Monday Art Blogging

I suppose I could have begun this week looking at more insane violence--like up in America's Dairyland, or I could come up with something about the pissing contest in Chile.There's the ongoing tragedy in Iraq...or perhaps I could even link to Oyster, whose intrigue with the JFK assassination prompted him to connect to a computer game simulation that's probably being denounced as often as it's being downloaded.

Speaking of denouncing, it's good that there's been an uproar over the utterly despicable attempt by the House of Representatives to open your tax records to partisan snooping, while I don't know if this story about finding the possible location where Ken Bigley and others were beheaded is really something to crow about--I think celebrations would be in order if Bigley and the others had been saved--or at least if some of those responsible for those vicious acts had been captured.

But, instead, I'll begin this week by...checking out art.


In a follow-up to something I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, New York City is honoring Romare Bearden, a North Carolina native who moved to the Big Apple, became a civil servant (hey, that gives ME some hope) and made the most of his spare time, becoming a defining figure in modern art.



There's more on Bearden in the online version of the Nation:

Bearden's work was in the modified Cubist style that had become a sort of lingua franca of Modernism. Always a person of deep culture and wide reading, he struggled in the 1940s to give visual embodiment to texts by Homer and García Lorca, as well as the Bible. The paintings from the Kootz period are quite rewarding and worth looking at closely. The underdrawing is in fact entirely in the Abstract Expressionist mode: It is made up of the swift, whiplike arabesques, with sudden jazzy reversals, that one sees in Pollock or de Kooning. The images that overlay them are constructed of Cubist panes of color, and feel, especially in the García Lorca series, as if they have been inspired by Guernica...

In the culture of the 1950s, abstraction seemed to be the only option for a serious painter, but Bearden ultimately realized that he was not cut out for it. There was accordingly no clear path before him. He was not alone in his frustrations, and though I cannot say that he and Philip Guston were part of one another's lives, they both went through the same sort of crisis...

Bearden's liberation came through a medium that combined collage and photomontage. The deep biographical question, to which I have no answer, is how he found this medium and made it his own.

My own hope is to somehow figure out a way to make it back to NYC while Bearden's work is still in the limelight. In the meantime, hope y'all enjoy a little culture with the normal dose of politics...