ROlllare Bearden at 100 by David Yezzi

Little enough is certain about the painter Not surprising for an artist who employed Romare Bearden (I9II-88) that even the vibrant and evocative narrative elements in pronunciation of his name remains unclear. his paintings and collages, Bearden loved In taped interviews, Bearden pronounced it stories. Like a character from one of August RO-mer-ee, while his intimates simply called Wilson's plays (which his paintings helped him Romy.l Oddly, today Ro-MARE is what to inspire), he loved telling them-recount­ one hears most often, and even longtime ing them with relish, ebulliently. Bearden's friends have largely adopted this pronuncia­ particular brand of pictorial storytelling, the tion. (There are also discrepancies in the titles distinctive Cubist narrative style he devel­ of a number of his works, which appear one oped in his paintings and collages, is unique way here, another there.) Now a couple of in American art; it's also uniquely American. centenary events afford an opportunity to And though the story of his paintings ends know Bearden and his work a little better. A in Harlem - by way of Pittsburgh, North first-rate show of his signature collages, cur­ Carolina, and even Saint Martin in the Ca­ rently on view at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery ribbean- it begins way back with the ancient in New York, reveals the fme-grained nature Greeks and as far distant as Wang Wei's Chi­ of his art-the rubbed and scratched surfaces na and Manet's Paris. As his friend the pho­ and brilliant, aqueous hues not captured by tographer Frank Stewart said of Bearden's reproductions.2 The second is the publication wide knowledge of the history of painting, ofRomare Bearden: AmericanMndernist, a col­ "he knew from caveman on up." lection of fourteen essays originally given as Here's one of the stories that Bearden liked lectures in conjunction with the career retro­ to tell: It's 1950, and Bearden, then in his late spective "The Art of Romare Bearden," orga­ thirties, traveled to Paris on the GI Bill, os­ nized by the National Gallery ofArt in 200,.3 tensibly to study philosophy at the Sorbonne (which must have been tricky given his lim­ I An earlier version of this essay was given as a talk ited command of French). In fact, he had at the New York Studio School ofDrawing, Painting gone as a painter, with some early acclaim and and Sculpture in New York on November IO, 20IO. a few gallery shows already to his name. He 2 "Romare Bearden: Collage, A Centennial Celebra­ took with him letters of introduction from tion" opened at Michael Rosenfrld Gallery, New his dealer, the legendary Samuel Kootz, to York, on March 26 and remains on view through Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Brancusi (with May 2I, 20II. whom he later shopped for groceries). While 3 Romare Bearden: AmericanModernist, edited by Ruth he made no paintings during his time in Paris, Fine and Jacquelin Francis; The National Gallery of his passionate immersion into the life of the Art, 296 pages, $70. city had a lasting effect in his work.

