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“I do not burden myself with the need for complete abstraction or absolute formal purity but I do want my language to be strict and classical, in the manner of the great Benin heads, for example. In that sense, I feel my work is in the tradition of most of all the great exponents of flat painting. I have drawn on these styles, which I feel are timeless and historically durable, to control my images in pictorial space. . . . Without going too far beyond selected aspects of reality, I try to transform them, often as they are perceived conventionally, into an intense aesthetic statement.”(1)
Celebrated for his innovative collages that owe as much to “the Harlem where [he] grew up” as to “the Haarlem of the Dutch Masters,”(2) Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, the seat of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina to college-educated, middle-class parents who nurtured exposed him to art and culture from a young age. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem, where his parents' circle of friends included prominent musicians, artists, intellectuals, and poets. Living among luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance had a profound influence on Bearden, and the neighborhood became one of three locations central to his art, along with Mecklenburg County—where he would frequently visit relatives—and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his grandparents owned a boarding house. After high school, Bearden eventually made his way to New York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in education in 1935. In the fall of that year, he began a job as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Services, a position he held until 1969.
While working for Social Services, Bearden enrolled in night classes at the Art Students League, where he studied with German expressionist George Grosz. The social and political thrust of Grosz's artwork had an impact on Bearden's own choice of subject matter, but just as important was the fact that Grosz encouraged him to study the composition and draftsmanship of Dutch and other masterworks. Bearden developed a keen eye for formal structure and a passion for art history. Also around this time, he began working with Augusta Savage's Harlem Artists' Guild and frequenting the sessions and exhibitions held at Charles Alston's studio at 306 West 141st Street (known simply as “306”). In 1942, Bearden enlisted as a private in the US Army, serving in a segregated unit stationed in New York, which enabled him to continue to work and exhibit during the war.(3) In 1945, his work caught the attention of Samuel Kootz, who represented such key figures of American modernism as Adolf Gottlieb, Alexander Calder, and Robert Motherwell. Bearden joined the Kootz Gallery stable of artists and in 1947, had his first solo exhibition there.
In the 1950s, Bearden began experimenting with color in his work, divorcing it from figural representation, and applying it in “marks and patches.” Noticing that he tended to apply color in a way that fragmented his composition, Bearden looked again at the work of Vermeer and De Hooch, and “came to some understanding of the way these painters controlled their big shapes, even when elements of different size and scale were included within those large shapes.”(4) This “rectangular structure”—as he called it—became Bearden's foundational approach to composition. Soon after, Bearden moved away from painting and towards collage, a medium that encapsulated his belief that “art is made from other art” and enabled him to engage with the composition of a given work in a more physical manner. In a 1969 essay for Leonardo, Bearden explained his approach, pointing out his investment in maintaining a shallow space consistent with and influenced by the flatness of Byzantine painting and African design:
I first put down several rectangles of color, some of which, as in a Rembrandt drawing, are of the same proportion as the canvas. I next might paste a photograph, perhaps of a head, in the general area where I expect a head to be. The type of photograph does not matter, as it will be greatly altered. At this stage, I try only to establish the general layout of the composition. When that is accomplished . . . I try to move up and across the surface . . . avoiding deep diagonal thrusts . . . .(5)
In collage, Bearden sought to “redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience.” Cutting and pasting photographs, paper, fabric, newspaper, and magazines, Bearden added gouache, ink, pencil, oil, and spray paint to his kaleidoscopic surfaces, creating dazzling compositions that focused on themes as expansive as his own talent and artistic influences. He once explained, “In my work . . . I seek connections . . . . People in a baptism in a Virginia stream are linked to John the Baptist, to ancient purification rites, and to their African heritage,”(6) and collage—a medium based on connection—became both a metaphor for this idea and a means to achieve it. In Bearden's hands, the cut-and-pasted fragments of collage become fragments of life, culture, and memory. Focusing on jazz, blues, the slow-paced intimacy of rural life, the hectic pace and public nature of urban life, conjure women and other African traditions that survived the ruptures of slavery and diaspora, Bearden redefined the image of humanity not in terms of “the black experience,” but black experiences—rural and urban, African, American, and Caribbean.
