ART REVIEW : Romare Bearden: Sharing Senses of Life

When you look at Romare Bearden’s art you hear things: the lonesome whistle of a train clattering through a black ghetto on the outskirts, the sass of women above the bass of men. You hear the guttural of gut-bucket blues and mazes of jazz making itself up as it goes along.

When you look at Romare Bearden’s art you feel things: the satisfaction of being a young woman possessed of a luxurious body that is hers to stretch any which way she pleases. Bearden lets us know how a kid feels as he struts a Harlem street.

It’s possible to make a plausible argument that Bearden is the most important African-American artist of the 20th Century, but why do that? As Michael Jackson wants to know, who’s got time to spend their life being a color? Let’s just say that Bearden is an American artist of great significance, on a par with Stuart Davis and Ben Shahn as a distiller of a certain brand of indigenous spirit.

A retrospective of Bearden’s art called “Memory and Metaphor” just opened at UCLA’s Wight Art Galleries. At more than 100 works, it’s big. Organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, it’s on the third stop of a U.S. tour that will end up at the National Museum of American Art in Washington. You can tell it’s an important event without the credentials. Once you’re in the galleries its tough to walk away. Certainly among the most compelling half-dozen exhibitions of the year.

Bearden was born in Charlotte, N.C., in 1912. He grew up in Harlem, where his parents numbered among the local elite. His mother, Bessye, was a New York editor of the Chicago Defender and surrounded herself--and her son--with key players in the Harlem Renaissance: W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. Bearden had one of those enviable--and dangerous--childhoods surrounded by celebrities including Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. How does a kid live up to heroes like that?

The Depression hit. The Beardens weathered it. When the WPA rolled around to help indigent artists, Bearden was too well off to qualify. He went to the Art Students League and studied with George Grosz, the German refugee Dada master.

By the time World War II ended, Bearden was with the Kootz Gallery stable, along with Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. He seemed to live under a firmament studded with lucky stars, but he’d seen some bad stuff during the McCarthy era, such as the destruction of Robeson.

On one hand, he was a black kid from Harlem; on the other, an increasingly erudite humanist intellectual from a privileged caste. His painting from the ‘40s--attempts to fit in the mainstream--are mostly on biblical themes and more than just competent pastiches of Picasso’s “Girl With a Mirror.” In those days, everybody had to work through Picasso.

He did it by going into the lions’ den. In 1950, he started an 18-month stay in Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met important artists such as Georges Braque and James Baldwin. As a result of all these advantages, he dried up and could not paint for two years after his return. He did, however, marry Nanette Rohan and compose a hit song for Billy Eckstein, “Sea Breeze.”

As the ‘50s melted into the ‘60s, he made one more try at the mainstream. He would have been a good abstract artist. You can tell he understood his own sensibility in titles like “Snowy Morning” and “Silent Valley of Sunrise.” His abstractions are all about essences and atmospheres. They look a little thin at first, but they grow on you. Another title suggests he was going to need a kind of substance that abstraction couldn’t deliver. “Blue Is the Smoke of War, White the Bones of Men” is just not a non-objective theme.

As often happens, Bearden found his true vocation by accident in the early ‘60s when the civil-rights movement flourished. The artist experimented with collage based on his memories of African Americans in rural poverty and urban blight. He didn’t think much of them, but his dealer said, “This is your next show.” Thus Bearden’s style was launched when he was the tender age of 52. Luckily, he lived another quarter-century.

His method was simple enough. He’d snip photographs out of magazines, recombining features of several heads. Results have a woozy surreal look so that mandibles seem to grimace and chatter and eyes have the capacity to cast a hex. He’d add them to bodies that were sometimes photographic, sometimes scissored out of pattered paper like paper dolls, then add big hands that look like groping blind animals with minds of their own.

You can see Bearden’s artistic sophistication lurking in every image. The spirit of German Expressionism is behind “Jazz (Chicago) Grand Terrace,” Picasso’s shadow falls across the guitar in “Serenade” and Matisse nods approvingly at Bearden’s brown odalisques. But none of it reads like “influence,” it reads like borrowed art being brought back home.

Picasso couldn’t have painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” without the inspiration of African sculpture, so Bearden was just taking back what already belonged to him. The Germans adored jazz, and that was Bearden’s too. If Matisse chose to disport nudes and call the setting a “seraglio,” Bearden knew he meant “cat house.” A historian might choose to call his result “syncretic,” but in Harlem that means “funky.” Bearden translated artspeak back into argot with no loss of dignity, depth or wit.

Like any righteous artist, Bearden was a poet, not a polemicist, so there is a wonderful range of mood in the work. City scenes border on riot-edge chaos or blend into the sensual ease of “Madame’s White Bird.” Out in the grassy country there are couples who turn despair into endurance and women who can transform misery into magic.

In his final decade, Bearden dreamed of life as a carnival attended by a friendly guy in a skeleton suit. He envisioned paradise as a classic lyric realm where there is no particular reason that the Trojan warriors or the noble Paris shouldn’t have brown skin--or orange.