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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478000587 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2019 |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
PUTTING SOMETHING OVER SOMETHING ELSE
Calvin Tomkins
For the opening of a memorable Romare Bearden show at the Cordier & Ekstrom gallery in February 1975, Arne Ekstrom engaged Danny Moore's five-man jazz group and a fine blues singer, Denise Rogers, whose resonant, earthy voice delighted the predominantly but by no means exclusively black opening-night crowd. The show was called "Of the Blues," and the pictures all sang in tune: "Carolina Shout," "Storyville," "New Orleans Farewell," "At the Savoy," "Kansas City 4/4," and fifteen other collage paintings, richer in color than any of Bearden's previous work, more luminous, more complex. The series did not illustrate the blues or chart the history of the blues or anything like that; each painting had come out of Bearden's memory and experience.
Growing up in Harlem in the twenties, Bearden lived and breathed the music and came to know most of the great performers. Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton were his early masters (to be joined later on by Duccio, Vermeer, Delacroix, and Mondrian). Ekstrom had urged him to paint the blues series, and the two men agreed that it had been a fine idea. During a break between sets by the musicians, Bearden answered a friend's question about the paintings. "One of the things I did was listen to a lot of music," he explained. "I'd take a sheet of paper and just make lines while I listened to records — a kind of shorthand to pick up the rhythm and the intervals." When Bearden was starting to paint seriously, in the thirties, he got a lot of help and encouragement from Stuart Davis. Bearden would go downtown to see Davis, who lived in Greenwich Village, and would usually find him listening to Earl Hines records. Once, he asked Davis why he liked Hines so much, and Davis said, "For his wonderful sense of intervals." Hines made the pauses between notes into something important; the silences were as expressive as the sounds. In Bearden's painting, the separations between colors, or between different values of a color, are expressive in this way. Like Hines, Bearden is a virtuoso of the interval.
A heavyset man of sixty-three, with features that look more Russian than anything else, Romare (he pronounces it "Rome-ery") Bearden has the unusual ability to appear at all times both perfectly composed and entirely spontaneous. He is so light-skinned that most people meeting him for the first time assume he is white. At this particular juncture, we seem to be stuck with the term "black," however, and Bearden is generally referred to as America's leading black painter. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, and other museums. The Modern gave him a retrospective exhibition in 1971; the show subsequently went on tour, and ended up in the Studio Museum in Harlem, around the corner from Bearden's old West 125th Street studio. He has been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters — the hallmark of acceptance by the cultural establishment — and he is a member of the board of the New York State Council on the Arts. His work is much in demand these days — a recent series of brilliant collage paintings on the theme of Homer's Odyssey, which he showed at Cordier & Ekstrom last spring, was so successful, aesthetically and otherwise, that he has already redone the series in watercolor — and while he and his wife, Nanette, continue to live very simply, in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Canal Street, they have built a vacation house and studio on some property owned by Nanette's family on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
Most of Bearden's friends agree that he is painting better than ever. "His work has a kind of warmth and satisfaction that's new," according to Harry Henderson, a writer and editor with whom Bearden collaborated on Six Black Masters of American Art, a book for young readers. "His new paintings lack the harshness of some of the earlier ones; they seem to glow. It's something that's come out of Romie — his proud feeling about what black people have achieved."
PITTSBURGH
Three boys, aged ten to twelve, are shooting marbles in the back yard of a boarding house in Pittsburgh, in the neighborhood known as Lawrenceville, one day in 1926. A strange kid with braces on both legs appears out of nowhere and stands watching them. "What the hell you looking at?" says Bearden's friend Dennis. Dennis is a pretty rough kid. The newcomer doesn't reply, just stands there, and after a while Dennis gets up and belts him one. Then Dennis and Bearden's cousin Charlie and Bearden all start beating on the stranger — who still doesn't say anything, or even cry — until Bearden's grandmother happens to look out the window and comes out wielding a broom. She picks up the strange kid and carries him into the house. His name is Eugene. "And then he got to be our friend," Bearden says, telling the story many years later. "He'd had infantile paralysis, and he couldn't run with us — he couldn't even eat very fast — but he was always around the house."
