The great African-American artist Romare Bearden was born September 2nd, 1911, and died March 1988. In conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of his birth, there are some great exhibitions of his work opening. In New York City, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at 515 Lenox Avenue at 135th Street is paying tribute to Romare Bearden, who lived much of his life in Harlem near the museum. In "Romare Bearden: The Soul of Blackness/A Centennial Tribute" the Schomburg gives the public a great view of its extensive collection, along with pieces from Russell Goings collection. It includes the artist's first collage, and his last painting, as well as works like Black Manhattan (1969) and Jamming at the Savoy (1981). The show is up till January 7, 2012. See the handout for the exhibit. The Studio Museum in Harlem is also showing an interesting exhibit of The Spiral, a 1960s group of Black visual artists started by Bearden. The show includes work of Bearden’s and many other Black artists of the period, rarely seen today. The Spiral collective was formed in response to March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, and initially a forum for Black visual artists to discuss their contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. The artists involved, though part of the Western modernist tradition, had a wide variety of styles, media, and approaches to art. Spiral become a place to debate the relation of racial identity and aesthetic sensibilities; the role of the Black modern artist, and other questions of art and politics. The present exhibition continues to raise interesting questions. "Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective" is at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, through October 23rd. A little less further uptown,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art has brought out Bearden's 1971 masterpiece, The
Block, which it owns but is rarely on view. The monumental collage was produced on six separate Masonite
panels, displayed framed side by side at the Met, totaling 18 feet long (pictured below combined to one image). Made
from colored paper (some of it carefully abraded to suggest aging buildings) , metallic
paper, fabric, and collaged images from newspaper, magazines, and Photostats. Bits of drawing and painting (such as the
lines suggesting bricks) are used sparingly.
If you are closer to North Carolina, where Bearden was born, there is another Centennial exhibition there, looking at his works of life in the South, and how that background influenced his later work. "Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections," at the Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte NC, is a major exhibition containing about 100 works from throughout his art career. On Sunday, Sept. 4 at 3 p.m., the Mint Museum Uptown will offer the “Premiere: Romare Bearden’s Jazz Compositions,” featuring a rare performance of some of Bearden’s written jazz compositions. “Romare Bearden Works on Paper”
unveils some watercolors and prints from private area collections at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for
African-American Arts + Culture, College Street, Charlotte NC, in a triple exhibition opening on his
birthday along with “Romare Bearden: The Life,“ photographs of Bearden by Frank
Stewart; and “Beyond Bearden: Creative Responses,” more recent artists influenced and inspired by Bearden. Romare Bearden Centennial Celebration from Gantt Center on Vimeo.
I trust followers of this Basquiat site will see the excitement of these great opportunities to see Bearden’s work. Bearden and Basquiat were artists of very different sensibilities and styles, and of different generations. Yet there are parallels of themes, most obviously Jazz and street life, major themes for both artists. While Bearden’s major contribution to modern art was as a collagist, and Basquiat was known mostly as a painter, both incorporated collage elements with painting, and both used their media with a collage sensibility that made visual their borrowings from their surrounding culture. In doing so, both also experimented with the latest photomechanical reproduction techniques in their process (Photostats and Xerox). Bearden, like Basquiat, preferred modernist abstraction to social realism, but both artists nevertheless constantly referred to social realities in their work, especially the position of Black people -- often depicting elements of Black history with resonance to their time. Basquiat often said he did not want to be a “Black artist,” but to be a “great artist.” Bearden and Basquiat are of course among many examples that show how you can be both. In part of the 1980s both Bearden and Basquiat were active in New York at the same time, though they never met. The Haitian-American artist Lorraine O’Grady wrote that when she met Basquiat (through Keith Haring) he had never heard of “the black art world” (quite the opposite of Bearden). She was convinced that the (white) art world he was rising in was going to "eat him up." She thought the experience of Black artists from the 1960s “could give him perspective on its mores in a way his graffiti friends could not.” Stunned and thrilled with his art when first seeing it at the 1981 Annina Nosei group show, she noted that its thinnest aspect was the separation from such an audience which could have enabled and challenged him. (see O’Grady’s “A Day At The Races: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Black Art World.”) It is interesting to think what would a meeting between Basquiat and Bearden would have been like, and what the survival of a group like Spiral could have meant. |
