My friend Susan and I enjoyed exhibitions at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta yesterday. Small drawings were the big draw for us, but we left thinking more of the exhibit "Something over Something Else: Collages of Romare Bearden."
For "Something Over Something Else," Curator Stephanie Heydt recreated an exhibition that the artist had put together forty years ago. At that time,
The New Yorker magazine had just profiled him, and he got the idea of doing a "profile" of himself, represented from an oblique angle. He leaves himself and his family out of most of his collages, instead recapturing characters and sensory details that, layer by layer, tell us where he was and what he experienced.
For example, one of the pieces depicts his black neighbors in the fields picking cotton. A hand-written note beside the collage tells us that his friend's grandmother told him that all the children had to help in the fields. From this one-sentence anecdote, we grasp that this little African-American boy Romare wasn't in the same class with his community.
Characters and themes emerged from the collages. Train whistles, a boyhood friend Eugene who died young, struggles of his neighbors, a "Conjur Woman" [his preferred spelling] who worked magic in the community. Bearden's human figures often have outsized hands. Commentary by the museum pointed to some other elements: Benin masks in the presentations of Black faces; jazz music; strong older women protecting younger women and children.
For my memory's sake, I photographed the piece in the collection that seemed to be the artist's commentary on his own technique. First we notice the artist himself, his arm around a painting of two black women; then his model, facing the painting. In the lower third of the composition, we see textiles and a pencil sketch of a woman. Behind the artist, we see a cut out of a Renaissance painting of Biblical figures. It's "something over something else," layers of tradition and meaning, lots going on. It's also fun and funny, having this element of improvisation, that the artist found use for what he found.
Another piece, according to Bearden's hand-written note, depicts the sunset over Manhattan as he would see it leaving town for Brooklyn at the end of his work day. I photographed that image, struck by the combination of painted sky, photographed buildings, photographed water.
That same day, Atlanta's NPR station WABE aired a discussion of Bearden during their program
City Lights. Host Lois Reitzes brought together Emory English Professor Robert O'Meally with the curator Stephanie Heydt. I learned that Bearden's friends included W.E.B. DuBois and Duke Ellington, and that novelist Ralph Ellison helped Bearden to hone those hand-written captions for his pictures.
Some of my guesses were confirmed. Born in Charlotte, NC to a well-to-do family that owned properties that other Black people rented, Bearden observed some struggles that he himself didn't have to experience. His mother wrote for Black newspapers and magazines; young Bearden did political cartoons for them.
[Photo: Bearden's family in North Carolina. Romare is the tousle-headed boy in the sailor suit.]
Discussing many influences visible in Bearden's art, O'Meally paraphrased Bearden: "As a youth, you swim like a whale with your mouth open; as you age, you learn to close your mouth."
Birds and water show up in many of Bearden's works; the experts suggested that these signified Bearden's spirituality: water for baptism and cleansing, birds for the Holy Spirit. I was reminded of Bearden's collage depicting the memorial for his friend Eugene. Bearden composes the collage in horizontal bands. Pieced-together photos make a crowd of mourners across the central band, buildings and trees peaking out behind them, images from cemeteries below them, and, across the top, outsized photos of flying pigeons. Even without the commentary, the collage speaks to us of spirit flying free.
Lois Reitzes raised the subject of Bearden's effect on playwright August Wilson. The poet-turned-playwright created a set of dramas depicting African American life in each decade of the Twentieth Century. Growing up in Pittsburgh when Bearden worked there, young August Wilson admired the "big hands" and "big hearts" in the artist's work. Resolving to meet the man, Wilson got as far as the artist's door, but couldn't bring himself to ring the doorbell. August Wilson's series of plays takes characters and settings from Bearden's art. Bearden himself appears in one play as a little boy who mourns his friend Eugene, and is left to care for the friend's pigeons. An adult character tells him to "let his pigeons go."
Observing that Bearden's playful compositions and vibrant colors express joy even when he's depicting somber subjects, Lois Reitzes asked if these works from the late-1970s were a sort of valedictory statement from an artist who had come through a decade of depression in the 1950s and the decade of Civil Rights turmoil. Her experts agreed. O'Meally related a story of Bearden's leaving the mental hospital with his father and realizing that they were passing a wall that had once displayed a mural by Diego Rivera. Hands touching the wall, Bearden realized that he could still feel the raised surfaces of Diego's paint, and he felt reassured that his art would endure; he didn't have to feel badly about not having quick success.
That makes yet another layer to Bearden's phrase, "Something over something else."
[Photo: I stepped back to capture the image of the young man who was studying the work before I got to it, and was still looking when I left. For the first time in my experience, the museum was crowded with people of diverse ages and backgrounds -- little kids, young parents, elderly couples, a high school group, couples in their teens and twenties, families speaking languages I didn't know, all taking in the different exhibits on display.]
Link to
The Romare Bearden Foundation
