Romare Bearden

by

Jacqueline Francis

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 November 2020
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0090

Introduction

Romare Bearden (b. 1911–d. 1988) is an artist best known for his inventive collage methods, evident in his production from the mid-1950s to the time of his death. Influenced by synthetic cubism, fauvism, and German expressionism, Bearden created intimate collages of cut-out magazine and book images—figures and forms of everyday life and of canonical art from around the world as well. The collages served as the basis of other projects in which Bearden photographed, photocopied, and enlarged them to produce matte, black-and-white prints. Bearden also made unique mixed media work, bringing together a variety of papers and materials and reworking the bas-relief surfaces additively with paint, ink, and graphite and subtractively by abrading them. His mature production included watercolor drawings, oil monoprints, sculpture, limited edition prints (etchings, lithographs, and serigraphs), fabric and textile work, and commissioned public murals and stage design as well. A student of George Grosz during the 1930s, Bearden started out as a social realist painter who admired Mexican muralism of the period that heroicized the poor and working classes and satirized the rich and powerful. Early in his career, Bearden was a political cartoonist and illustrator for student publications at Boston University and New York University as well as for African American newspapers and magazines. In search of universal themes, Bearden, in an expressionist mode, interpreted ancient Greek myths, biblical narratives, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems during the 1940s, a decade during which he enjoyed some success. His work was included in the annuals of major museums and in African American art surveys, and it was the subject of monographic exhibitions organized by galleries in New York and Washington, DC, even during World War II when he served in the US Army. The Museum of Modern Art and Bryn Mawr College acquired his paintings. When support for Bearden’s art dwindled, he traveled in Europe for several months, and, once back in the United States, he returned to his job as a New York City social worker. He also took up songwriting, penning lyrics for jazzy tunes and romantic ballads that won popular acclaim. Encouraged by friends, among them Hannah Arendt and Henrich Blucher, Bearden returned to visual art making in the mid-1950s. He made abstract paintings and Dada-influenced collages. The latter mostly featured people of African descent as totemic forms and as dramatis personae in diverse narrative traditions. The iconic figures of his compositions included working-class African Americans whom he knew from spending summers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his grandmother, Harlem’s Big Band leaders, and black healers, conjurers, and musicians from the rural US South and from the Caribbean island of St. Martin. An artist, curator, writer, and community organizer, Bearden often worked collaboratively: he co-wrote books on art theory and art history and he co-founded artists’ groups and art exhibitions spaces. A humanist and anti-racist activist, Bearden was a vocal advocate for the arts, for African Americans, and for greater opportunities for artists of all races and backgrounds.

Monographs and Biographies

Many catalogues published to accompany Bearden exhibitions include biographical information on the artist’s life, cultural history of his times, chronologies, and germane bibliographies. Still, two biographies of Bearden, published after his passing, are distinctive because their authors knew Bearden, and they interviewed the artist and those close to him. Bearden effectively collaborated with both of these writers. Campbell, a graduate student in art history during the 1970s, began corresponding with Bearden, for he was the subject of her MA thesis and PhD dissertation, both of which inform Campbell 2018. In preparation for Schwartzman 1990, the author met weekly with the artist to collect material. Price and Price 2006, written by two American anthropologists who study the colonial history, folklore, and maroon societies of the Caribbean, examines Bearden’s life on St. Martin, his wife’s ancestral home and a locale the couple visited regularly for the last twenty years of his life. Corlett 2009 (cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications) gives necessary attention to Bearden’s printmaking.

• Campbell, Mary Schmidt. An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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  An art historian who positions Bearden as an Odysseus-like traveler who journeyed through the artistic movements—social realism, cubist-influence figural abstraction, abstract expressionism—and then returned “home” to representationalism—however fragmented and abstract—of resonant black cultures, environments, and people.

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• Price, Sally, and Richard Price. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

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  The authors argue that the light and color of the island’s flora and fauna and the dynamism of regional religious and cultural traditions, such as obeah and carnival, deeply affected the artist, bringing new energy to the entirety of his oeuvre. This text was simultaneously published with a French version: Sally Price and Richard Price, Romare Bearden: Une dimension caribéenne (La Roque-d’Anthéron, France: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2006).

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• Schwartzman, Myron. Romare Bearden: His Life and Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990.

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  A professor of English at the City University of New York when he met Bearden in 1978, Schwartzman had long been interested in African American literature and culture. This lavishly illustrated publication is an account of Bearden’s life and offers readings of his works.

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Monographic Exhibition Publications

Since the 1940s, Bearden’s work has been regularly featured in African American survey exhibition catalogues and brochures. There are more than eighty solo exhibition catalogues fully dedicated to Bearden’s oeuvre. For this exhibition history, see the bibliographies in Campbell and Patton 1991; Fine, et al. 2003; and Campbell 2018 (cited under Monographs and Biographies) for comprehensive lists. This section focuses on the monographic exhibition catalogues that reliably include checklists, reproductions in color and black and white, chronologies and timelines, and bibliographies. National Book Award winner Ralph Ellison’s contribution to Art Gallery 1968 is a formalist interpretation of his friend’s modernism. Greene, et al. 1971 is a landscape-oriented, twenty-four-page booklet, an in-house project of the host institution, which had never organized a solo exhibition for an African American artist. Washington 1972 offers lush color plates and an epistolary-like essay by the author to Bearden. Melberg and Bloch 1980 is the product of a museum in the artist’s birthplace of Charlotte, North Carolina, a major city in the historically segregated South seeking to embrace and celebrate an African American son. Bearden 1986 is tied an exhibition, at the center of which was a newly commissioned mosaic mural by the artist. Put together by the artist’s gallery, ACA Galleries 1989 accompanied the first exhibition after the artist’s death. In title, Powell, et al. 2006 marries a historical, spiritual practice of the African diaspora to Bearden’s collages, situating them within a vernacular tradition. The title of Gelburd and Golden 1997 refers to the photojournalism of the 1960s, especially that focused on the US Civil Rights movement, in which Bearden was invested. Campbell and Patton 1991 and Washington 1972 are the most informative exhibition catalogues. The Bearden Project is an indication of Bearden’s lofty status in the histories of African American art and visual culture, in which his collage art and lifelong activism are equally valued.

• ACA Galleries. Romare Bearden, 1911–1988: A Memorial Exhibition. New York: ACA Galleries, 1989.

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  Collage-like presentation of artist’s works, writings by and about him, obituaries and tributes, and documentary photos. Foreword by Mary Schmidt Campbell.

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• Art Gallery. Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections. Albany: State University of New York, 1968.

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  Introductory essay by Ralph Ellison demands attention to the experimentation of Bearden’s art, an ingenious strategy of cuts, breaks, and juxtapositions that reflects the rhythms of African American culture, which, despite historical silences about it, is central to the national American narrative.

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• Bearden, Romare. Romare Bearden: Origins and Progressions. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986.

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  Catalogue features excerpts from the artist’s journals in 1947 and 1949, years when the artist was reading The Journals of Eugène Delacroix. Essay by art historian Lowery S. Sims that relates Bearden’s oeuvre to the trajectories of European modernism, and, as in Campbell 2018 (cited under Monographs and Biographies), likens the artist’s style and search for appropriate subject matter to an Odyssean journey.

