An Artist’s Life is Hard Enough : A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS: From 1792 to the Present, <i> By Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson (Pantheon: $65; 608 pp.)</i>

“A History of African Artists: From 1792 to the Present” is a landmark work both in the fields of art history and of African-American studies. As the authors, artist Romare Bearden and writer Harry Henderson, note, previous art history texts have at the most covered only one or two African-American artists. And to judge from some art history texts, the authors marvel, “the first African-American has yet to pick up the brush.”

This voluminous effort proves this is hardly the case. The earliest known work by an African-American dates back to 1792, and African-American artists have been producing steadily ever since. Over 50 artists are explored in this book, which makes it, for the beginning student of African-American art, an excellent primer. For those more familiar with the works, opening this heavily illustrated book is like reminiscing with old friends.

Included here are well known but always exciting works such as Archibald Motley’s vibrantly colored “The Blues” (1929), painted while Motley was in Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship, which captures the sophistication and the hoopla of the Harlem Renaissance and black night life. Lesser known gems such as Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture “Target Practice” (1970), a haunting figure of black man’s face framed by a bulls-eye, are both startling and engaging.

The book benefits greatly from the fact that one of the co-authors, Romare Bearden, was an African-American artist of phenomenal stature--with works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshorn Museum and the Whitney Museum. Bearden died in 1988, having completed the basic draft of this book, which his friend and co-writer Harry Henderson then finished. It becomes clear to the reader early on that Bearden is more than just an academic, dizzy on theory; nor does he assume the pose of the critic, cool and distanced. His is forthrightly the voice of an artist, greatly concerned with the lives and the struggles of other artists, particularly when those lives were complicated by issues of race.

The book was actually conceived in 1965 when the Museum of Modern Art asked Bearden to talk to a group of students about the history and development of black artists in America. Frustrated with the lack of information available outside of his immediate peer group, Bearden set out, along with Henderson, to collect material. The history they compiled over the next 15 years would not only corroborate the oral history of arts among African-Americans, but also unearth new discoveries. There is an archeological-adventure feeling about the book that makes it not only easy to read, but hard to put down.

Consider, for example, the story of Henry Ossawa Tanner, a young African-American art student who gained admission in 1880 to the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. As Tanner’s reputation within the school grew, so did the racist resentment of his classmates. When called “nigger,” Tanner asserted that he was a “painter too”--but even this was considered cocky and out of bounds. One evening, his fellow students dragged Tanner out into the street, tied him to his easel in a mock crucifixion and left him there, struggling to untie himself. Tanner went on to receive critical acclaim in Europe as well as major exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Other artists had an easier time of it. Nova Scotia-born Edward M. Bannister studied portraiture at Boston’s Lowell Institute and was warmly embraced by such artists as Dr. William Rimmer, William Morris Hunt and others. Later, after moving to Providence, R.I., he became well known for his landscapes and bay scenes. The Providence Art Club was founded in Bannister’s studio, and the discussions that began there led to the establishment of the Rhode Island School of Design.

While many texts of American art history, African-American or otherwise, tend to neglect women artists of all races, this history does not. There is plenty here about such pioneering African-American women artists as Augusta Savage, Alma Thomas and Elizabeth Catlett.

The question of self-exile pops up again and again throughout this work. Like Tanner, many African-American artists found that they had first to travel to Europe and other points abroad before gaining acceptance and recognition in their native land. Some artists such as W.H. Johnson eventually returned home; others, like Elizabeth Catlett, who has lived in Mexico since the 1950s, have never returned to the United States and have become important figures in their adopted lands.

Not that the grass was always greener on foreign soil. In 1923, sculptor Augusta Savage sought and almost gained admission to a summer art school in Fountainbleu outside of Paris. One hundred young American women were to be selected by a prestigious committee of American artists and architects. Savage, who knew that she was more than qualified, was rejected--as she later learned, because the committee felt that her presence would be “difficult” for the Southern girls to take. Although it took her six years, Savage did eventually make it to Paris, enrolling in 1929 at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, a leading art school. The next year, Savage won citations in both the fall and the spring Salons, and the French Colonial Exposition selected one of her works for medallion reproduction.

The struggles and triumphs recounted in this book make it so much more than the average art-history text. It is inspiring as well as informational and should prove of great interest also to non-artists--even to those who get itchy after 15 minutes in a museum. Bearden and Henderson have managed to do what so few artists and writers are able to do: They have made paintings, sculptures and prints come alive.