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Bearden: The Road to Glory
Fred Stern
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Romare Bearden, Tomorrow I
May Be Far Away, 1967; Paul
Mellon Fund, © Romare Bearden
Foundation; 2001.72.1
Click image to enlarge.
We are pleased when a significant artist "makes it big." Dignitaries attend openings of their shows. Reviewers heap praise on their work, discuss impressions, advances, trends. Influential galleries promote their creations, and museum gift shops even offer copies.
Romare Howard Bearden (1911-1988) was an artist who experienced such recognition. In his lifetime, Bearden's work was admired in top-notch museums worldwide and avidly collected by wealthy patrons. This resounding success was all the sweeter because Bearden was an African-American who overcame the highly restrictive limits imposed by the racial prejudices of his day.
Bearden's life could have taken a different turn. In addition to his artistic ability, he was a talented athlete, a baseball player who was offered a position with the Philadelphia Athletics--if only he would "pass" for white. Bearden refused.
Yet he did not take his art along the narrow path of complaining or pleading. Instead, African art, American history, the image of the Negro presented as "everyman" all shine from his canvases. The glow of his work pulses through the entire arena of American art.
This year, Bearden is the subject of a wave of unprecedented celebration in New York museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Children's Museum. The Bearden Foundation, founded by the late artist and his wife, continues to encourage and assist in setting up new exhibitions.
Bearden was a son of Charlotte, North Carolina, a town rich in beautiful vistas and the traditions of Southern culture. At the turn of the century, Charlotte was also a busy transportation hub, a center for the commerce involving cotton. In this bustling environment, Bearden's paternal family, whose acumen, energy, and aspirations raised them into the middle class, provided a solid foundation for his ambitions.
His artistic temperament was well grounded. His grandfather had been a painter, and his mother was a recognized charcoal sketch artist. His mother's side of the family owned real estate, which, for a black family at that time and place, was not typical, to say the least. They had their own homes, a general store, and at least two additional properties that served as boarding houses. College education was important on both sides of the family. Even though they were unusually successful for black families of the period, the strictures of Jim Crow laws were still handicapping.
When Bearden was only three years old, his father moved the family to New York. They settled in Harlem at the height of the famous Harlem Renaissance. All around them, black artists, musicians, and builders thrived in a new creative atmosphere and environment. Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington were all neighbors and friends. Bearden's mother, even at his early age, was eager for Romare to pursue a professional career veering toward medicine. He studied briefly at Boston University, then returned to New York City and in 1935 earned his B.S. in mathematics from New York University.
However, rather than going to work as a mathematician, he became a social worker with the New York Department of Social Services. This was during the Great Depression, a time of extreme economic distress, but also a time of new political ideas and activism. In his new job, young Bearden must have dealt daily with the hardships of New York's poor and disenfranchised. Perhaps, as an outlet for his emotions, he also began to draw cartoons. Soon his work appeared in the two most widely read magazines of the day, the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. In his sketches, Bearden addressed the social and economic issues he encountered as a social worker. Needless to say, his cartoons made a strong, lasting impression.
After putting in a full day's work, he furthered his artistic development with evening classes at the Art Students League of New York. This brought him under some of the most influential and innovative artists of the day. For example, there was George Grosz, a satirical artist whose critical pen was sharpened to lampoon the failed efforts of Germany's political parties. But aside from honing his cartooning skills, he also explored the trend toward Surrealism that was then making inroads in American art. Surrealism is an artistic style that began in Europe in the 1920s in which artists tried to picture their dreams. Bearden greatly admired the skills of Max Ernst, an important German Surrealist artist whose paintings are in leading museums.
Covering a broad spectrum of the American experience
Throughout his long career, Bearden explored many subjects. Foremost among these were religious themes and biblical characters. Key elements in his work included baptism, the birth of Christ, and the Crucifixion. His first projects were executed in watercolors or ink, his figures appearing in great swirls of color. A Madonna and Child (1945) echoes the tradition of the French painter Georges Rouault, whose paintings repeat the black-frame outlines of stained-glass windows.
When Bearden turned to collage, these religious themes took on a distinctive African-American tone. You'll see this in the collages of 1964-65: The Burial, The Ritual, Baptism. Here dramatic impact is heightened by strong, close-up handling of eyes, hands, and other dramatic elements.
Bearden's African-American themes have several components. There is the image of rural blacks, as exemplified by the 1964 collage Cotton. Here, the distinctive images of women working the cotton fields are so carefully shaped that they convey a penetrating impression of the artist's compassion and deep concern for his subjects.
The urban black appears in various settings in Bearden's art. Among the most effective portrayals is The Street (1964), in which repeated images tie pedestrians and their expressions into multifaceted images. One senses the anger and sadness faced by minority groups, and the person viewing this work is challenged, forced to look inward at attitudes toward minorities.
Railroad trains assume a prominent role in Bearden's work. He knew them well, having worked one summer on a Canadian railroad, and he understood their importance in African-American life. The railroad train was a material element in the migration of blacks to the job-rich industrial North. Thousands of poor Southerners left their rural environment during the Depression, World War II, and the years that followed, particularly for Detroit and Chicago.