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• Campbell, Mary Schmidt, and Sharon F. Patton. Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940–1987. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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  Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Studio Museum in Harlem and in five other cities. Biography and cultural history overview by Mary Schmidt Campbell argues that Bearden’s work of 1964 and afterward addressed racial identity in a manner that his earlier production did not. In the main essay, curator Sharon F. Patton describes Bearden as a formalist who found inspiration in global art histories.

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• Corlett, Mary Lee. From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2009.

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  Corlett chronicles the relation between Bearden’s notes prints and their collage sources and his work with New York City master printers, such as Robert Blackburn and Joseph Kleineman, and with those at Philadelphia’s Brandywine Workshop. Book also includes interviews with Bearden Foundation administrators and artists who worked with Bearden in the last decades of his career.

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• Fine, Ruth, Mary Lee Corlett, Sarah Kennel, et al. The Art of Romare Bearden. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003.

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  Indispensable resource anchored by curator Ruth Fine’s overview essay with its explanation of the intricacies of Bearden’s techniques and identification of the many materials and formats in which he worked. Contributors explore the artist’s training, professional activities, ambitions, and reception to his work. Dutifully detailed exhibition history, bibliography, and chronology offer accurate information, such as the correct year of the artist’s birth, which had been frequently misreported.

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• Fitzpatrick, Tracy, and Lowery Sims. Romare Bearden: Abstraction. Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2017.

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  Essay by Tracy Fitzpatrick on Bearden’s nonobjective watercolors, oil paintings, and mixed media collages during the 1950s and early 1960s, a middle period linking his work in social realist and expressionist modes and the ultimate shift to the signature, figurally abstract production.

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• Gelburd, Gail, and Thelma Golden. Romare Bearden in Black-and-White: Photomontage Projections, 1964. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997.

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  Includes essays by curators Gail Gelburd and Thelma Golden on the pivotal year of Bearden’s career, republished poems by Bearden, and a transcript of Gelburd’s interview with novelist and cultural critic Albert Murray.

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• Greene, Carroll, Jr., Judy Golden, and April Kingsley. Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

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  Features acknowledgments from the artist and an essay by art historian Carroll Greene Jr., who cites the canonical European sources in Bearden’s oeuvre, which he locates in the 20th-century modernist tradition. Useful bibliography by Judy Goldman and chronology by art historian April Kingsley offer exhibition history, reviews and scholarly writing, and previously undocumented milestones in the artist’s career.

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• Melberg, Jerald L., and Milton J. Bloch, eds. Romare Bearden, 1970–1980: An Exhibition. Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum, 1980.

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  Curator Jerald L. Melberg’s introduction argues that the artist’s vision came to full fruition in this ten-year period. Art critic Dore Ashton and novelist and cultural critic Albert Murray each invoke music in the essays they contribute, tying expressive sound to both Bearden’s collage style and one of his frequently explored subjects.

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• O’Meally, Robert G. Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. New York: DC Moore Gallery, 2007.

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  Essay by Robert G. O’Meally invoking the artist’s interest in Greek mythology and lifetime travel in the United States, the Caribbean, and western Europe.

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• O’Meally, Robert G., Stephanie Mayer Heydt, Rachel Z. DeLue, and Paul Devlin “Something over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2019.

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  Exhibition catalogue of the Profile series, Part 1 (1979) and Part 2 (1981), a collaborative project produced by Bearden and his longtime friend, novelist and critic Albert Murray. Bearden and Murray composed captions—reflective and poetic text—to accompany Bearden’s images. As literary and visual representations, the Profile series offers a collage-like journal of the artist’s life. Introductory essay by Ruth Fine.

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• Powell, Richard J., Margaret Ellen DiGiulio, Alicia Garcia, Victoria Trout, and Christine Wang. Conjuring Bearden. Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2006.

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  Accompanies exhibition that presents Bearden as a conjurer of images, one especially interested in the powerful conjure figure, ubiquitous in vernacular African American and African diasporic cultures. Essays by art historian Richard J. Powell and four of his Duke University students advance this idea, examining Bearden’s genre portraits and landscapes, based on the artist’s renderings of the Caribbean, the Louisiana Bayou, his hometown of Harlem, New York, and his Charlotte, North Carolina, birthplace.

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• The Bearden Project. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2012.

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  Accompaniment to exhibition marking the centenary of the artist’s birth. Elegantly designed volume includes reproductions of the works of one hundred contemporary black artists, invited to make a work in homage to Bearden on the centennial anniversary of his birth. Text includes statements from each artist and description of the participants’ responses by exhibition curator Lauren Haynes. Preface by Diedra Harris-Kelley, the artist’s niece and co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation.

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• Washington, M. Bunch. The Art of Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972.

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  An oversize, coffee-table art book featuring color plates. Brief personal essay by Washington, a Philadelphia-based artist and poet who expresses his appreciation of Bearden’s work and its import to his own creative trajectory. Foreword by novelist and journalist John A. Williams, a longtime friend of the artist.

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General Audience

Before the dawn of multicultural publishing in the United States in the late 1970s, basic information about Bearden’s work and other African American artists was difficult for nonspecialists and others outside of the art world and academia to find. Bearden and Henderson 1972 constitutes an effort to introduce historical and contemporary black artists to an interested public. Dover 1960 and Fax 1971 recognize Bearden’s achievements and explain them in an accessible language. These publications that appeared during the early years and the midpoint period of the artist’s career are markers of his status in the discrete category of “black art,” a designation with which he struggled. Tomkins 1977 [cited under Profiles in Art Magazines, Journals of Culture, and the News]—an expansive profile article in the New Yorker—is, arguably, the best press that the artist received during his lifetime. Sims 1993 demonstrates increasing interest in African American culture and different strategies of presenting celebratory narratives about it to the public, which includes people of African descent who are eager to learn about black achievements in history. Francis 2019 contributes to a Museum of Modern Art publication focused on the institution’s holdings of works representing black people and/or produced by black artists In Alexander 2007, a poet and literary scholar relates Bearden’s work to European modernism and its African sources as well as to the African American quilt tradition. Marsalis 2003, Stewart 2004, and Breen 2016 are among the dozens of get-to-know the artist projects oriented toward the general public.

• Alexander, Elizabeth. “The Genius of Romare Bearden.” In Power & Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Reflections. By Elizabeth Alexander, 33–44. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

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  Originally commissioned for Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African-American Art, a collection catalogue published in 2004, the essay is an overview of the artist’s career that pays special attention to the Bearden works of the 1940s and 1980s held by Hill. Author also engaged with Bearden in the 1980s when his collage practice informed her reading of literature by African American women.

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• Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. Six Black Masters of American Art. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

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  This work was the first collaboration of Bearden and his longtime friend Henderson, a science writer and journalist, The text profiles historical painters Joshua Johnston, Robert S. Duncanson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, and the sculptor Augusta Savage as well as Jacob Lawrence. Bearden brought his personal knowledge of his contemporaries Pippin, Savage, and Lawrence to the project.

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• Breen, Nelson E., dir. Bearden Plays Bearden. DVD. New York: Films Media Group, 2016.

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  Two-part film: Part 1: The Art of Life of Romare Bearden; Part 2: Interviews and Explorations. Analysis of Bearden’s work, conversations with him and artist colleagues, such as Robert Blackburn, and interviews with the artist and his friends. Narrated by the award-winning actor James Earl Jones.

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• Dover, Cedric. American Negro Art. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1960.