Although Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his father's family came from, his parents lived in Harlem, and Harlem is where he grew up. He used to visit his Charlotte relatives in the summer, and later he began spending summers in Pittsburgh, with his mother's mother. She lived near the steel mills and took in boarders, as many as twenty at a time. This was the period of the first great black migration from the rural South to the Northern industrial cities. Bearden remembers his grandmother's rubbing new boarders at night with cocoa butter. "They didn't realize, when they first started, the terrific heat from those furnaces," he says. "They'd strip to the waist, and when the furnace doors opened, the flames would lick out like evil tongues and scorch them. But they were making forty to fifty dollars a week, which was a tremendous wage in comparison with what they'd been getting. I loved it there. I found it fascinating looking at the mills. For a while, I spent my summers in Pittsburgh, and then, after my first year of high school, in Manhattan, I decided I preferred living in Pittsburgh, so I went to school there."
Bearden was twelve the summer he met Eugene. Nobody knew anything about Eugene at first — where he lived or who his parents were. One day, he showed Bearden some drawings he had done, on sheets of brown paper. Bearden was enthralled. "He'd done one drawing of a house of prostitution not far from where we lived, run by a woman named Sadie. We always liked to go there and try to sell newspapers, because the music was so interesting — that kind of rolling piano. Eugene had drawn Sadie's house with the façade cut off, so you could see in all the rooms. And somebody had shot off a pistol, and the bullet was going all through the house. Women were on top of men, and the bullet was going through them, into the next room and the next, until it came down through the ceiling into the front parlor, and Sadie had her pocketbook open, and the bullet had turned into coins and was dropping into her pocketbook. I said to Eugene, 'You did this? Can you teach me to do it?' He said, 'Sure.' So I started taking drawing lessons from Eugene.
"My grandmother set up a table in my room, and Eugene and I would go and draw every day. All his drawings were about what happened in Sadie's house, and I was just trying religiously to copy what he did. After a week or so, my grandmother came around wanting to see what he had done. She took one look, and she grabbed all those drawings and threw them into the furnace. She said, 'Eugene, where did you ever see anything like that?' Eugene said, 'My mother is a whore. She works over at Sadie's place.' My grandmother told him, 'Eugene, don't you go home tonight.' My grandmother finished making dinner for everybody, and then she got a big suitcase and all three of us went to Sadie's, and she knocked on the door. The music was going, and Sadie came to the door, and as soon as she saw my grandmother she knew what had happened. 'I didn't want this boy here,' she said. My grandmother said, 'I'm not coming in, but you let Eugene go up and get his clothes, because I'm taking him home to live with me.' So Eugene and I went up to where she lived, which was way up on the top floor; you could look down through the cracks in the floor into the room below. We brought Eugene back to live with us. His mother would come every Sunday to visit him. They'd sit in the front room, where there was an old German clock that had written on it 'Every Hour Wounds. The Last One Kills.' How I hated to look at that! Eugene never did any more drawings after he left Sadie's house. He died about a year later, and we went to his funeral. But I always thought that with his drawings he could have been another Lautrec. That was the first time I ever thought about drawing — and then for years I forgot about it."
HARLEM
Bessye J. Bearden did not approve of her son's wanting to become an artist. This was the Depression, and people were starving. Bessye J. was an activist, a tremendously energetic and public-spirited woman — New York editor of the Chicago Defender, the widely read Negro weekly; chairman of her local school board (after having been the first woman appointed to a school board in New York City); national treasurer of the Council of Negro Women; a member of the executive board of the New York Urban League. She had dealt in real estate, and in 1935 she was appointed Deputy Collector for the Third New York Internal Revenue District. She was a political force in Harlem, having been the manager of several congressional campaigns, an organizer of the National Council of Negro Women, and the founder and first president of the Negro Women's Democratic Association — someone you came to see when you wanted to cut through red tape and get action. Everyone in Harlem knew Bessye J., and Bessye J. knew everyone: Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary Bethune, councilmen and judges, editors and mayors, not to mention all the musicians and singers and actors who played at Connie's Inn or the Lafayette Theatre, half a block from the Beardens' apartment, which was on the third floor at 154 West 131st Street. (From a front window you could see the Tree of Hope, the famous old elm at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 131st Street, where out-of-work actors used to gather and talk.) Duke Ellington was a friend of the family, and bought an oil from Bearden's first formal exhibition. Fats Waller and his lyricist, Andy Razaf, and Razaf's wife, the singer Minta Cato, used to drop in regularly. Bearden remembers his mother as someone who was constantly in movement and among people. "Once, I came into the house and found her crying," he recalls. "I asked if she was sick. She said, 'No I'm just by myself.' She had to be with people all the time." His father, Howard Bearden, worked for the New York City Department of Health as a sanitation inspector. He was an intelligent, sensitive man, and a drinker; he was very much in Bessye J.'s shadow.