22 The New Criterion May 20n Romare Bearden at roo by David Yezzi

According to one interview Bearden gave, Bearden carried his inheritance from Eu­ his first meeting with Matisse did not go as ropean painting and collage back with him he had hoped; Bearden made something of to the States (though in truth he'd pos­ a well-intentioned, and in retrospect rath­ sessed it for years) and made ofit something er hilarious, faux pas. Having understood personal and distinctly American-Cub­ from a friend that Matisse loved chocolate, ist in style, but infused with stories of the Bearden bought some as a gift from the rural South, and synched with the teeming Army PX (he had served Stateside during life of New York City and the rhythms of the war). When he gave the chocolate to jazz. Bearden devised within the Cubist Matisse, the great man's reaction was decid­ idiom a new narrative potential, teeming edly cool-Matisse apparently did not care with incident and surprise. His figures do for American chocolate (who could blame not easily settle down into a single story; him?) . "Awful stuff," Matisse had said, and rather, through scraps of assemblage and a the interview never recovered. revolutionary use of color, they radiate, as This is how Bearden told it, and the story through a prism, a multitude of anecdotal is rather too good to check. In a profile of details and emotional resonances. Bearden's Bearden for The New Yorker in 1977, Calvin unique vision and innovative use of collage Tompkins reported that Bearden never met was not arrived at easily or quickly; it was Matisse, though "he and his friends used to the product of years of grappling with the see him from time to time." The last sight­ art of painting and with his own personal ing made a deep impression on Bearden. It and aesthetic past. was the sort of thing that could only hap­ pen in Montparnasse. Bearden was sitting Bearden elucidates the tension in art be­ outside the D6me Cafe, when Matisse, who tween precedence and innovation in much must have been in his eighties, came walking the same terms that T. S. Eliot described in by, propped on the arm of a younger man, his famous essay "Tradition and the Individ­ and accompanied by two women, possibly ual Talent." Tradition or "handing down," artist's models. Someone in the cafe said for Eliot, was not a matter of"following the something to the effect that the maestro was ways ofthe immediate generation before us passing by, and the waiters spontaneously in a blind or timid adherence to its success." began to applaud. This, he warned, should be vehemently dis­ When Matisse was told that this applause couraged. What Eliot advocates, and what was for him, he came over and shook every­ Bearden comprehended so fully, is the his­ one's hands. Bearden prized this story for the torical sense required to create vital new sense it gave of being in a place where artists works of art-that is, for anyone (as Eliot meant so much to people: "It wasn't Maurice puts it) "beyond his twenty-fifth year," any­ Chevalier or Brigitte Bardot," Bearden later one who would outlive the brash enthusiasm marveled. "It was a man who changed the ofyouth to make a life in the arts. The histor­ way that people saw life." ical sense, Eliot explains (mutatis mutandis, The episode became something of a substituting painting for writing): foundational story for Bearden and his art. Bearden emerged out of an American involves a perception, not only ofthe pastness modernist tradition based in New York of the past, but of its presence; the historical but which had looked to Paris for inspira­ sense compels a man to write not merely with tion. "Whoever you need for help is who his own generation in his bones, but with the you like," Bearden said, and his passion for feeling that the whole literature of Europe Matisse and Picasso, for Cezanne and Jean from Homer and within it the whole ofthe lit­ Helion (to say nothing of Rembrandt and eramre of his own country has a simultaneous the Old Masters) would prove both forma­ existence and composes a simultaneous order. tive and sustaining. . .. [I]t is at the same time what makes a writer

The New CriterionMay 20ll 23 Romare Bearden at 100 by David Yezzi

most acutely conscious of his place in time, of As Hilton Kramer has noted, Bearden his own contemporaneity. makes use of forms that "derive originally from Mrican art, then passed into modern This last point is crucial. Only byacknowl­ art by way ofCubism, and are now being em­ edging the presence of the past can one fully ployed to evoke a mode ofAfrican-American understand the uniqueness of the present experience." Bearden was serious about his moment. inheritance and about what he bequeathed. Bearden clearly knew Eliot's essay. A small As one percipient reviewer put it, Bearden chapter from his book The Painter's Mind: "is not playing games. With a gentle sympa­ A Study ofthe Relations ofStructure and Space thy, he explores his culture and our culture in Painting, co-authored with his friend and with the delicate sensuality of a good physi­ mentor the artist Carl Holty, is titled "Struc­ cian feeling for broken bones." ture and the Individual Talent." Init, Bearden Always keenly aware of his lack of formal and Holty argue that "the supreme interpre­ training, Bearden worked hard to make up tation of [the artist's] pictorial structure lies for it. He continued to copy from reproduc­ in a change in his character and vision to a tions for over three years, looking back to oneness with all the means of his medium, The Annunciation of Duccio and from there and with art itself." A realized structure, he forward to the shifting planes of Cezanne. continues, "unites such complexities as a Bearden worried that the problem with art sense ofthe past, as well as the total response schools-and certainly with what artists' of the painter to his craft, to himself and to training had become by the 1980s-was the life about him." that they no longer taught technique; they This was patently the case for Bearden, teach success, he jibed. In other words, stu­ whose only formal training was a short stint at dents come out of school versed in the style The Art Students League in the mid 1930S with of the moment. They know how to make, the expatriate Expressionist painter George say, an Ab Ex painting, or a Pop Art paint­ Grosz. Bearden taught himself to draw by ing, or a conceptual piece, but lack the ba­ copying Old Master paintings, which he had sic tools, such as draftsmanship, that would a photo shop mechanically enlarge from re­ allow them to leave their own mark on the productions. He painstakingly copied the form, to arrive at something new out of the dmvings of Rembrandt and the canvasses of ashes of the old. Vermeer, to which he added his own colors, Bearden's historical sense included Clas­ feeling deeply the conviction that "the art of sical and modernist literature as well. He the world belongs to everyone." greatly admired the rhythms ofJames Joyce, comparing them to jazz. He made paint­ IfBearden is not as widely touted today as ings inspired by the seventeenth-century his Pop and Ab Ex contemporaries, it may poet Andrew Marvell, by the Bible and the be the fault of his conviction, independent Apocrypha, and by Homer's Iliad. He drew from fashion and mindful of tradition, that inspiration from Rabelais, Hemingway, the best art was marked by both divine play Faulkner, and Valery. In the late 1970S, he and an abiding seriousness. Bearden chose produced one of his masterworks: a series to return to the figure after Rothko and of collages based on Homer's Odyssey, that Co. had jettisoned it, and, while artists after brings together classical legend with Matisse­ Warhol succumbed increasingly to the siren inflected cutouts and an Mro-Caribbean pal­ song of irony and kitsch, Bearden found in ate, conflating history and geography, much the continuity of cultures and artistic tradi­ in the way the poet Derek Walcott does with tions an affecting beauty and a love ofpaint. Achilles on the island of Saint Lucia in his Bearden was fundamentally a late modern­ epic Omeros. ist, extending the lessons of Cubism into By the I970S, Bearden was widely ac­ new realms. knowledged as a major artist. He was the

