream culture. Bearden's art and life are essentially a
courageous triumph over injustice and the supreme survival of humanist
values and personal strength. They are a celebration of life itself.
Dr Janet McKenzie
References
1. Fine R. Romare Bearden: The Spaces Between. In: Fine R, Corlett
ML, Francis J et al. The Art of Romare Bearden. Washington: National
Gallery of Art, 2003: 4.
2. Ibid: 8.
3. Ibid: 13.
4. Ibid: 22.
5. Ibid: 25.
6. Ibid: 27.
7. Ibid: 28.
8. Ibid: 29.
9. Ibid: 29-30.
10. Ibid: 31.
11. Ibid: 53.
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im doing an evaluation on romare and i found this very helpful thankyou |
- John, west warwick, rhode island |
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