Happy Birthday to a pioneer of African-American art, Romare Bearden:
I wrote about him back in May, 2011: http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/2011/05/romare-bearden-at-museum-of-african.html
From the NY Times, 1997: COLLAGE is the most important innovation in art of the 20th
century, and this can be said with confidence because there is nothing
parochial about the medium. It has attracted international artists and
has been adapted to all styles of two-dimensional work. Some artists, of
course, have used it only occasionally, but one master of collage who
relied on it was Romare Bearden (1912-1988).
Back in 1997, the Whitney Museum's branch in Stamford exhibited some of
Bearden's small collages, as precursors of a fascinating and
little-known development, a series of 28 black and white ''photomontage
projections'' that Bearden made in 1964.
The collages that are the seeds of the projections are compositions
of paper, photographs and paint put on boards measuring 8 1/2x11
inches. The imagery was then fixed with an emulsion applied with a
handroller. After drying, the collages were simply enlarged
photographically in black and white, and mounted on Masonite.
Because they are photographs they don't have edges or seams that
distinguish collage, but they retain its disparate quality. Some are big
enough to put a viewer in mind of murals; the dimensions of one are 4x6
feet. It's a simple process but has wide ramifications.
As many advertisers recognize nowadays, simple black and white can
have real punch and urgency. Viewers are not beguiled by tints and hues
so are likely to pay attention. Perhaps that's why Picasso painted
''Guernica'' without color.
Bearden's achievement was likewise born of a sense of immediacy,
and of electricity in the air. When he conceived his series, the civil
rights movement had just gained strong impetus from the civil rights
march on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the summer of
1963. In her essay for the show's catalogue, Gail Gelburd notes that the
event was seen flickering on countless black and white television sets.
The march inspired black intellectuals, writers and artists to form
a group called Spiral; Bearden was elected secretary. Spiral aimed to
recreate the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's, but the
members didn't want to be viewed merely as black artists. As Ms. Gelburd
writes, ''They sought acceptance within the mainstream while paying
respect to their heritage.''
This mandate was well-suited to Bearden. His biography recites a
dizzying list of accomplishments. For instance, while in college at
Boston University he played baseball in the Negro League and then earned
a degree in mathematics from New York University.
He began his art career as a political cartoonist while also being
employed as a social worker. After serving in the Army during World War
II, he studied philosophy in Paris on the G.I. Bill. He returned to the
United States in the early 1950's and after a brief career as a writer
of popular songs he turned to painting in the Abstract Expressionist
mode.
Many things displayed in the photomontage projections might be
accounted for in this list: Bearden had an intense interest in people,
including the teeming masses, and the works at the Whitney are chock
full of humanity.
His Abstract Expressionist period, from 1954 through 1962, no doubt
fixed in him the predilection to mix things up, to make bumptious
compositions and to alter scale to his own expressive purposes. At the
same time, Bearden's understanding of mathematics might have played some
part in the preciseness, the just-right quality, that underlies the
visual welter of a given work.
Influenced and inspired by these experiences and occupations, not
to mention friendships with many cultural giants including Duke
Ellington, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Bearden could enter
sentimental territory and not get caught in it.
Two projections in which he recalls his origins --''Mysteries,''
set in North Carolina, and ''Pittsburgh Memories,'' the city where he
spent his boyhood -- are distinguished by extreme close-ups of faces
that carry the drama. The faceting, the geometric break-up of the faces
of the two boys who confront the viewer in ''Pittsburgh Memories,'' is
inspired by African masks and what is described as primitive art in
general.
Bearden incorporates such references with great sophistication and a
range of meaning. The visual jumble of each of the protagonists' faces
is much like extreme scarring, and reflects a rough and dangerous
growing up.
Perhaps the key to what Bearden accomplished in the projections is
that, while they can allude to folk art, and familiar allusions can draw
a viewer into a work, they are not folk art. Bearden's friend, the
writer Albert Murray, says tantalizingly in an interview in the
catalogue: ''Bearden's very special awareness of the ritualistic
dimension of stylization saved him from genre, from just being
provincial.'' ''When you turn the raw experience into a style, the style
becomes the statement.''
If viewers accept that style is the key, they can appreciate its
varieties: the rhythmic angles, for example, that dominate ''Spring
Street'' and bring Analytical Cubism and Stuart Davis to mind, versus
the seeming chaos of ''The Dove,'' in which the bird, once found, is the
composition's calm center.
The photomontage projections may have been a brief chapter in
Bearden's career, but they led to the large-scale collages that he made
for the rest of his life and for which he is becoming widely recognized.
William Zimmer, 1996, NY Times