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  See pp. 48 and 59. In a briskly written section of this illustrated survey, Dover, an Anglo-Indian anthropologist and a Bearden acquaintance, characterizes the artist’s work with ambivalence, especially as it relates to his moves between representationalism and abstraction. Quotes Bearden’s musings on the same subject and cites a positive review of his work.

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• Fax, Elton C. “Romare Bearden.” In Seventeen Black Artists. By Elton C. Fax, 128–145. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971.

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  An introduction to African American artists by an artist and art historian who knew them as colleagues. Each chapter gives a biographical account of the artist’s life and career and includes quotes from Fax’s interview with the subjects. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the artists and their works.

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• Francis, Jacqueline. “Romare Bearden.” In Among Others: Blackness at MoMA. Edited by Darby English and Charlotte Barat, 132–135. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019.

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  Four works—The Visitation (1941), The Silent Valley of Sunrise (1959), The Dove (1964), The Dove (1971)—are discussed. The last, a large scaled reproduction of the earlier mixed-media collage is of special interest, for the former was a gelatin silver print enlargement produced by MoMA for exhibition purposes and sanctioned by the artist.

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• Marsalis, Branford. Romare Bearden Revealed. CD. Marsalis Music, 2003.

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  In homage to the artist, saxophonist Marsalis’s quartet and featured guest performers, such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and vocalist Harry Connick Jr., reinterpret “Seabreeze,” a 1954 hit song with lyrics by Bearden and music by Larry Douglas, and jazz standards, including ones Bearden used as titles for his works. Liner notes by Robert G. O’Meally.

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• Sims, Lowery Stokes. Romare Bearden. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.

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  Rizzoli’s art series publications are large format, illustrated books that present their subjects as canonical artists. Art historian Sims also situates Bearden as a modernist master, one different from primitivists who appropriated tropes of non-Western and non-European cultural traditions.

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• Stewart, Frank. Romare Bearden. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2004.

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  In 1975, professional photographer Stewart started working with Bearden, who hired him to document his artwork. This collection of one hundred black-and-white photos warmly portrays Bearden at work in his studio, socializing with friends and family, and fully engaged in the larger settings of exhibition openings and university lecture halls. Foreword by artist and Bearden friend David C. Driskell and introduction by curator Ruth Fine.

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Anthologies and Collected Writings about Bearden

In the decades after Bearden’s death, interest in the artist’s work has expanded beyond the art historical purview. Bearden is a burgeoning subject in many fields of the humanities, a development that is related to an increased exposure to art, which can be seen in the collections of major US museums with a commitment to 20th-century modernism. It is worth noting that research by art historians such as that in Fine and Francis 2011 and by interdisciplinary scholars in Tweedy 2008 was first presented in programs that were free and open to the public. Bearden’s work is a hub topic in African American studies, and Dawes and Shenoda 2017 is an example of a spoke reaching out to a specialist audience of poetry readers who may not know the artist’s work. O’Meally 2019 is led by a scholar who has worked extensively with the Romare Bearden Foundation, which is dedicated to expanding the artist’s legacy.

• Dawes, Kwame Neville Senu, and Matthew Shenoda, eds. Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press, 2017.

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  A collection of forty-nine poems on African American migration, written by thirty-five contemporary poets of African descent. Includes six color reproductions from the Odyssey series, the inspiration for the initiative. Foreword by Derek Walcott, a Bearden friend and collaborator and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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• Fine, Ruth, and Jacqueline Francis, eds. Romare Bearden, American Modernist. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011.

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  Fifteen essays developed from lectures presented at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts symposium on Bearden, coinciding with the National Gallery of Art retrospective exhibition of 2003. The volume offers expanded considerations of Bearden’s work, situating it in interdisciplinary discourses as well as in modernist histories and theories of avant-gardism.

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• O’Meally, Robert G., ed. The Romare Bearden Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

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  Collection of writings—essays by and about Bearden’s work and career, exhibition reviews, interviews, and reflections from colleagues and collaborators—edited by an interdisciplinary scholar who has worked closely with the artist’s foundation. Reprints of well-known publications, such as Tomkins 1977 (cited under Profiles in Art Magazines, Journals of Culture, and the News) and Ellison’s essay for Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections (Art Gallery 1968 [cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications]) are brought together with new offerings from, among others, novelist John Edgar Wideman, cultural studies scholar Brent Hayes Edwards, and literary scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin.

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• Tweedy, Ellie, ed. Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition: essays from the Romare Beardon Foundation Symposium, Chicago, 2007. New York: Romare Bearden Foundation, 2008.

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  Essays and transcribed conversations from a Bearden Foundation symposium at Columbia College of Chicago in 2007. Interdisciplinary discussion and insights from artists, literary scholars, art historians, and hip-hop musician and author DJ Spooky. Art historian Helen Shannon’s essay on Bearden’s use of traditional West African sculpture tracks the artist’s engagement with these artworks in exhibitions he visited and as reproductions in books and magazines.

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Chapters and Sections in Scholarly Books

Bearden’s work has been cited in debates about the category of “black art” which reference historically represented subject matter and specific style that are generally figurative. Notably Bearden 1934 (cited under Published Works by Bearden) advocates for such “racial art,” while Bearden 1946 (cited under Published Works by Bearden) rejects the premise. hooks 1995 and English 2007 discuss the predicament of black artists who faced prescriptive expectations. Cahan 2016 incorporates the dilemma into the author’s study of late 1960s activism against elitist and exclusionary museum policy in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mercer 2002 and Mercer 2005 draw Bearden outside of the black-white binary of American national discourse and instead situate him in broader frameworks, namely the expressive production of African diasporic people and cosmopolitanism that emphasizes shared values. Bearden chose to interpret biblical narratives because he saw universality within them and Pinder 2017 is a useful study. Wilson 1992 is a rare feminist engagement with Bearden’s female nudes, which the author argues the artist recovers from historical stereotypes of the sexually available woman. Rogers 1994 finds rehabilitation of the female form and the working-class, African American family in a Bearden collage of 1964. Since Bearden’s death in 1988, interest in his approaches to interpreting 20th-century African American blues, jazz, and Big Band music has grown, reflected in favored topics of interdisciplinary scholars interested in cultural studies in works such as Leach 2015.

• Cahan, Susan E. “Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual.” In Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power. By Susan E. Cahan, 171–252. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

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  See also “The Sculpture of Richard Hunt at the Museum of Modern Art” (pp. 296–313). In a book about activist attempts to integrate elite New York City museums, Cahan devotes a chapter to the single-artist shows for Hunt and Bearden, which opened simultaneously in 1971. Bearden’s work, Cahan notes, fit the Museum of Modern Art’s grand narrative of modernism.

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• English, Darby. “Beyond Black Representational Space.” In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. By Darby English, 27–70. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

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  Engaged consideration of the category of “black art” as discussed by the members of SPIRAL, an African American artists’ collective that Bearden co-founded as a member in 1963, and endorsement of Ellison’s refusal of it in Art Gallery 1968 (cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications).

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• hooks, bell. “Art on My Mind.” In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. By bell hooks, 1–5. New York: New Press, 1995.

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  Five interviews with artists who are women and eighteen essays about the politics of representation as it regards African American iconology by the US feminist and cultural studies scholar hooks (the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins). The negative reception to Bearden’s figural abstraction in the 1940s and the artist’s interpretation of black, working-class and popular culture in collages are touchstones for the author, who inveighs against respectability politics and resistance to modernism’s transformational strategies.

