Through much of the next decade, Bearden created figural paintings that relied on heavily drawn outlines and areas of pure color. His work of this period shares with that of many artists around the world a striving to make sense of the carnage and inhumanity of World War II. Many of his 1940s canvases represent Biblical narratives. They possess the religious intensity and the vaguely stained-glass-inspired aesthetics that typify Georges Rouault’s art, although Bearden’s paintings are never as somber. Rouault worked in dark, murky colors with smoky transitions from one hue to the next. Bearden chose bright colors and his exceptional draftsmanship carries the pictures.

When he wasn't pitching for BU's varsity baseball team, Bearden was pitching cartoons to its comic monthly, the Beanpot -- a hidgepodge of tweedy college humor and now-arcane contemporary reference. Some of its jokes are tamely suggestive; others, including many of Bearden's, are startling in their use of ethnic stereotypes. His earliest submissions were simple line drawings, but Bearden grew quickly as an artist, and hi contributions grew apace. He made his way into the magazine's masthead and eventually became art editor. These covers, reproduced for the first time in seventy years, give a Bearden's-eye view of America in the early thirties: on the front of the "Scandal Issue!" subway riders are glued to scandal sheets. And Gandhi, recently arrested for civil disobedience in India, wears a piece of prison-stripe homespun.

Bearden shifted into Zen-inspired abstraction in the 1950s, creating paintings of brilliant subtlety. Many artists of the period were dabbling in Eastern philosophy and art styles, but Bearden undertook intense study with a master calligrapher and read deeply on the subject of Chinese art. Early in the decade he spent time in Paris (even briefly attending classes at the Sorbonne) but soon decided that the creative problems he faced could not be answered in France. He returned to the United States to focus on developing an art that truly represented his singular voice. The abstract expressionist–inspired works
he created in the decade following his return to New York satisfied him personally, but he still found them incomplete as works of art. They did not engage the social and political issues that had nourished his early interest in art. He wanted to make personal pictures without denying either his African-American heritage or the dynamic complexity of contemporary New York life.

After years of struggle and periods of deep despair in the early 1960s, Bearden emerged in 1964 with an approach to making art that, while not without precedent, had certainly remained obscure since its inception in the early teens by Picasso and Braque. Bearden made collages — bold, brash arrangements of photographs from magazines along with cloth, painted paper, and other assorted elements. The collage aesthetic so fully satisfied his artistic ambitions that it influenced his work in other media as well. His late watercolors, for example, appear collaged and extend the stained-glass look of his 1940s paintings with the dizzying perspectival jumps characteristic of his collages. Yet it was not the medium of collage itself that most intrigued Bearden. It was the aggressive reorientation of space that collage made possible, in which he saw an opportunity to merge a range of interests, from politics and civil rights to jazz and poetry.

The Piano Lesson, 1983. Collage and watercolor, 29" x 22".

Bearden’s collages confound reduction to a single interpretation. The information carried by the source material usually interested him less than the patterns and colors they provided. When he used a magazine photograph, it was seldom more than a scrap of the original picture. He further complicated his works by adding paint — either directly or by including bits of painted paper — and other layers of collaged materials. An overarching subject dominates most Bearden collages, but the images and materials offer seemingly endless possibilities for ancillary readings.

The politics of the civil rights movement informed most of Bearden’s collages. He found the key to his art in the disjunction in scale and spatial relationships that he could create by careful juxtaposition of images scavenged from diverse sources. His art visually manifests the disparities in American life that the civil rights movement sought to redress. Viewers become aware of a profound disjunction in each of two logical systems: the laws of the picture plane and those of the American legal system. The ill-fitting features on his figures, the direct result of the collage technique, represent the inequality then built into the American judicial system. Bearden protested having to live under laws that do not offer equal protection. With jarring shifts in perspective, his work echoes that social disjunction.

Bearden felt deeply the intervening of media in contemporary perception, as well. Reproduced images had so fully supplanted reality that looking at photographs had become authentic experience. Bearden placed media imagery between himself and his audience, mirroring, and thereby co-opting, that profound transformation of American life. By making the art experience likewise mediated by photographic interlopers, he beat the mass media at their own game.

	The Street, 1964. Collage, 9 5/8" x 11 3/8". Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, New York, N.Y.

Romare Bearden achieved tremendous recognition during his lifetime — a privilege that has eluded many great artists. He received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and five honorary doctorates. But perhaps most satisfying for him was the widespread exposure his art gained in this country. He has been the subject of several traveling exhibitions, and most of the major collecting art museums in the country have Bearden originals. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is preparing a major retrospective for the fall of 2002. His work is increasingly represented in textbooks, and The Art of Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual, M. Bunch Washington’s definitive and long out-of-print 1972 monograph, is available again from Snowfire Books. If it’s true, as documentary filmmaker Ken Burns proposes, that the story of America is at its essence a story of jazz, baseball, and the Civil War, then Romare Bearden — the songwriter, the star pitcher, the great-grandson of slaves, and the great visual chronicler of African-American life — was telling it first. And he was telling it in the first person.

John Stomberg (GRS’90,’99) is the director of the BU Art Gallery, an adjunct assistant professor of art history at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and an instructor at the School for the Arts.

Sidebar: Entering the World of Romare Bearden

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