Bessye Bearden had helped any number of young people get started in their careers — the actor Canada Lee, for one — and she and Howard felt that Romare, their only child, should stick to his original plan, which had been to become a doctor. After two years at Boston University, he transferred to New York University, where he majored in mathematics, with the idea of going on to medical school, but while he was at NYU he started drawing for the college humor magazine. He met E. Simms Campbell, the highly successful black cartoonist, who gave him advice and encouragement; he began contributing a weekly political cartoon to the nationally circulated Afro-American. Bearden was also being urged at this period to become a professional baseball player. He had been Boston University's star varsity pitcher, and for two summers while he was in college there he pitched for the Boston Tigers, a Negro team that often played exhibition games with semi-pro clubs. Bearden was told that if he wanted to "pass" he could easily play in the majors (this was before Jackie Robinson broke the color line), but he had no inclination to do that. His inclination, more and more, was to continue drawing.
It was the Depression, curiously, that gave many Negroes the chance to be artists. In 1935, Bearden went to a meeting of Harlem artists at the YMCA on 135th Street. He was amazed to find forty or fifty there — he had been told that there were very few Negro artists. This was the beginning of the Harlem Artists Guild, headed first by the painter and muralist Aaron Douglas and then by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Bearden himself was ineligible for the Works Progress Administration art program, because of his family's income, but the knowledge that other Negroes were devoting themselves seriously to painting and sculpture made a strong impression on him. "I found that the WPA, even at the worst time of the Depression, gave artists a salary and materials to work with," Bearden says. "It gave minority artists what they could never have afforded otherwise." In 1936, a year after he graduated from NYU with a bachelor's degree in science, he enrolled in the Art Students League, to study with the German expatriate George Grosz. Grosz's corrosive line drawings and watercolors of German society "made me realize the artistic possibilities of American Negro subject matter," Bearden once wrote. At first, he was still thinking mainly in terms of political cartooning, but Grosz changed his mind about that. It was Grosz, he said, who "led me to study composition, through the analysis of Bruegel and the great Dutch masters, and who in the process of refining my draftsmanship initiated me into the magic world of Ingres, Dürer, Holbein, and Poussin."
A year and a half at the League constituted Bearden's only formal training in art. In 1938, he took a job with the New York City Department of Welfare as a caseworker. He continued to live with his parents but as soon as he could manage it he rented a studio at 33 West 125th Street, which was then on the edge of Harlem; across Fifth Avenue, the neighborhood was all white. Jacob Lawrence, another young painter, had the studio on the floor beneath, and soon afterward the poet Claude McKay moved into the building. "Things were still very lively in Harlem then," Bearden recalls. "So much of the life in those days was lived out in the open, on the street. People were still coming in from the South, and you still had the house-rent parties — somebody would need to raise money to pay the rent, so they'd throw a party, pass out little cards on the street, and you'd come and pay a quarter for admission, and there would be plenty to eat and drink and usually some good music, and that way you got to meet all sorts of people."
The Harlem artists were a close-knit group in the late thirties. They met regularly at "306"— 306 West 141st Street, where Charles Alston and the sculptor Henry Bannarn lived, sharing a big studio that for a short time also doubled as a WPA-sponsored art school. Alston, an accomplished painter, who was related to Bearden by marriage, kept open house for all the creative talents of the day. "There was always a hot discussion going on at 306," according to Alston. "Langston Hughes would drop by, and Claude McKay, and sometimes William Saroyan and Bill Steig or Carl Van Vechten, from downtown. Musicians, too — Andy Razaf, and Sammy Stewart, and John Hammond, the jazz musicologist, and lots of others." When Bannarn moved out, Alston shared the place for a while with Ad Bates, who was a dancer with the Doris Humphrey/Charles Weidman troupe, and who also worked as an artists' model at the Art Students League. Bates organized several art exhibitions at 306, including Bearden's first one-man show in 1940 (mostly student work); later, he introduced Bearden to a number of white artists downtown, including Stuart Davis and Walter Quirt.
