Culture Friday

The New York Times reviews a Romare Bearden retrospective at the Whitney Museum:

IN July 1963, a month before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, Romare Bearden met with a group of other black artists in his studio on Canal Street to talk about what they should do for civil rights. "Western society, and particularly that of America, is gravely ill, and a major symptom is the American treatment of the Negro," Bearden said. "The artistic expression of this culture concentrates on themes of `absurdity' and `anti-art,' which provide further evidence of its ill-health."

It was his idea that the group, which called itself Spiral (based on the Archimedean idea of a spiral growing in all directions at once, outward and upward), work together making collages. The plan didn't catch on, but it abruptly set Bearden, who was then 51, an abstract painter slow to find his own voice, along a new path.

The collages that he made until his death in 1988 are among the glories of American art. They now occupy a floor of the Whitney Museum. This is the Bearden retrospective that attracted mobs of admirers at the National Gallery in Washington, where it was organized and first presented. As in Washington, it has inspired a slew of events — lectures, concerts and more exhibitions, at the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. Bearden, a beloved and influential figure in the history of art and black culture in New York, has finally come home...

His goal (this, among other things, he shared with Jacob Lawrence) was not "the Negro in America in terms of propaganda," as he put it. It was "to reveal through pictorial complexities the richness of a life I know." He explained further: "I do not need to go looking for `happenings,' the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dalí, Beckett, Ionesco nor any of the others could have thought possible; and to see these things I did not need to do more than look out of my studio window."

Check out the entire article, then, if you feel like it, use the search engine of your choice to find out more about this incredible artist. Both my sister and one of my best friends are Beardon fans--said friend once got to see a retrospective of his work in Winston-Salem--and while the best I've managed is a few collages at various museums (and whatever I can find on the internet), I'm certainly impressed. Here's one of his paintings featured in The Times's accompanying slide show:

This looks like it could've been influenced by Matisse.