Entering the World of Romare Bearden

Playwright August Wilson believes he became an artist at age thirty-two, when he “called to my courage and entered the world of Romare Bearden.” It was a good deal easier than summoning the courage to enter Bearden’s apartment building.

“I stood outside 357 Canal Street [in Manhattan] in silent homage, daring myself to knock on his door,” the two-time Pulitzer prize winner writes in a foreword to Myron Schwartzman’s illustrated Bearden biography. “I have often thought of what I would have said to him that day if I had knocked . . . and he had answered. I probably would just have looked at him. I would have looked, and if I were wearing a hat, I would have taken it off in tribute.”

Not all Bearden devotees have found their reverence so hard to scale. André Thibault (COM’76), in fact, posed as a deliveryman in order to get Bearden’s autograph. For reasons he’s never learned, but which in retrospect seem almost astrological, the aspiring collagist received an invitation to a Bearden opening at Manhattan’s Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in 1980. He went to it wide-eyed, an issue of Art News with a Bearden cover story under his arm. When he arrived, however, he saw minks and camel-hair coats spilling from the building’s entrance and down the block. Even those with influence were having trouble getting in.

Andre Thibault with Bearden in his Long Island City studio, 1983. Photograph courtesy of Andre Thibault.

“And I looked like a bum,” he says. “So I’m heading off down the street, very dejected — going to take the bus back to the subway, and it’s really cold. And I just happen to gaze upon this box.”

An empty cardboard box, Thibault thought, together with his shabby attire, could be his V.I.P. pass. He returned to the building, shouldered his way up the crowded staircase, and told an official-looking woman at the gallery door that the extra catalogues had finally arrived. “‘I need to put ’em down real quick,’ I told her. ‘I have another delivery to make.’”

The fib got Thibault a grudging go-ahead. He quickly discarded the box and made his way toward Bearden, brandishing his Art News — a jeaned and sneakered kid bobbing like a beach ball across the sea of tuxedos.

“I said, ‘My hero. I’ve never asked anyone to sign even a baseball card, but I’d just love it if you’d sign this for me.’”

As a smiling Bearden handed back the autographed magazine, Thibault decided to give his luck one last nudge. “I said, ‘Mr. Bearden, I’m out in the woods, hacking away at collage. If I could some day bring my work by and show you what I do, it would probably save me a lifetime of mistakes.’ And he put his phone number on the back of the magazine and told me to give him a call exactly two weeks from that day. I’ll tell you, I just floated out of there. I walked on clouds.”

For five and a half years, once or twice a week Thibault lugged his canvases to Bearden’s Long Island City studio. “He’d tear them apart. He’d look at them, shake his head, then come over to me and point to the middle of my forehead and say, ‘You didn’t listen to what I said.’ It was brutal; it really was.” Gradually, though, the quality of Thibault’s images rose to meet his mentor’s expectations. By the end of Bearden’s life, Thibault was working both as his professional assistant and as his frequent collaborator. In 1987, describing a visit to the studio, Schwartzman wrote that Bearden’s former student was now assisting him “with such virtuosity that very few words passed between them: it seemed they could read each other’s minds.”

So complete is Thibault’s familiarity with the Bearden style that in recent years the FBI has been enlisting his help to identify the forgeries that have begun to appear. “I can spot one a mile away,” he says. Thibault was a bit unsettled, in fact, to learn that his talent had made him one of the bureau’s initial suspects. “They said they’d done their investigation on me. And I said, ‘Are those the clicks I’ve been hearing on my phone?’ They laughed. And then I said, ‘Look, if I were making any Beardens on the side, you guys wouldn’t even know about it. You’d never be able to tell them apart.’ And they just shut up.” — Eric McHenry

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