Our featured work, Fish Fry (1967) exemplifies Bearden's mature style, which took up the challenge put forth by Ralph Ellison—a close friend of Bearden's—to forge a “new visual order.”(7) An energetic array of shapes and colors, Fish Fry demonstrates Bearden's interest in everyday life, his affection for southern black American culture, and his gift for blending compositional rigor with formal improvisation. As the title indicates, the collage portrays a fish fry, a social event rooted in black communities of the American South, dating back to slavery, and influenced by West African and Caribbean cooking. In the twentieth century, fish fries became a staple of working-class Southern life. Because they cost little to organize (given that the fish was locally caught by the fry participants), they became common fund-raising events, and they were also a staple of juke joint culture. Generally, a fish fry would occur on a Friday or Saturday night and be accompanied by music and dancing.(8) Here, Bearden's idea that art is made from other art is manifest not only in the cut-and-pasted collage elements, but also in the title's reference to blues: Saturday Night Fish Fry was a popular song released by jazz and blues musician Louis Jordan in 1949.
In addition to subject matter culled from life in Mecklenburg County, Fish Fry features several of Bearden's key stylistic tendencies, including his ability to see and forge connections across multiple art traditions. The collage's overall composition recalls the Dutch masterworks that had such a profound influence on the artist. Two strong vertical rectangles balance each other at either end of the work. The solidity of the right rectangle is broken by a window (comprised of four smaller rectangles), while Bearden hints at a deeper space past the left-hand rectangle by including a small hearth in the lower left corner. This reference to space beyond the flat back wall of a painting via repeating geometric forms is a common structural element in works by Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. Bearden maintains the flatness of the image even in his portrayal of the dinner table, which rises up to meet us, parallel rather than perpendicular to the picture plane. At the same time, a wine glass sits on the table in proper perspective to our position as viewers. These competing perspectives are designed to avoid conveying depth of space. Bearden foregrounds the two-dimensionality of art, remaining faithful to his conviction that “a quality of artificiality must be retained in a work of art, since after all, the reality of art is not to be confused with that of the outer world.”(9) Finally, it may be tempting to read the heads of the figures at the fish fry as influenced by Cubism, but they are actually more closely aligned with the way heads and faces are treated in many African Sculptures. Here, Bearden reminds us of the profound influence African art had on European modernism, even if that debt has been historically under-acknowledged.
An activist and an artist, Bearden spent his career challenging prevailing notions of what African American artists could and should do with art, notions that emphasized the social reality of black life at the expense of artistic form. Even today, there is still a tendency to focus on subject matter in paintings, sculptures, collages, photographs, film, and video work by black artists at the expense of formal innovation. Just as importantly, Bearden also built bridges between the various discrete categories of art history books and museums. European masterworks, African sculpture, Japanese prints, Chinese landscape paintings, Byzantine mosaics—Bearden used all of these to suit his needs, and in so doing, he revealed continuities and emphasized similarities. Bearden's investment in the artifice of art remains a refreshing challenge to contemporary viewers, who live in a world saturated by cravings for “reality”—on TV, in movies, in memoirs, and even in art. Always an educator, Bearden teaches us to think about the construction of images, to understand that artistic innovation resists categorization and defies expectation, and to let go of our desire for “realness” and revel in the energetic beauty of all kinds of art.
1. Romare Bearden, “Rectangular Structures in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo, v. 2 (1969), 14.
2. Bearden, quoted in The Art of Romare Bearden: A Resource for Teachers, 63.
3. “Timeline,” Romare Bearden Foundation, http://www.beardenfoundation.org/artlife/timeline/timeline.shtml
4. Bearden, “Rectangular Structures in My Montage Paintings,” 12.
5. Bearden, “Rectangular Structures in My Montage Paintings,” 14.
6. Bearden, quoted in The Art of Romare Bearden: A Resource for Teachers, 58.
7. “A Leader in the Arts Community,” The Art of Romare Bearden, National Gallery of Art, http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/bearden/lead1.shtm (Accessed March 2011).
8. Kim O'Donnell, “Let's Go to the Fish Fry,” A Mighty Appetite blog for the Washington Post.
9. Bearden, “Rectangular Structures in My Montage Paintings,”18.