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• Leach, Brenda Lynn. “Romare Bearden and Visual Jazz.” In Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Jazz. By Brenda Lynn Leach, 27–38. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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  A book by an American composer, conductor, and music historian considers the influence of music on 20th-century visual artists and Joan Míro’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s impact on Dave Brubeck and John Cage, respectively. Bearden’s love of jazz and the impact of its structures and formal elements on his practice are recounted.

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• Matlin, Daniel. “Harlem without Walls: Romare Bearden’s Realism.” In On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis. 195–255. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

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  Drawn from Matlin 2010 (cited under Unpublished Dissertations), the chapter discusses Bearden’s 1960s collages as realist conceptualizations of an urban crisis in the storied New York neighborhood. Author identifies a “mellowing” of Bearden’s representations of African American life in the early 1970s and more grounding in his fond memories.

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• Mercer, Kobena. “African-American Modernism at Mid-century.” In Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Edited by Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, 29–46. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

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  Author asserts that among the significant mile markers of the artist’s career is Bearden 1946 (cited under Published Works by Bearden) for its articulation about the complex, composite quality of black culture in the United States and across the African diaspora. Mercer, a British-born scholar of visual cultural studies and historical contemporary art in the United States and Europe, turns to Bakhtinian dialogic theory to position Bearden’s collages as challenges to photojournalism’s claim to realism.

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• Mercer, Kobena. “Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen.” In Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Edited by Kobena Mercer, 124–145. Annotating Art’s Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

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  Summoning art historian Alois Riegl’s term for an artwork that expresses the spirit of its era, Mercer argues that Bearden’s collages of 1964 the breaks and fissures in late twentieth century American culture, of which the hyphenated African American experience is an integral component.

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• Pinder, Kymberly N. “Deep Waters: Rebirth, Transcendence, and Abstraction in Romare Bearden’s Passion of Christ.” In Beholding: Christ and Christianity in African American Art. Edited by James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill, 153–165. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017.

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  Abridged version of essay published in Fine and Francis 2011 (cited under Anthologies and Collected Writings about Bearden). Pinder, an art historian trained in European medieval art, analyzes Bearden’s series of 1945, a cubist interpretation of a Christian narrative offered to audiences as a modern rendering with a universal appeal.

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• Rogers, Paul. “Hard Core Poverty.” In Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography. Edited by Deborah Willis, 158–169. New York: New Press, 1994.

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  Author contrasts French photojournalist John Launois’s portrait photograph Hard Core Poverty (1966) and Bearden’s Watching the Good Trains Go By (1964), reading the former as a judgmental statement of dysfunction in African American culture and the latter as a complex picture that, however romantic, resists essentialist tropes of the black experience in the United States.

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• Wilson, Judith. “Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of Pornography and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-US Art.” In Black Popular Culture. Edited by Gina Dent, 112–122. Discussions in Contemporary Culture 8. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.

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  An art historian discusses Bearden’s sources, which include pornographic magazines that include photographs of nude, black women. Noting that self-censorship prevented many African American artists from working with this common trope of Western art history, Wilson credits Bearden with liberating the female body from conservative, respectability politics. Because the Romare Bearden Foundation refused to grant permission to reproduce the artist’s work for such a discussion, the essay is not illustrated.

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Published Works by Bearden

Following in the footsteps of his mother, Bessye J. Bearden, a correspondent for African American newspapers and magazines from the 1920s to her death in the 1940s, Bearden wrote commissioned articles for these special periodicals. Bearden 1937 is a feature article that investigates the industrial workplace environment during the Great Depression. Bearden 1934 is an opinion piece, the artist’s earliest public statement about his inspiration, sources, and objectives; it also looks askance at an unnamed African American painter’s Scandinavian landscapes, suggesting that “black subjects” were more appropriate. (Bearden’s remarks probably were pointed toward William H. Johnson, who lived and worked in Scandinavia during the 1930s.) Bearden 1946 and Bearden 1975a are similarly ruminative, as Bearden considers the role of the artist in a postwar climate and rejects the prescriptive stance of Bearden 1934. The more than fifty Bearden publications include cultural histories, biographies for young adult readers, reviews of exhibitions and books (Bearden 1975b), obituaries printed in newspapers, and the posthumously released art history survey Bearden and Henderson 1993. The tenor of Bearden’s nonfiction prose is formal and deliberately paced, well organized and scripted to bring the reader to a concluding point: Bearden 1969 and Bearden and Holty 1969 evidence this effort to explain his work and his canonical artworks, respectively. Bearden 1983 is a delightful description of the artist’s winter home in the Caribbean.

• Bearden, Romare. “The Negro Artist and Modern Art.” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 12 (December 1934): 371–372.

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  In a critique of his peers who represent far-flung locales, Bearden recommends that black American artists search for subject matter in their immediate environs and that they interpret their subjects in a representational style that, unlike complete abstraction, will be accessible to the general public.

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• Bearden, Romare. “The Negro in Little Steel.” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 15 (December 1937): 362–365.

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  See also p. 380. After traveling to steel-making plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1936, Bearden reports on laborers’ travails and their efforts to unionize themselves and to form integrated workplaces. Bearden’s photographs of the locales and workers are published with the text.

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• Bearden, Romare. “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma.” Critique: A Review of Contemporary Art 1.2 (November 1946): 16–22.

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  Bearden renounces the prescriptions of “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” and criticizes the philanthropy of the Harmon Foundation, which organized regular exhibitions of the work of African American artists in the 1920s and 1930s.

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• Bearden, Romare. “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings.” Leonardo 2.1 (January 1969): 11–19.

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  Bearden explains his objective of creating compositional space in his collages, which he resolutely describes as paintings, influenced by a range of sources from Benin bronzes and Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries murals to large-scale canonical Chinese paintings and the religious imagery of the Sienese School.

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• Bearden, Romare. “Humility.” New York Times, 21 June 1975a, 27.

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  Excerpt of Bearden’s graduation address at Carnegie-Mellon University. The artist invokes Thomas Mann and Alfred North Whitehead to encourage the audience to pursue peace and harmony in a complex world that each person must face with humility.

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• Bearden, Romare H. “Review of The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity by Elsa Honig Fine.” Leonardo 8.1 (Winter 1975b): 82–83.

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  A negative review of a survey text, which Bearden finds is riddled with factual errors and marred by a sociological view of African American culture and society.

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• Bearden, Romare. “An Artist’s Renewal in the Sun.” New York Times Magazine, 2 October 1983, 46–48.

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  See also p. 52. A travel article about St. Martin, the winter home of Bearden and his wife Nanette Rohan Bearden, whose parents were born there. Lyrically description of the Caribbean island, a territory divided between France and the Netherlands, and of his daily routine, that he contrasts to the hectic and tiring pace of his life in New York. Illustrations convey this title’s message as they include photos of a relaxed Bearden.

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• Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

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  Biographical entries on more than forty US artists and as well as profiles of their advocates such as the intellectual Alain Leroy Locke. The tone of the well-researched volume is conversational and lively, written with a general audience in mind.

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• Bearden, Romare, and Carl Holty. The Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting. New York: Crown, 1969.