"There was a great interchange of people coming up to Harlem from all over," Bearden recalls. "You got to know all kinds of people — actors, musicians, underworld characters, intellectuals, society types. I met García Lorca once at a party. There was always a lot of movement from place to place, and it was so easy to know people." In those days, the center of Harlem was Seventh Avenue and 135th Street. Negroes had started to move to 135th Street about 1902. W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Augusta Savage, and other prominent people lived on 135th, although the really fashionable blocks were 138th and 139th between Seventh and Eighth, streets of handsome town houses, several of which were designed about the turn of the century by Stanford White for wealthy clients, and inhabited since the twenties by well-to-do black doctors, lawyers, and entertainers; they were known locally as Strivers' Row. The famous nightclubs were all within a few blocks of 135th and Seventh. Negro customers were not allowed in the Cotton Club or Connie's Inn (once a year, the Cotton Club revue would play at the Lafayette, so the Harlemites could see it), but Charles Buchanan, the manager of the Savoy Ballroom, used to let the Harlem artists in free to dance there, and Bearden and his friends went several times a week.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Romare Bearden Reader"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix "Pressing on Life Until It Gave Back Something in Kinship": An Introductory Essay / Robert G. O'Meally 1 Part I. Life and Times Putting Something over Something Else / Calvin Tomkins 31 Interview with Romare Bearden / Henri Ghent 54 Part II. Writings The Negro Artist and Modern Art / Romare Bearden 87 The Negro Artist's Dilemma / Romare Bearden 91 The Journal of Romare Bearden: 1947 to 1949 / Romare Bearden 99 Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings / Romare Bearden 121 The Twenties and the Black Renaissance / Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson 133 The 1930s: An Art Reminiscence / Romare Bearden 156 Humility / Romare Bearden 162 Encounters with African Art / Romare Bearden 164 Part III. Reflections on a Layered Legacy Bearden: Black Life on Its Own Terms / August Wilson 175 Abrupt Stops and an Unexpected Liquidity: The Aesthetics of Romare Bearden / Toni Morrison 178 The Genius of Romare Bearden / Elizabeth Alexander 185 The Art of Romare Bearden / Ralph Ellison 196 Bearden / Ralph Ellison 204 Between the Shadow and the Act / John Edgar Wideman 209 Romare Bearden: African American Modernism at Mid-Century / Kobena Mercer 217 Bearden Plays Bearden / Albert Murray 236 The Political Bearden / Brent Hayes Edwards 256 Circe in Black: Homer, Toni Morrison, Romare Bearden / Farah Jasmine Griffin 270 Conjure and Collapse in the Art of Romare Bearden / Rachael Delue 281 Changing, Conjuring Reality / Richard Powell 296 Romare Bearden's Li'l Dan the Drummer Boy: Coloring a Story of the Civil War / Robert Burns Stepto 307 Impressions and Improvisations: A Look at the Prints of Romare Bearden / Mary Lee Corlett 315 Bearden's Caribbean Dimension / Sally Price and Richard Price 351 Sheer Mastery: Romare Bearden's Final Year / Myron Schwartzman 363 Romare Bearden, an Idelible Imprint / David C. Driskell 379 Selected References 389 Index 393What People are Saying About This
“The Romare Bearden Reader is for all those—both in and outside the academy—who continue to be enchanted by Bearden's art and are eager to see and learn more about the work of this tremendous artist. This volume is the definitive Bearden anthology.”
“Robert G. O'Meally has curated an astonishing array of commentary on the work of one of the twentieth century's most innovative artists, the inimitable Romare Bearden. Whereas Bearden's status as one of the African American tradition's greatest artists has long been secure, this collection is indicative of a welcome surge in interest among scholars, critics, and biographers in Bearden's life, works, and place in the canon. O'Meally has done us a great service in assembling some of the most thoughtful reflections on the work of one of the geniuses of modernism.”