Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism
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Experience vs. Theory: Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism Matthew S. Witkovsky Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 23, No. 2, Fiction Issue. (Summer, 1989), pp. 257-282. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0148-6179%28198922%2923%3A2%3C257%3AEVTRBA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T Black American Literature Forum is currently published by St. Louis University. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/slu.html. 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Witkovsky From his discharge at the end of World War I1 until his participation in the Civil-Rights-oriented art group known as Spiral in 1962-63, Romare Bearden was very much involved with the foremost American art movement of that time, Abstract Expressionism. For three years after the war, Bearden exhibited with soon-to-be celebrated Abstract Expressionists such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, David Hare, and others at Sam Kootz's gallery, and his work evolved, both then and afterward, along lines which reflect these and other contemporary artists' formal concerns throughout the late '40s and the '50s. Still, after 1950, Bearden's work was exhibited almost exclusively with that of other black artists, rather than that of the movement's established proponents. After converging ever more visibly with Abstract Expressionism's repertoire of aesthetic and philosophical concerns during the 1950s' Bearden seemed suddenly to reject his work of the previous decade, both in medium and content, and to concentrate on the work in collage that has since brought him lasting recognition. In fact, however, Bearden's collages and photostats of the mid-1 960s onwards bear fundamental resemblances to his abstract and semi-abstract works of the previous years; more importantly, they reveal an attitude towards Abstract Expressionism which has great relevance to the movement's methods and aims. In choosing to base his images on scenes rooted in his own experience, Bearden does not repudiate the need-greatly stressed by the Abstract Expressionists-to convey messages of universal, timeless, and - - A native of Brooklyn, New York, Matthew S. Witkovsky is a graduate student in art history at Yale University. Black American Literature Forum,Volume 23, Number 2 (Summer 1989) @ 1989 Indiana State University 258 Matthew S. Witkovsky hence mythic importance; rather, he claims that universal emotions and actions may be most effectively captured via local, historically specific scenes. Bearden's evolution parallels that of the core of Abstract Expressionist painters. Beginning around 1938, he studied at the Art Students' League under German political artist George Grosz. Although he never joined the Federal Arts Project, as did several subsequent Abstract Expressionists, he painted within the formal parameters of American Regionalism and Social Realism prevalent during the Depression. In addition, he spent a great deal of time with Harlem artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, and Ernest Critchlow, who were heavily involved with the Project, its aims, and methods. Although he agreed with many Project artists that art should be "an instrument of social change" ("Rectangular Structure" 1l), Bearden early on expressed an interest in formal concerns in art which transcended the specifics of his time and place and of his position as a black artist. In a 1934 article, Bearden made known his opposition to the efforts of institutional patrons of black art,such as the Harmon Foundation, to limit blacks to depicting their "ethnic richness" in order to convince white viewers of their cultural integrity. Black artists of the day, he felt, were "at best hackneyed and uninspired." "They have looked at nothing with their own eyes. they have evolved nothing original or native like the spiritual, or jazz music" ("The Negro Artist" 371). Bearden praised contemporary art movements for substituting "for mere photographic realism a search for inner truths" and called upon blacks to portray these truths in their own art. He did not, however, demand that any artist sacrifice representational art in order to probe themes of universal importance; after all, he wrote, "Rembrandt painted the ordinary Dutch people about him, but he presented their emotions in such a way that their appeal was universal" (372). Despite his debatable assessment of Rembrandt, Bearden raised some very important points with this essay. Wanting to expand his freedom as a black artist, he established a potential link between his art, or that of any black person, and one of the most renowned artists of the Western tradition. He saw no reason that an artist of color should not have as much claim to universality as a white artist. Bearden's emphasis on "real-life" source material-the "ordinary people" he saw in Rembrandt's paintings-nevertheless qualified this highly modernist drive toward universal significance in a way which greatly affected his relation to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism 259 During his studies at the Art Students' League, Bearden read avidly and, from 1936 onwards, received a great deal of exposure to European art-in addition to the training Grosz provided-from the writer Claude McKay and fellow painter Carl Holty (Hatch interview). Before he was drafted in 1942, he had begun to take a serious look at twentieth-century artists like Picasso and Cezanne, even though he did not employ what he called their "space idealsn1-their revolutionary rearrangement of forms in relation to the picture plane-in his own painting. In his studio on 125th Street, surrounded by members of the Harlem Arts Guild and other uptown cultural movements, Bearden thus pursued interests rather similar to those in which the Abstract Expressionists engaged downtown. Upon his return from military reserve duty in 1945, Bearden was asked to show at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in New York, and it was here he enjoyed his first broad recognition. He had had exhibits since 1941, including two while he was stationed in the army,2but the group and one-man shows Kootz gave him represented a huge improvement in his status. In addition to his higher visibility, Bearden now shared wall space with several artists who, during the later '40s, were beginning to attract some attention in the art press- principally, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and David Hare. Later, Hans Hofmann's and Arshile Gorky's works were exhibited at Kootz (Gorky's posthumously), and Pablo Picasso became a celebrated addition to the gallery with a show in 1941, followed by a permanent contract after Kootz reorganized in the '50s. Bearden's inclusion in this gallery, which might seem fortuitous or unexpected in retrospect, made perfect sense at the time, because his formal concerns and subject matter coincided with his fellow artists' in a way that could only add to the gallery's thematic unity. Bearden started his tenure at Kootz with a series of watercolors and oils, collectively entitled "The Passion of Christ," based on the Biblical books of Mark and Matthew. Kootz placed it second in his 1945-46 season, installing it in October, and it received praise from a number of New York critics. Edward Alden Jewell, a somewhat forward-looking reviewer for the New York Times, praised Bearden's "develop[ment] from social interpretation of the depression days, Negro subjects, illustrations and genre painting to its present level of semi-abstraction" (Holt 6). Bearden, according to this analysis, had advanced from a supposedly "debilitating" focus on Regionalist and "ethnic" concerns to a stylistic approach which participated in the post-war aims of avant- garde American art. 260 Matthew S. Witkovsky In an artist's statement prefacing the show's catalog, Bearden expressed a few of the concerns characteristic of the embryonic Abstract Expressionist circle, most specifically the need to depict myths in an attempt to convey universal human values and reactions. "This myth," he wrote, referring to Christ's life, death, and resurrection, "is . perhaps the greatest expression of man's humanism." Because of Christ's influence on man's "humanistic" spirit, Bearden maintained, Christ's actual existence is unimportant: "What is important, is that the idea [of him] has lived in men." Christ's stature as a mythic concept