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  An art appreciation and theory text that connects the well-respected contemporaries of the artist and author, from Norman Lewis and Robert Rauschenberg to canonical figures, including Tiepolo, Paul Cézanne, and Piet Mondrian, all admired for the pictorial unities, powerful forms, and rhythmic balance of their works.

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Archives

Materials held by American repositories—public and private—include artworks, institutional documents, ephemera, unpublished writings, and publications related to his exhibition history and career. The Museum of Modern Art Library provides material on the institution’s organizing of the artist’s exhibition in that year. Bearden lent materials to the Archives of American Art for microfilming in 1968. In the archives, “Romare Bearden Papers, 1937–1982” contains clippings, writings by and about Bearden, and a scrapbook with drawings. They were digitized in 2005. The holdings in the Romare Bearden Foundation and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture are rich in these documents. Bearden was a prodigious correspondent, sharing news of his travels and the success and struggles in his work with friends and colleagues. In journals and on scraps of paper, he wrote for himself poems; list of books in literature, philosophy, art history, and history to read (and reread); and summaries of and shorthand notes about them. Even written fragments and other unfinished projects are illuminating. While pedagogical tactics are evident and expected in lecture notes to be rounded into speeches for academic and museum audiences, they are surprise elements in warm reminiscences, leavened with the personal anecdote and delivered at memorial services for artist colleagues. Pages of an unpublished radio play and short story also reveal Bearden’s interest in the psyche of serviceman during the World War II; he served in the armed forces and yet otherwise shared little about his stateside posting and his military experience. Contemporaries’ engagement with Bearden is found in the archives of New York City–based cultural producers Camille Billops and James Hatch and Sam Shaw (Sam Shaw Archives, Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives). In 1969, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began to acquire material on Bearden as well as prints, recognizing the work of a native son and his importance in the state’s history as a regional leader in arts patronage.

• Archives of American Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

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  Bearden cited in files “Romare Bearden Papers”; “Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum (Philadelphia), 1968–1985” (microfilm); “Cinque Gallery Press Release, 1969” (microfilm); “First World Festival of Negro Arts Photographers/Geoffrey Clements, 1966”; “Lenora Seroka Photographs, 1977–1984”; “Printed Material on Romare Bearden, Alice Neel, and Howard Newman, 1975–1990”; and “Romare Bearden Papers, 1937–1982.” The archives also hold recorded oral histories with Bearden and his correspondence in the papers of other artists and historians.

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• Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives. Romare Bearden Oral Histories. Atlanta: Emory University.

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  Recordings in which Bearden recounts his career in interviews with drama scholar Hatch and artist Billops (6 December 1972), artist Emma Amos (6 December 1974) and artist Alvin Hollingsworth and Emma Amos (16 February 1976).

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• Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.

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  Folders in “Political Art Documentation and Distribution File.” “Romare Bearden–Artist Scrapbook.” Uncatalogued material related to Greene, et al. 1971 (cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications).

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• Romare Bearden Foundation. New York: Romare Beardon Foundation.

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  Established by Nanette Rohan Bearden, the artist’s widow, in 1990. Holds Bearden’s correspondence, personal library, photographs, recordings (video and audio), sheet music, and typescripts of poems, radio plays, and short stories.

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• Sam Shaw Archives. Romare Beardon Collection.

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  Photographer Shaw (b. 1912–d. 1999) was Bearden’s one-time studio mate and the two were lifelong friends. Sometime around 1950, Shaw shot often reproduced black-and-white images of Bearden, posed in front of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, linking the artist with a historical site of African American culture and history and the neighborhood where he lived from 1914 to 1956.

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• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York: New York Public Library.

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  Correspondence, writings, and notes in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division. Photographs in Photographs and Prints Division. Posters in Art and Artifacts Division Collection.

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• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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  The university houses nine art folios by Bearden as well as information about the artist.

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Journal Articles

Articles published in scholarly journals are generally monographic with a focus on the collages of 1964 and afterward and on the import of the collage method in Bearden’s late career works. Glazer 1994, Lamm 2003, and Hage 2016 are representative. Exceptions are discussions of the artist’s abstract paintings of the late 1940s and 1950s in Witkovsky 1989, his interest in religious narrative are situated amidst School of Paris concerns in Patton 1992 and the controversy around one of Bearden’s commissioned murals in Kroiz 2016. Rogers 1994 and Pinder 1999 criticize treatment by writers of Western art history surveys, which fail to account for the breadth of Bearden’s interests and production. Fine 2005 notes that, despite the attention paid to the author’s retrospective exhibition and its catalogue (Fine, et al. 2003 [cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications), writing about the artist is limited and marginalizing.

• Fine, Ruth. “Expanding the Mainstream: Romare Bearden Revisited.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 148.1 (March 2005): 40–55.

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  The lead author of Fine, et al. 2003 (cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications) notes that despite acknowledgment of Bearden’s formalist concerns, that writers are preoccupied with his minority status. Fine suggests that broad and multivalent frameworks are necessary to account for any artist’s achievement.

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• Glazer, Lee Stephens. “Signifying Identity: Art and Race in Romare Bearden’s ‘Projections.’” Art Bulletin 76.3 (September 1994): 411–426.

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  Glazer identifies André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence (New York: Doubleday, 1953) as a key influence in Bearden and Holty 1969 (cited under Published Works by Bearden). Glazer also discusses Bearden’s formal appropriation of Old Master painting structures to present African American life in an inclusive framework of universal, human experience.

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• Hage, Emily. “Reconfiguring Race, Recontextualizing the Media: Romare Bearden’s 1968 Fortune and Time Covers.” Art Journal 75.3 (Fall 2016): 36–51.

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  An art historian who focuses on modernist artists’ creative and critical transformations of magazines, Hage explores Bearden’s collage practice and high-profile commissions for two leading news journals in the 1960s. She argues that, in these works, Bearden used cut-up periodicals not only to make collage but also to criticize the mainstream US media’s biased blinkered coverage of African Americans.

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• Kroiz, Lauren. “Relocating Bearden’s Berkeley.” Boom: A Journal of California 6.3 (Fall 2016): 50–57.

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  Art historian considers Bearden’s eponymous mural for a California’s city government chambers, initial responses to this commission (the artist’s first), and the fate of the artwork in recent years.

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• Lamm, Kimberly. “Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Romare Bearden’s Photomontages.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 26.3 (Summer 2003): 813–835.

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  In the author’s view, the contemporaries Ellison and Bearden created works that went against the grain of the most prevalent representation of black Americans in the mainstream art and culture, i.e., sociological views and documentary takes. In doing so, their literary and visual subjects, presented as fragmented and complex form, are realistically in the process of becoming.

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• O’Meally, Robert G. “Basquiat, Bearden, Armstrong et le Roi du Zulu.” Les Cahiers du Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne 130 (2014–2015): 90–110.

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  An essay that features images by Bearden in a discussion of American jazz iconology.

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• Patton, Sharon F. “A Divine Presence in the Art of Romare Bearden.” PRISM: Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts 15 (1992): 29–32.

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  Art historian argues that Bearden’s interpretation of Christian themes was meant to inspire audiences as humanist and spiritual accounts of life’s moral challenges.

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• Pinder, Kymberly N. “Black Representation and Western Survey Textbooks.” Art Bulletin 81.3 (September 1999): 533–538.

