Colossal Remnants

America’s greatest collagist, Romare Bearden, created his artistic identity the same way he created his signature works — patiently, piece by piece.

by John Stomberg

Romare Bearden in Harlem, early 1950s.

In the early 1930s, when such a thing could still happen, future Baseball Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane (SMG’24) brought members of the Philadelphia Athletics to Boston University for an exhibition game against the varsity baseball team. Although they were a perennial big league powerhouse, the A’s could manage only one hit off the Terriers’ star hurler, Romare Bearden. Legendary manager Connie Mack was so impressed that he offered Bearden a pro contract and a big signing bonus. But the offer had an unwritten proviso: in those days, pro baseball was still strictly segregated — Bearden, a light-skinned black man, would have to pass for white. Troubled by the idea, Bearden simply passed.

In a 1977 profile for The New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins wrote that Romare Bearden was “generally referred to as America’s leading black painter.” When Bearden died of bone cancer eleven years later, the New York Times called him “the nation’s foremost collagist.” It’s likely he would have rated a Times obit, and perhaps even a New Yorker profile, no matter what career path he had followed. Along with baseball, Bearden was a natural at songwriting: he published more than twenty jazz compositions in his lifetime, including the hit “Seabreeze,” which Billy Eckstine, Oscar Pettiford, and Tito Puente all recorded. But no other means of expression could match collage as a conduit for his distinctive voice and vision.

Bearden’s signature works — those produced after 1964 — tend towards political engagement. He thought art should be both an individual expression and an agent of social change. Bearden understood deeply the power of images. Working from magazines, he reclaimed pictures of African-Americans by removing them from their context in the dominant visual culture and placing them in one of his own creation. This was particularly meaningful given how little control African-Americans had over the representation of black America prior to the 1960s. His canvases, in the words of playwright August Wilson, present “black life . . . on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness,” and “[give] back in fragments, in gesture and speech, the colossal remnants of a spirit tested through time and the storm and the lash.”

	Three Folk Musicians, 1967. Private collection, courtesy of Sheldon Ross Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan. Photo: Eric Smith.

Bearden’s virtuosity, like that of many pioneering artists, was the ultimate product of a rigorous education in traditional media and technique. As an undergraduate at the School for the Arts, Bearden picked a program of study dominated by visual art. Of the twenty-seven classes he attended between 1930 and 1932, eighteen were in studio art and two were in the history of art. This was a notably unusual course selection at the time. Not until after World War II did most major universities accommodate such intense concentration on studio art. Formal arts training typically occurred in smaller schools dedicated to art. Bearden’s BU education, emphasizing drawing, modeling, and perspective, gave him an excellent foundation in the essentials of artistic rendering.

In the summer of 1932 Bearden returned home to New York, where he met with George Grosz at the Art Students League to inquire about attending the school in the fall. His mother had other ideas. Well-known in the social circles of Renaissance-era Harlem, Bessye Bearden had been working to ensure that her son would eventually be admitted to medical school. She prevailed in the choice of his curriculum, and he spent the next two years studying mathematics, then a recognized path to medical school, at New York University. Despite her well-intentioned machinations, however, Bearden returned to Grosz and the Art Students League soon after completing his degree. In his eighteen-month stint with Grosz, usually cited as his only arts training, he matured expressively and put the formal lessons of Boston University to new uses. From that point on, he dedicated himself to his art.

In each of the three decades prior to achieving his collage approach to making art, Bearden achieved moderate success in the prevailing style of the time. During the 1930s, he employed a realist style informed by a social conscience. Grosz encouraged the political predilections of his young student, and Bearden’s early paintings emphasize the urban American scenes that dominated the work of New York artists in the 1930s.

Page 1 of 2

TOP