24- The New Criterion May 20II Romare Bearden at lOO by David Yezzi subject of a one-man show at the Museum and sculptural elements they introduced into of Modem Art in 1971 and, later in that de­ what became known as synthetic cubism. As cade, the long Tompkins proflie in The New Greenberg puts it (and it is worth quoting Yorker. His fame only increased after his him at some length on this point): death from bone cancer, in 1988. In 2004, he was the first black painter to receive a ret­ In later collages of both masters, a variety of rospective at the National Gallery in Wash­ extraneous materials are used, sometimes in ington. But it hadn't always been that way: the same work, and almost always in conjunc­ by 1950, the year Bearden went to Paris, he'd tion with every other eye-deceiving and eye­ been dropped by his dealer Samuel Kootz, undeceiving device they can think of. The area and by 1953 he had retreated from paint­ adjacent to one edge ofa piece ofaffixed mate­ ing into songwriting (he wrote the popular rial-or simply of a painted-in form-will be "Seabreeze" used in ads by the Seagrams shaded to pry that edge away from the surface, company). His good friends Hannah Arendt while something will be drawn, painted or even and her husband, the poet Heinrich Blucher, pasted over another part of the same shape to warned him that he was ruining himself by drive it back into depth. Planes defmed as par­ not painting, and it turned out they were allel to the surface also cut through it into real right. In 1956, Bearden suffered a nervous space, and a depth is suggested optically which breakdown and woke up in Bellevue Hospi­ is greater than that established pictorially. All tal not knowing where he was. this expands the oscillation between surface After Bearden renewed his commitment and depth so as to encompass fictive space in to painting in the late 1950S, he seems not front of the surface as well as behind it. Flat­ to have doubted it again. In 1959, the gallery ness may now monopolize everything, but it is owners Arne Ekstrom and Michael War­ a flatness become so ambiguous and expanded ren visited his studio and expressed interest as to turn into illusion itself-at least an optical in showing his new work. (The gallery that ifnot, properly speaking, a pictorial illusion. later became known as Cordier & Ekstrom represented Bearden for the rest of his life.) In his collage The Piano Lesson from 1983 Bearden's initial exhibitions with Ekstrom (named after Matisse), Bearden returns, were of non-representational paintings, but as in so many of his pictures to childhood by the mid 1960s he produced-off-hand­ memories, to rituals of the parlor recast in edly, almost by accident-his first series of Cubist pictorial space. In a conversation collages, which became known as Projec­ with his biographer Myron Schwartzman in tions. The dynamic that Bearden introduced the mid 1980s, Bearden discussed The Piano into the art of collage in these small works Lesson in much the same terms as Greenberg (which were then photographically enlarged) described the work of Picasso and Braque. became his signature. The art of collage, so Bearden talks ofthe interplay between depth close to painting in his hands, engaged him and flatness and how he "tipped" his picture for the rest ofhis life. so that piano at the center lies on a diagonal, suggesting volume. Bearden then uses both The central tensions of Cubism captivated line and color to "bring things back on the Bearden throughout his career. As enunci­ frontal plane ... so that the things are more ated by the critic Clement Greenberg, they or less flat." are the tensions between flatness and depth, Matisse employed a similar technique between the suggesting of illusion and the in his Piano Lesson of 1916, which Bearden dashing of illusion in such a way as to create clearly had in mind when he was working both energy and formal poise. These were out his own picture. Matisse's compositional the very tensions that had occupied Picasso rhythms are lyrical and classically poised. As and Braque, as they moved from their earlier in the Bearden, it is the piano and the table discoveries in analytic cubism to the collage (as well as a chair) that break the flat plane of