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  Notes that Bearden’s collages often decorate covers of books for both scholarly and general audiences that explore African American subjects. Pinder argues that the artist’s work, as reproduced in some textbooks, is similarly put to use, i.e., to stand in for black subjectivity. Pinder criticizes this tactic as flattening and reductive.

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• Rogers, Paul. “Ralph Ellison, the Collages of Romare Bearden, and Race: Some Speculations.” International Review of African-American Art 11.3 (1994): 7–10.

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  Close reading of Art Gallery 1968 (cited under Monographic Exhibition Publications) in which the author—an art historian—proposes that Bearden’s collages and projections are simultaneously aestheticized, social, and political, eschewing the narrowed category of positive black imagery.

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• Wallace, Caroline V. “Exhibiting Authenticity: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s Protests of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968–71.” Art Journal 74.2 (Summer 2015): 5–23.

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  Museum studies scholar revisits the campaigns of black artists and activists to diversify and promote inclusion in New York City’s art scene during the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era. Bearden, respected by his contemporaries and a younger generation as well, added his voice to these efforts, leading to change in mainstream museum exhibits and to the founding of the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968.

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• Witkovsky, Matthew S. “Experience vs. Theory: Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism.” Black American Literature Forum 23.2 (Summer 1989): 257–282.

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  An art historian relates the artist’s figurally abstract and nonobjective paintings of the 1940s and 1950s to the collages he made after these decades, arguing that each body of this work addresses local and culturally specific subject matter.

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Interviews and Conversations

Bearden readily presented his biography to interviewers, and details are repeated throughout these examples. As is the case in secondary literature about him, two misstatements must be noted: the year of his birth was 1911 (and not 1912) and his undergraduate degree was in education (and note mathematics). Transcripts demonstrate that Bearden was a skillful moderator in Bearden at al. 1969 and a generous conversationalist who recognized the other speakers’ contributions to group discussions (see Siegel 1966, Siegel 1985a, and Siegel 1985b). A deft storyteller and enthusiastic educator, he readily wove his art historical references into conversations (see Diamonstein 1979, Peters 1983, Rowell 1988, and Billops and Hatch 1998). Considered an elder statesman, Bearden frequently was asked to weigh in the question of “black art” (see Kendall 1977).

• Bearden Romare, Sam Gilliam Jr., Richard Hunt, et al. “The Black Artist in America: A Symposium.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27.5 (January 1969): 245–260.

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  Bearden moderates a discussion with six other African American artists: Sam Gilliam Jr., Richard Hunt, Jacob Lawrence, Tom Lloyd, William T. Williams, and Hale Woodruff. Their charge is stated bluntly in the first lines of the transcript, to address “some of the problems of the Black artist in America.”

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• Billops, Camille, and James V. Hatch. “Romare Bearden: Visual Artist.” Artist and Influence 17 (1998): 30–41.

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  In an interview in 1972, artist and archivist Billops and theater historian Hatch converse with Bearden about his career, art history, and the contemporary art scene in New York City.

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• Diamonstein, Barbaralee. “Romare Bearden.” In Inside New York’s Art World. By Barabaralee Diamonstein, 28–39. New York: Rizzoli, 1979.

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  Transcripts of interviews—taped before live studio audiences—between the arts writer Diamonstein and thirty of the city’s notables, including artists, architects, art critics, gallerists, and museum directors. Bearden’s skills for storytelling is evident, and he is, at turns, funny, self-deprecating, and philosophical.

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• Kendall, Michael. “Romare Bearden Interview.” Art Workers Journal 6.9 (April 1977): 6–7, 12.

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  Interviewed by a Philadelphia-based artist, Bearden talks about the artistic communities of which he was a part in the pre–World War II era. In response to a question about whether there is a black aesthetic, he defines it as art “done by black people.”

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• Peters, Joy. “Romare Bearden: Jazz Intervals.” Art Papers 7.1 (January/February 1983): 11.

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  Bearden relates the rhythms of his collages to those of jazz composition. Prompted by artist and educator Peters to explain his methods of making monotypes, Bearden talks about the necessity of working quickly and his collaboration with longtime friend and master printmaker Robert Blackburn.

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• Rowell, Charles H. “Inscription at the City of Brass: An Interview with Romare Bearden.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 36 (1988): 428–446.

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  An interview conducted in Bearden’s home on St. Martin in 1987, published after the artist’s death. Literature scholar Rowell engages Bearden in a wide-ranging discussion of his childhood experiences in the US South and in Harlem, artistic inspirations and cultural sources for his art, and his outlook on creative practice and improvisation. The issue includes contributions submitted, in memoriam, by artists, scholars, and writers.

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• Siegel, Jeanne. “Why Spiral?” Art News 65 (September 1966): 48–51.

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  An interview with the fourteen members of SPIRAL, an African American artist collective co-founded by Bearden in 1963. In roundtable fashion, the group responds to questions posed by Siegel. Highlights of the transcript are their diverse takes on the artist’s role in society.

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• Siegel, Jeanne. “How Effective Is Social Protest Art (Civil Rights)?” In Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s. By Jeanne Siegel, 85–98. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985a.

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  Transcript of a panel discussion conducted and broadcast on nonprofit, non-commercial New York City radio station WBAI on 14 December 1967. Bearden talks with fellow SPIRAL collective artists Alvin Hollingsworth and William Majors. Bearden argues that protest has been articulated variably, and he groups Goya’s The Disasters of War alongside Cézanne’s anti-academic still lifes, Brechtian theater, and pop art satire.

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• Siegel, Jeanne. “Romare Bearden: The Unknown American Negro Artists.” In Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s. By Jeanne Siegel, 73–83. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985b.

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  Transcript of interview conducted and broadcast on WBAI on 12 October 1967. Siegel, an educator and arts writer, asks Bearden about his career and about historical and contemporary African American artists.

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Reference Works

In providing exhibition and publication histories of almost 4,000 artists of African descent, Igoe and Igoe 1981 is a singularly reliable reference source for information about Bearden. Other articles cited here offer summary biographies. Hughes 1997 gives an enthusiastic account of the artist’s breakthrough collages and criticizes the mainstream’s lack of interest in Bearden’s work (and that of any black artists in the 1960s). Since 2000, Bearden’s work is considered more frequently in general art history. Francis 2014 addresses Bearden’s framing of aesthetic concerns in his work and in art appreciation and art education writings. Oliver 2011 includes auction records from 1973 to 2004, providing an illuminating account of the valuation of the artist’s work. Bearden’s ethnoracial and cultural identities are aspects important to multicultural publications focused on African Americans in Wedge 2009 and Otfinoski 2011, on African American intellectual history in Roach 2010, and on the culture of the American South in Wilson 2013.

• Francis, Jacqueline. “Romare Bearden.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 2d ed. Edited by Michael Kelly, 324–327. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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  Discusses style and composition as presented in Bearden’s writings about his own work and in the methods employed in historical paintings and drawings he deemed exemplary.

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• Hughes, Robert. “The Empire of Signs.” In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. By Robert Hughes, 519–521. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

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  Bearden’s collage practice is introduced in this subsection devoted to modernist and postmodernist approaches to it. His work is contextualized alongside his predecessors (the Dadaists in Germany and Henri Matisse) and his contemporary Rauschenberg. The author affirms that Bearden had “an abiding love of actuality and pictorial anecdote.”

