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The Art of Romare Bearden
Estate of Romare Bearden, courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation, New York.
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Romare Bearden (1911 - 1988) was one of America's great artistic innovators,
blazing his own trail in a time of turbulent cultural change. While
his work offers an invaluable view of mid-twentieth-century African-American
experience, it has also come to occupy a significant place in the wider history
of American art and speaks to the universal concerns of artists everywhere.
Born in North Carolina and coming of age in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance,
Bearden was surrounded from an early age by writers, musicians, artists,
and intellectuals who presided over an extraordinary period of creative ferment.
With keen artistic sensitivity, the insight of a philosopher, and the
courage of a pioneer, Bearden absorbed images and ideas that he later wove
into his colorful, complex, and imaginative art. His work is infused
with the sounds, intervals, and rhythms of jazz and the blues; the majesty
and mystery of popular religion and obscure ritual; echoes of European old
master painting and African art; and the atmosphere of the places he loved.
The Art of Romare Bearden curator Ruth Fine writes of the artist's
achievement: "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 did this by embracing themes and
practices from diverse times and places and imbuing them with a character
and physical presence that is distinctively his own. In the materiality
of his expansive expression, method and message become one."
The thirty works presented on the Jerry Jazz Musician on line exhibit --
published with the cooperation of the National Gallery of Art -- include many
selections from his half-century of work that reveal the experimental evolution
of his collages, but also examples of his paintings in oil and gouache;
watercolors and drawings; photographs, monotypes, and edition prints; designs
for record album covers, book illustrations, and the ballet; and the artist's
only known sculpture.
Bearden's probing curiosity and the depth of his humanistic concerns are
reflected in the subjects of his art, from quotidian experiences in the northern
and southern United States and the Caribbean, to classic biblical and literary
motifs. While reflecting the African-American community into which he was
born, the universality of Bearden's visual concerns offers a complex
world-overview, fraught with contradictions and problems yet filled with
hope and beauty.
- Earl A. Powell III, Director, National Gallery of Art
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| To Romare Bearden
Derek Walcott
How you have gotten it! It's all here, all right.
The lean, long black hand of the night
has swirled the cut throat of the cockerel
of daybreak, and the flecks of its blood splatter
the hills and the sacred ground
where the chalk-circles and the spiked diagrams
are drawin on the Loa's ground.
Dawn bleeds without a sound.
In all religions sacrifices matter,
but to these rituals we ascribe malign reasons,
and primitive dreams, but as was the lamb
to Isaac, the ram to Abraham, all tribes have laid
on the threshold of heaven, cocks, ewes, horned rams
to the force that has made the fountain of the blood
in which we are born, and the harvest of our mortal seasons,
for a shadow comes towards us all, with its clean blade.
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Excerpted from the exhibition catalogue The Art of Romare Bearden, © National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2003
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The Family, c. 1941
gouache with ink and graphite on brown paper, 74 x 104.8 cm (29 1/8
x 41 1/4)
Collection of Earle Hyman
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
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Untitled (He Is Arisen), 1945
watercolor and ink on paper, 30.5 x 22.9 cm (12 x 9); 45.7 x 40.6
cm (18 x 16)
Mr. Keith Lee and Dr. Lori Andochick
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
Now the Dove and the Leopard Wrestle, 1946
oil on canvas, 59.7 x 74.3 cm (23 1/2 x 29 1/4)
Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
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Evening, 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue, 1964
collage of various papers with paint, ink, and graphite on cardboard,
21.3 x 27.9 cm (8 3/8 x 11)
Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, North
Carolina
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
Train Whistle Blues: I, 1964
collage of various papers on cardboard, 35.6 x 27 cm (14 x 10
5/8)
Laura Grosch and Herb Jackson
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
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Pittsburgh Memory, 1964
collage of printed papers with graphite on cardboard, 21.6 x 29.9
cm (8 1/2 x 11 3/4)
Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New
York
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
City of Brass, c. 1965
photostat with paper collage and gouache on wood, 73 x 101.6 cm (28
3/4 x 40)
Collection Fanny Ellison
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
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Farm Couple, c. 1965
collage of various papers with paint, ink, and graphite on cardboard,
23.2 x 29.9 cm (9 1/8 x 11 3/4)
Anonymous lender
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
Three Folk Musicians, 1967
collage of various papers with paint and graphite on canvas, 127.3
x 152.4 cm (50 1/8 x 60)
Anonymous lender
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
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Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1967
collage of various papers with paint, ink, and graphite on fiberboard,
111.8 x 142.2 cm (44 x 56)
Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New
York
©Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, New
York |
The Art of Romare Bearden Exhibit
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Information about the traveling Art of Romare Bearden exhibit on the National Gallery of Art website.
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