Painting: Touching at the Core

“An artist,” says Romare Bearden, “is an art lover who finds that in all the art he sees, something is missing. To touch at the core of what he feels is missing, to put there what needs to be there, becomes the center of his life’s work.”

For Bearden, a heavyset, light-skinned Negro, what was missing was an adequate portrayal of the worlds he had grown up in and knew best—the farm life of the sharecropper in the South, where he was born, the tense, raucous life of his boyhood in Harlem, where his father was a city health inspector, and Boston, where as a youth Bearden played pro baseball in the Negro leagues. The 15 works on display at Manhattan’s Cordier & Ekstrom gallery are meant to fill in the gap. They range from scenes outside sharecroppers’ shanties (see color opposite) and springtime in the cotton fields to a portrait of a gangland adolescent returning home in Harlem.

In material as well as topic, they are timely, for the smoothly lacquered collages are built of magazine scraps and subway billboard posters painted, pasted together and occasionally combined by photomontage. Nonetheless, the pictures illustrate the difference between journalism and art, for Bearden brings to his panoramas a poet’s fantasy, a professional’s technique, and a philosopher’s understanding of reality.

Sons & Suns. Bearden, 53, has spent 30 years developing his technique. In the late 1930s he studied under Satirist George Grosz at Manhattan’s Art Students League, next fell under the combined influences of Picasso, García Lorca and Hemingway (a 1946 show of gaudy oils and watercolors was inspired by García Lorca’s lament for a bullfighter). In the 1950s, he painted in Paris, took a turn in Manhattan as a professional songwriter but periodically returned to canvases of Negro life. He began to use collage only in the 1960s.

What makes the final product so fresh and captivating is the skill with which Bearden employs his polyglot artistic heritage. His jigsaw Afro-American faces borrow their cubistic profiles from Picasso; yet, as Bearden says, Picasso in turn was inspired by African masks. Bearden also cadges tricks from Bosch, Brueghel and the neo-Dadaists, pasting a tiny sun in a woman’s eye as she greets her returning juvenile-delinquent son (pun intended) in The Return of the Prodigal Son. All this intermingling has the effect of broadening his pictures from the specific into the universal. It takes no special knowledge of slumland to appreciate the irony of a startlingly adult little girl licking an ice-cream cone amid hostile stares in a Harlem Summertime (“They grow up fast in that part of town”). Finally, what is true for his Negro subjects becomes true for every man. With this judgment, Bearden is in profound agreement. “My subject,” he says “is people. They just happen to turn out to be Negro.”