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• Igoe, Lynn Moody, and James Igoe. 250 Years of Afro-American Art: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Bowker, 1981.

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  Bearden is among the 3,900 artists whose activities were charted through 1984 by an art historian and her husband. This publication also issued as a computer-optical discfor computers in 1999.

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• Oliver, Valerie Cassel, ed. “Bearden, Romare Howard.” Benezit Dictionary of Artists. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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  Entry includes a survey of the artist’s career activities, auction prizes, and a reproduction of Bearden’s signature, appropriate in this resource for collectors, historians, and professionals. Link is provided to biographical article written by art historian Denis Raverty.

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• Otfinoski, Steven. “Romare Bearden.” In African Americans in the Visual Arts. Rev. ed. By Steven Otfinoski, 18–20. New York: Facts On File, 2011.

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  Positions Bearden as a major innovator of 20th-century American art and as a social activist.

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• Roach, Imani. “Romare Bearden (Fred Romare Howard Bearden).” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of African American Thought. Vol. 1. Edited by Abiola Irele and Biyodun Jeyifo, 143–146. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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  Addressing Bearden’s shifting positions on “black art” during his lifetime, author concludes that Bearden’s work was, above all, rooted in his own sociocultural and racialized experiences.

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• Wedge, Eleanor F. “Romare Bearden.” In Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography. Edited by Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 40–42. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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  Notable for its clear delineation of Bearden’s legacy as artist, curator, educator, historian, and institution builder in US cultural and intellectual communities of the 20th century.

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• Wilson, Charles Reagan. “Painting and Painters, 1980–2012.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Vol. 21, Art and Architecture. Edited by Judith H. Bonner, Charles Wilson Reagan, and Pennington Estill Curtis, 232–234. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

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  Brief biographical entry describes the artist’s work as a cubist approach to interpreting themes explicitly of the US South (grounded in his memories of his North Carolina birthplace) that are universal in their appeal.

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Unpublished Dissertations

Campbell 1982 is the first academic monographic study, completed as the release of prints commissioned by the Office of the US President, raised Bearden’s visibility on the national stage. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s, no PhD dissertations exploring the artist’s career appeared. Instead, since then, Bearden’s oeuvre has regularly figured in case studies by researchers working in art history—Greene 2009, Salley 2009, Monahan 2010, Murrell 2014—as well as in English and American literature and cultural studies, i.e., Bartlett 1999, Niedzielski-Eichner 2009, Gustafson 2010, and Mensah 2016. Two trends can be identified in the scholarship that emerged at the end of the 20th century and at the start of the 21st. First, the research of those who number Bearden’s collages among the cultural innovations of the 1960s, which they tie to canonical accounts of the decade. Second, the work of those who consider him an influencer, especially among younger generations of artists of African descent producing abstract and mixed media works.

• Bartlett, Andrew Walsh. “The Free Place: Literary, Visual, and Jazz Creations of Space in the 1960s.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 1999.

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  The writer argues that the decade’s avant-garde music, especially the innovation of free jazz composer and musician Cecil Taylor, exerted a major influenced in politics, culture, and art, including the work of novelist James Baldwin and of Bearden.

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• Campbell, Mary Schmidt. “Romare Bearden: A Creative Mythology.” PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1982.

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  The author gives an admiring account of Bearden’s career through 1991, written during his lifetime by an author who first met the artist in 1972, curated exhibitions of his work shortly after finishing her MA thesis on his role as a black American artist, and continues to lecture and publish widely on its significance. Campbell argues that the achievement of Bearden’s mature work is its “unique mythic vision of black American life.” Includes Bearden’s letters to the author and close colleagues.

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• Greene, Nikki A. “The Rhythm of Glue, Grease, and Grime: Indexicality in the Works of Romare Bearden, David Hammons, and Renée Stout.” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2009.

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  In a comparative study of different generations, Greene argues that, in the work of these three 20th-century African American artists, the semiotic notions of the index and the traces are critical. The writer argues that the cut and pasted down paper in Bearden’s collages serve as indexes of his travels, intellectual interests, research, and memories.

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• Gustafson, Donna. “At Home in the 60s: Images of the Home in American Art, 1960–1975.” PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2010.

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  A history of representations of the domestic space by pop and contextual artists—some critical, others advancing models of patriarchal authority and female contentment with it. Bearden’s treatment, Gustafson argues, subverted media images of dysfunctional African American families.

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• Matlin, Daniel Peter. “Black Intellectuals and Black Urban Life in the United States: Kenneth B. Clark, Amiri Baraka and Romare Bearden, 1960–1975.” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2010.

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  Situates named subjects—Bearden, the psychologist Clark, and the poet and Black Power activist Baraka—as “confident cosmopolitans,” each exceeding the narrowed role of “indigenous interpreter” who interpreted African American life for the benefit of their white compatriots.

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• Mensah, Lucy Kwabeh. “Designing Cities & Men: Post-WWII Urban Renewal, Black Masculinity, and African American Aesthetics.” PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2016.

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  Among the case studies from literature and art is Pittsburgh Memories—collages that Bearden produced in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The writer situates these images of black working-class men in Pittsburgh (a subject of Bearden 1937) in a “poetics of steel” that interpreted gender identity and the changes in America’s industrial landscape.

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• Monahan, Anne. “‘The Discontents of Modernity:’ Race, Politics, and Figuration in the 1960s.” Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2010.

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  The works of Bearden, Philip Guston, and Faith Ringgold lie at the center of this study of political art that bucked dialectical concerns of the 1960s, pitting “art for art’s sake” nonobjective painting against critical imagery that announced the makers anti–Vietnam War and anti-racist stances.

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• Murrell, Denise M. “Seeing Laure: Race and Modernity from Manet’s Olympia to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014.

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  The writer argues that Bearden’s collage interpretation of the odalisque as a nude black woman serves as a rejoinder to the iconography of the black female servant in Western modernist painting. Murrell, an art historian, concludes that Bearden’s representations do not sexualize black women’s bodies; rather, they situate them in a cultural context.

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• Niedzielski-Eichner, Nora. “Integrating Modernism: The Migration Paintings of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2009.

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  Focusing on the historical move of millions of African Americans from the North to the South during the early decades of the 20th century, this writer argues that Bearden’s approach to representing a migration narrative in the “Projection” photostats, however informed by the literary movement of New Criticism, also disrupted the formalist claims of abstract expressionists that the art object was autonomous and self-referential.

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• Salley, Rael Jero. “Unfinished Visuality: Contemporary Art and Black Diaspora, 1964–2008.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009.

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  The writer explores the meaning and significance of the term diaspora through chapter-long case studies of historical and contemporary artists from the Bahamas, Cameroon, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Bearden’s work is the focus of the first chapter, and the emphasis is on The Prevalence of Ritual: Mysteries (1964), which the author characterizes as a conceptual and political work that sidesteps the discourses of black art and black nationalism.

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Profiles in Art Magazines, Journals of Culture, and the News

The ways that Bearden made the news speaks to the landscape of New York’s art world in the latter half of the 20th century, his changing fortunes, and the manner in which stories about minority Americans reflected the ethos of multiculturalism. New York Times 1961 is a news account in which Bearden complains about the difficulty of finding and keeping a studio in New York City. Ashton 1965 introduces Bearden’s work to a European audience. Childs 1964, Berman 1980, and Tomkins 1977 are profiles about Bearden and about black America. Gregg 2012 notes “The Art of Romare Beardon,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2003 was viewed as a landmark enterprise for the organizing institution.