"The train was always something that could take you away and could also bring you to wherever you wanted to go," Bearden once said, when asked to explain why the train so often appeared in his art.
The image of the black woman, and in particular the woman of the African past, plays an important role in Bearden's oeuvre. Let's give her the same designation he gave her: "Conjur Woman." In its narrowest interpretation, she is the woman who prepares love potions, the reader of astronomical charts, soothsayer, and stargazer. But she is more than mystic. She is an energetic dancer, a fervent exponent of the family, matchmaker, and, of course, magician. Her erotic, life-giving character is explored in dozens of Bearden's Caribbean impressions. Some of these images can no doubt be traced to Bearden's wife. She was a talented dancer, and she and Bearden made frequent visits to the Dutch Caribbean island of San Maarten, where her family resided.
Bearden was the consummate jazz enthusiast. He actually composed jazz during the l950s, and in fact his Sea Breeze composition became a popular hit. Altogether, he is credited with more than twenty musical compositions, attesting to his stature in the field.
But Bearden's prime contributions to jazz were his collages of other musicians. What distinguishes these works from the run-of-the-mill interpretations by others, are the authentic color he brought to them. He did not paint the usual foggy, smoky atmosphere in which others depicted nightclubs. Instead, his colors vibrate and almost "literally transfer the sounds heard" to chromatic colors that live with the pulse and "joie de vivre" of 1960s and 1970s Harlem.
The classics revisited
Like his predecessors, Bearden avidly studied the work of classic artists and sometimes reinterpreted their work in his own media. Among the classic artists whose principal works Bearden interpreted for contemporary viewers are sixteenth-century artists Lucas Cranach and Agnolo Bronzino. In Bearden's Prelude to Troy, a 1969 collagraph on paper, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., he translates Cranach's Judgment of Paris, transposing the images and recasting them as African-Americans. Similarly, he restructured Bronzino's A Young Woman and Her Little Boy, creating his Mother and Child in watercolor, graphite, and ink on paper.
You can also see the influence of Bearden's contemporaries. For example, his collage with graphite Down Home, Also, pays homage to The Sleeping Peasant by Pablo Picasso. Another 1969 collage recreates the images of two women from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Among these experiments and revaluations the most successful, in my opinion, is a 1982 re-rendering of Paul Cezanne's Card Players (1890-1892). The original Cezanne work is at the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. The Bearden version repeats the major shapes, but strengthens the colors of the players, whose green-and-black composition heightens the impact and originality of the Bearden concept.
In a retelling of the story of Odysseus in his 1977 sequence, Bearden affirmed his identification with both the sea and with the story of the Trojan hero. The images vibrate with his vision of a black Odysseus in a world of green, blue, and red.
Bearden Techniques
Bearden began his artistic life with the graphic artist's usual equipment--chalk, crayon, and paper. With these basic tools, he sketched his cartoons and magazine covers, staying away, for many years, from color forms and idealized images.
Then, in the 1940s, he began working with gouache, a medium in which opaque watercolors are applied to paper, with ink and graphite frequently used, as well. One can sense the broadening of his visual vocabulary and the tactile values of his images in such presentations as The Visitation, The Family, and Presage.
But Bearden found his ideal medium with collage. Collage is the technique developed in large part by the French artist Georges Braques and the much-better-known Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso in the early twentieth century. Their cubist canvases were primarily done in collage. The technique allowed for the addition of newspaper photos, text, and other materials to paintings on canvas or wood.
Bearden refined this method by developing the collage in miniature, blowing it up to full size, reworking the shapes, and finally rendering it in finished form. Explaining his collage technique to art critics he said: "My method is more complex than simply pasting up images. I use various elements to form a figure or a background. I then see how the image or images meld and what has to be changed or refigured to arrive at a satisfactory presentation. Only then do I consider a work completed."
Even in advanced age, Romare Bearden kept working, almost until the very end of his life. In his last years, he took on an assistant, Andre Thibault, who had been an apprentice with Romare Bearden in earlier years and who is now a superb collagist in his own right. He lives in my New Jersey hometown. Thibault was responsible for helping Bearden develop a new technique that perfected the adhesion of the collage components, thus assuring permanence of the art. What was Bearden like to work with? Thibault recalls a firm but energetic artist who shunned no effort to further his art. He remembers a man who admired his peers, especially fellow African-American artists Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin.
His wife, Nanette Rohan Bearden, a prominent dance teacher and artist, established the Romare Howard Bearden Foundation in 1990. Its mission is to enable art students to pursue their careers by obtaining training in great institutions. Its other important objective is to further the fine arts through Bearden exhibitions. Upon her death in 1996, the Rohan family assumed the continuation of the foundation, which still flourishes, guaranteeing that Bearden's work will be enjoyed for generations to come.
Fred Stern has explored the creative efforts of artists and
writers worldwide. His work has appeared in European and
Asian
publications as well as on artnet.com. He writes a bimonthly
column on the arts for Commuter Week and is a frequent
contributor to The World and I. He has given courses
on
American writers and has taught poetry and creative writing
at
the Institute of New Dimensions. He has lectured widely on
these topics. A volume of his verses is scheduled for
appearance in 2006 under the title Corridors of Light.
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