The New Criterion May 20n 25 Romare Bearden at 100 by David Yezzi

the canvas, while most everything else works names, while at the same time dignifying his to return the eye to the flat horizontals and ver­ beloved Caribbean with a classical high voice. ticals. By contrast, the diagonals in the back­ ground lead the eye forward and behind-it's Bearden's narratives, at once Homeric and as if the pyramidal metronome on the piano modern, intimate and universal, create an is first writ large then repeated (sometimes eternal present on the canvas (or Masonite upside-down) over the entire canvas. board). His fractured views and teeming in­ The same in the Bearden: the piano leads terior spaces employ narrative elements that us forward and back, while the columnar are often vestigial and suggestive-a face in a passages of blue and orange reassert the window, a floating battery ofeyes and hands, two-dimensionality of the work. As in the composite faces staring out through exterior Matisse, the many strong verticals are rhyth­ walls, a rooster, a brilliant sun. Yet somehow mically interspersed with pyramidal shapes Bearden's stories are more active and replete picked up from and echoing the angles ofthe dramatically, more universal, less composi­ metronome-the women's skirts, the space tionally final, than the more straightforward between the billowed curtains, the acute an­ social narratives of his colleague Jacob Law­ gles ofthe lime green throw mg. rence. Bearden's scenes gain power-and poetry-for being less detennined. A rural Bearden's compositional guideposts were fumily scene will echo, for example, a Dutch not only modernist and Cubist; he also interior or Manet's picnic on the grass. looked continually to the Old Masters for Bearden's assembled faces and victorious­ ideas and solutions. As the critic and painter ly humane compositions invite us in, while Mario Naves reminds us, during Bearden's eye-popping colors and elaborately layered briefstint at the Art Student's League, his ad­ figures lead us back toward the plastic and miration for Breughel was so intense that fel­ pure form - a delicate balance, as Greenberg low students nicknamed him Pete. Bearden says of the Cubists, between eye-deceiving said that he wanted "to paint the life of my and eye-undeceiving elements. The enlarged people as I know it ... as Breughel painted head of a child begins to tell one story, then the life ofthe Flemish people ofhis day." bared teeth taken from another face lead us Bearden's particular aesthetic vocabulary to entertain a different possibility, even as is an example in the visual arts of what the an African mask introduces its own set of writer Pico Iyer has called "tropical classi­ associations, rituals, and anecdotes. A gi­ cal." Iyer suggests that what distinguishes ant hand, expressive of a mother's outsized such artists as Derek Walcott in poetry, Mi­ powers ofnurture, lends a documentary feel, chael Ondaatje in fiction, and Richard Ro­ while scraps ofclothing and string return us driguez in the essay fonn is: to the synthetic quality of the work and to the presence ofthe artist's hand. the ability to season high classical forms with Rhythm provides a key to Bearden's work. a lyrical beauty drawn from the streets and His tour de force, The Block, a series of six beeches of their homes. To learn from the tra­ panels depicting scenes of Lenox Avenue in dition of Homer and Augustine, respectively, Harlem, takes its life from the energetic in­ and yet to enliven and elevate those dusty terplay of colored rectangles and the curves forms with the rhythms ofSt. Lucia, the colors introduced by cut-paper figures, lampposts, ofSri Lanka, the love songs ofthe Latin South. architectural ornament, letters, clouds. A . . . Rather than simply rejecting the worlds procession of yellow disks, for example, re­ into which they were born (or exalting them curs throughout the work, appearing first as for there own sake), they try to fmd ways of a halo, then as either a sun or moon glimpsed having it both ways-of, in Walcott's terms, above the rooftops and though a bedroom invigorating the classical forms he learned in window, then in a scene on TV, and finally school with his own West Indian words and as the light atop a barber pole.