• Ashton, Dore. “Romare Bearden—Projections.” Quadrum: Revue Internationale d’Art Moderne 18 (1965): 99–110.

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  A critic’s assessment of Projections takes the measure of the artist’s dissection and reorganization of the paper medium, and the graphic force and photojournalistic quality of the Projections series. The article in this Brussels-based publication includes black-and-white reproductions of seven of these works.

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• Berman, Avis. “Romare Bearden: ‘I Paint Out of the Tradition of the Blues.’” Art News 79 (December 1980): 60–67.

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  Profile article that celebrates Bearden’s status as “an acknowledged master of collage.” The critic’s narrative of the artist’s life is interspersed with Bearden’s richly related stories about his family, his first journey to Paris, and his New York artist’s circles. Illustrated with a color photo of the artist in his New York studio and color and black-and-white reproductions that present the artist’s figurative and abstract work.

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• Childs, Charles. “Bearden: Identification and Identity.” Art News 63.4 (October 1964): 24–25.

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  See also pp. 54, 61–62. Published on the occasion of Bearden’s first exhibition of Photostats (photostatic collages) at Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York, this profile situates Bearden as a “leading abstractionist” painter who brought the compositional sensibility of his painting into these breakthrough works. Includes three black-and-white illustrations: a photo of Bearden and reproductions of The Street (1964) and The Burial (1964).

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• Gregg, Gail. “Beardenmania!” Art News 111.7 (Summer 2012): 106–112.

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  The article identifies an uptick in interest in Bearden’s art following the National Gallery of Art retrospective of 2003, measured in subsequently mounted museum and commercial gallery exhibitions, interdisciplinary conferences and symposia about his work, and posthumously bequeathed honors, such as a US postage stamp series that reproduces four of his collages.

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• Lee, Felicia R. “An American Life in Mixed Media; Bearden Is Honored with a National Gallery Retrospective.” New York Times, 11 September 2003, E1–E5.

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  Article presents scholars’ and curators’ take on the occasion of “The Art of Romare Bearden” exhibition in 2003, at that time the institution’s first exhibition dedicated to an African American’s artist production.

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• New York Times. “Abstract Artist, 46, Loses to Firemen On Studio in a Loft.” New York Times, 24 March 1961, 27.

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  Report of Bearden’s dispute with the New York City Fire Department, which, citing structural issues and occupancy ordinances, sought to evict him. The artist was fined $50 but resided in the same space until his death in 1988.

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• Tomkins, Calvin. “Profiles: Romare Bearden; Putting Something over Something Else.” New Yorker 53 (28 November 1977): 53–77.

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  Published in an influential US weekly magazine, this article introduced Bearden to a large mainstream readership. Tomkins reads Bearden’s work through his biography. The title is part of a quote from Bearden—his description of painting, which he extended to collage.

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Reviews (Exhibition)

Critical response to Bearden’s work dates to the 1940s. Short in length, Reviews and Previews—Romare Bearden, E. C. M. 1955, and Raynor 1961 are useful records of the artist’s exhibition history that also provide helpful for descriptions of early career work, some of which is unlocated. Charged with assessing Bearden’s exhibitions at prestigious institutions, Allen 1971 and Gopnik 2003 take the opportunity to comment on the failure of mainstream US museums to exhibit the work of African American artists. Hughes 1991 includes similarly matter-of-fact art reproaches, with respect to the dearth of accounts on Bearden’s career. Kramer 1978, Brenson 1984, and Schwabsky 2017 celebrate focused shows at commercial galleries.

• Allen, Charles. “Have the Walls Come Tumbling Down?” New York Times, 11 April 1971, section 2, 27–28.

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  Enthusiastic review of two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to the work of African Americans artists Richard Hunt and Bearden. The critic states that the mounting of these shows does not make for “a nonracist policy,” but rather should be seen as initial steps toward the integration of the works of black artists into the museum’s exhibition program.

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• Brenson, Michael. “Art: Romare Bearden, ‘Rituals of the Obeah.’” New York Times, 30 November 1984, section C, 23.

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  A glowing review of Bearden’s exhibition of sixteen watercolors inspired by the Caribbean religio-cultural system of Obeah, shown at New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom. Critic praises Bearden’s storytelling ability and handling of positive and negative space and compares the depicted figures brought to the front of the picture plane to those seen in the compositions of George Grosz, one of the artist’s first mentors.

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• Danto, Arthur C. “An Artist beyond Category.” Nation 279.19 (16 December 2004): 29–33.

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  Review of retrospective exhibition, originating at the National Gallery of Art in 2003, and mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the penultimate venue. Art critic and philosopher Danto opines that Bearden was ultimately “made” by the 1960s—by pop art and the decade’s urgent political movements.

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• E. C. M. (Eleanor C. Munro). “Reviews and Previews—Romare Bearden.” Art News 54.8 (December 1955): 8.

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  A review of an exhibition of Bearden’s figuratively abstract oil paintings and nonobjective watercolors in an exhibition at Manhattan’s Barone Gallery, his last of the 1950s. Special praise given to the artist’s work in the latter format, few of which are extant.

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• Gopnik, Blake. “A World Gone to Pieces.” Washington Post, 14 September 2003, N6–N7.

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  See also p. N1. Review of National Gallery of Art’s 2003 exhibition that addresses the Eurocentrism of the museum’s permanent collection, and Bearden’s influences and his cultural background. Critic judges Bearden’s collages and photostats of the 1960s to be most effective and his late career paintings and cut paperwork less powerful.

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• Hughes, Robert. “Visual Jazz from a Sharp Eye.” Time 137.23, 10 June 1991, 72.

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  A favorable review of the Studio Museum in Harlem exhibition of 1991. The critic deems Bearden “one of the finest collagists of the twentieth century and the most distinguished black visual artists American has so far produced.”

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• Kramer, Hilton. “Art View: Bearden’s ‘Patchwork Cubism.’” New York Times, 3 December 1978, section D, 35.

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  A review of an exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom of twenty-eight collages, accompanied by quilts. The critic credits Bearden with making collage literary, noting that this work is put in the service of narrative and storytelling, an arena that modernist art rarely occupied.

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• Raynor, Vivian. “In the Galleries: Romare Bearden.” Arts Magazine 35.7 (April 1961): 64.

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  A review of an exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom of abstract paintings, which the critic relates to “cool jazz.”

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• “Reviews and Previews—Romare Bearden.” Art News 47.8 (December 1948): 52.

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  Brief account of the artist’s academic background and artistic training with George Grosz and Carl Holty and a description “The Iliad: 16 Variations by Romare Bearden,” a solo exhibition at New York’s Niveau Gallery. Critic judges the figuratively abstract work to be “decorative and lively” sketches that resemble a balletic performance.

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• Schwabsky, Barry. “Abstract Discoveries—Romare Bearden before His Famous Collages.” Nation (21 December 2017): 35–37.

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  Review of an exhibition focusing on the artist’s figurally abstract gouache and watercolor paintings in the 1940s and nonobjective oil and mixed media works paintings of the 1950s. (Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY). Art poet and critic Schwabsky finds that the latter body of work anticipates the color field painting of the 1960s.

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