Arts and Letters

Romare Bearden always gave you the appearance of being bigger, taller, and broader than he was. The warmth of his personality was conveyed so many times by his large generous smile. To me he represented a colleague and friend of unusual intelligence and aesthetic judgment. He had a broad range of interests: he wrote plays, composed songs, promoted the arts, played baseball.

Bearden was worldly beyond a doubt, and he knew every last nuance of the art world in which he moved, but he was never a member of a group or movement. He had no pretense. He would often appear at his openings wearing overalls, which marked his identity with the common folks in his paintings. His work and his life were one of a piece.

“I paint,” said Bearden in 1980, “out of the tradition of the blues, of call and recall, you start a theme and you call and recall.” Bearden may be best known for the way he expressed the sound of jazz in paint. Its blues, earthiness, gigs, satin scat, joy, playfulness, and sometimes triteness.

His blocks of white and black and color are painting symbols of the beat and tempo of jazz. He defined that American triumph better than anyone except the musicians who made it.

This sound of jazz was translated into a unique vision. He told stories—stories and memories of childhood, of his people in the rural South or Harlem. Stories of mythology black and white. “Let's never make the mistake,” he once said, “of believing that a real artist ever paints a picture. The true artist paints something.”

Bearden went beyond storytelling. His art, a rich blend of many cultures—black African, European, Middle Eastern, Byzantine, Hellenistic—gives his work a uniqueness in its breadth of vision, a sophistication that transcended his subject matter and his time.

The New York Times, in Bearden's March 13, 1988, obituary, described him as a painter who artistically manipulated pieces of photographs and colored paper to become the nation's foremost collagist.

But to be a foremost collagist in no way guarantees one's true stature as an artist. To appreciate his achievement, one must follow the development of his abstract phase, a phase that gave him an understanding of the language of painting.

It has always fascinated me that Bearden claimed (perhaps in a weak moment) he did abstract work because he had nothing to say. The paradox is that through his abstract explorations he formed the groundwork—the visual language—that characterizes his strength as a creative artist.

Bearden saw, in even the most purely abstract paintings, meaning and humanity. Forty years ago, he wrote in his journal that “Mondrian [equates] his use of horizontal and vertical lines with good and evil. These forces he feels must be brought to an [equilibrium].” He goes on to write: “Perhaps it is to Mondrian's credit that he was able to offer a modern equivalent for such a basic idea. For, after all, art has concerned itself with these simple basic emotions during the entire development of world culture, the differences of style developing from the varying perspectives in which artists in different eras surveyed these forces.”

But horizontal and vertical lines didn't give Bearden enough to express his vision. Bearden needed to be more directly and intimately involved with the world around him, the world as he saw it, or imagined it, not distanced from it, as abstraction would have distanced him. Two years later, just before he stopped keeping his journal (because, he said, he was spending all his time writing instead of painting), he wrote: “To come to the studio and start to paint just cubes and circles is in a sense to deny everything one has seen all day.”

It was his intelligence and understanding of abstraction that gave his collages a dynamic feeling and look. Each scrap of paper, piece of photograph, or brushstroke gave new energy to the passage next to it. So that the whole was greater than the sum total of its parts.

The years when he was wrestling with the issues of abstract painting prepared him and gave him the freedom and confidence, the visual voice to address his subject matter. Through this he could unite the formal elements of painting to the stories he felt compelled to tell.

“Each man makes his own tradition,” Bearden once said. “But first you have to understand life.” He refrained from joining any group, and he set his own tradition. “I wasn't an abstract expressionist or a pop artist,” he told an interviewer, and we can still hear him saying it. “I believe I had something unique to say about life that I knew best." He did, and he said it.