26 The New Criterion May 20II Romare Bearden at 100 by David Yezzi

Suns and moons appear regularly in on Saint Martin. Bearden observed that "in Bearden's pictures, frequently populating the Caribbean, it's like a volcano there; there's the same sky. This simultaneity suggests an something underneath that still smolders. aspect of Bearden's "prismatic" narrative People still beliePe. When you stop believing technique and its special representation of in the gods, they pack their bags and go some­ time-not only between eras, from Clas­ place else! ... So Zeus and Poseidon and all sical to contemporary - but even between the rest of them take off." Bearden kept the different times of day within the same pic­ spirits close. His watercolors, painted at his ture. The Block II also clearly depicts a large summer house in Saint Martin (where he moon on the right and a sun viewed through lacked the space to paint in oil), render spec­ a window on the left-these different inci­ tral ftgures in saturated, umbered colors. A dents and times ofday presented together. If haunting series of ghoulish large-scale water­ Cubism considered multiple points of view, colors, painted when he knew he was dying­ Bearden's narratives render multiple points both uncanny and carnivalesque-are infused in time, much the way medieval religious with visionary forboding. painting might chronicle separate events of a saint's life in a single painting. In The Block, The exhibition currently at Michael Rosenfeld the yellow o's are alternately suns and moons: Gallery is not to be missed. A number of the daylight shining on street corners, while, in collages are rarely shown, including the inti­ a window, lovers embrace by night. Bearden mate Untitled (The Family) (1969). One is re­ shows us the block from different angles and minded ofthe ways in which Bearden engaged at different hours simultaneously. The piece with the art of his contemporaries, while de­ embodies a balance ofClassical, almost scien­ cidedly following his own course. The spindly tific, coolness that nevertheless links different figures ofIllusionists at 4 PM (1967) recall the scenes together with warmth and generosity. surrealist ftguration in early Rothko, while the Bearden's Sunset andMoon Rise withM.audeli allover feel ofKing and Qjfcen ofDiammuls (aka Sleet (1978) includes the sun and the moon on MysteriRs) (1964-), newspaper and magazine cut­ opposite horiwns (as actually happens during outs on cardboard, suggests his own earlier ab­ the full moon). Sun and moon appear together stractions as well as those ofAb Ex itse]£ again in Gmjure Woman, a collage of totems The essays in the National Gallery's new col­ and folk magic suggestive ofBearden's abiding lection are a treasure trove ofinformation and (and one might argue modernist) fascination insight. The best ofthem avoid the easy politi­ with the occult. IfMondrian and Kandinsky cizing of Bearden's art, recognizing, in Darby tended toward Theosophy, Bearden's connec­ English's words, that ''where work is being tion to the supernatural was though the Obe­ taken seriously as art, the formal trumps the ah women ofthe Caribbean (where his wife's social every time." Bearden would have agreed. £unily was from) and the visionary women, While clearly committed-though his involve­ called conjure women, he encountered as a ment with Cinque Gallery and the Studio Mu­ boy in Pittsburgh and North Carolina. seum in Harlem-to supporting black artists, For more than ftfteen years, Bearden made Bearden saw his work as universal, as continu­ ends meet by working for the Welfare De­ ing the conversation begun by the Old Masters partment in New York. His job for much of in Holland and by the modern masters in the the time was to keep track ofthe gypsy popu­ ateliers ofParis. His vision for blacks in Amer­ lation - where they settled, their difficulties ica situated them in the cabins ofMecklenburg and needs. He saw a great deal of extreme County, North Carolina, in the bordellos of poverty-further affirmation for him that Pittsburgh, and on the sidewalks of Harlem, cultural separatism is, as Tompkins recounts, but connected them to modern Europe and "self-defeating." Ancient Greece and beyond. It is a modernist Bearden found echos between the occult lesson that he first made his own, then made practices of the gypsies and those still alive American, then imparted to everyone.

The New Criterion.May 20II 27