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exposed Bearden to the work of paint-
ers like Goya and Brueghel, and to the
potential of politically subversive art.
After graduating, Bearden continued
to pursue art at night while working as
a social worker in Harlem with black
migrants from the South who were
dealing with impossibly cramped living
conditions and abysmal medical care.
He began painting images of the black
working class, and managed to con-
tinue to paint during his stateside ser-
vice in World War II. After the war he
moved away from depicting the strug-
gles of black Americans, a shift that
Campbell attributes to the disenchant-
ment he felt after the segregation and
racism of the army, as well as to what
he experienced as a rejection
by some in his community
back home, who found his
portrayals harsh and ques-
tioned the authenticity of his
representing these struggles
from the vantage point of a
middle- class life. He turned
to painting abstract works
that attended to “universal
themes of death, rebirth, and
war,” Campbell writes.
During and after his mili-
tary service, Bearden often
worked out of a studio right
above the Apollo Theater
on West 125th Street in
Harlem, which he kept for
twenty years. Ralph Ellison
would go to Bearden’s studio
in the 1940s to watch him
paint, just as he was writing
Invisible Man (1952). Lang-
ston Hughes and photogra-
pher Roy DeCarava created
their monumental collabora-
tion, Sweet Flypaper of Life
(1955), with funding from a
Guggenheim fellowship for
which Bearden served as a
recommender.
In 1950 he spent a forma-
tive five months in Paris,
where he studied with the
philosopher Gaston Bache-
lard at L’Institut d’art et d’archéologie
at the Sorbonne. After hours, he vis-
ited the studio of the late painter Henry
Ossawa Tanner, met the writers Rich-
ard Wright and Albert Murray, and had
dinner with James Baldwin (who read
from what would become Go Tell It on
the Mountain after cooking potatoes in
a pan that was, in Bearden’s memory,
big enough to accommodate a person).
Back in New York, Bearden returned to
his job as a social worker and married
Nanette Rohan, a model with an agency
devoted to addressing the media’s re-
ductive and disparaging images of black
women, and who would “change the
course of his life,” as Campbell writes,
and help him through a breakdown. He
continued to paint large, abstract can-
vases and began working with Ekstrom,
who hoped that Bearden would pursue
another direction.
The path was not straight. While
Bearden spent his childhood at the
heart of the New Negro Movement and
the Harlem Renaissance, Campbell
writes, “it would take Bearden nearly
thirty years for him to discover what
his past had given him.” It was during
the civil rights movement that he would
return to directly engaging with narra-
tives of myth, rituals, race, and rights
in his art.
What should art by an African-
American artist be? It was a question
that resulted in public debate by lead-
ing intellectuals and artists such as
Hughes, Alain Locke, and Du Bois,
and that still echoes today. What pre-
cipitated the debate is what made
Lewis march—the absence of civil
rights meant protests of all kinds, in-
cluding through culture. Artistic ex-
pression increasingly became a way
to claim civic belonging during a pe-
riod of segregation. As early as 1934,
Bearden had entered directly into this
fray with his essay “The Negro Artist
and Modern Art” for Opportunity: A
Journal of Negro Life. In it, he argued
that the “calling of the Negro artist”
was to be genuinely, deeply connected
to the everyday lives of people and de-voted to addressing whatever the social
or racial questions of the day might be.
The artistmust not be content with merely
recording a scene as a machine.
He must enter wholeheartedly
into the situation which he wishes
to convey.... I don’t mean by this
that the Negro artist should con-
fine himself only to such scenes as
lynchings, or policemen clubbing
workers.... If it is the race ques-
tion, the social struggle, or what-
ever else that needs expression, it
is to that the artist must surrender
himself.Bearden had no interest in his work
functioning as propaganda. For him,
the impact of a work of art was bound
to an artist’s discovery of his own idiom
and vision of the world.
In 1963, inspired by the March on
Washington, Bearden hosted a gather-
ing of black artists in his fifth-floor loft
on Canal Street (where he’d moved in
the Fifties) in New York. The group,
which became known as Spiral, in-
cluded Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff,
Charles Alston, and Emma Amos (the
only woman), and was founded with
the understanding that abstractioncould still contribute to a discourse
of race and rights. (At the time, black
audiences generally felt that overt
symbols of protest and political en-
gagement were more meaningful than
abstract art.) Spiral provided a space
for its members to discuss inequality in
the art world and to debate ideas about
aesthetics. It also served as a forum
for “discussing the commitment of the
negro artist in the present struggle for
civil liberties,” as Bearden recorded in
his minutes for a meeting.
To one of Spiral’s meetings, Bearden
brought a bagful of cutouts from maga-
zines and journals—faces, figures, and
objects from magazines like Life and
Ebony, as well as images from an Afri-
can art journal—hoping to encourage a
collective project. The idea didn’t take
hold. Nevertheless, as art his-
torians Kobena Mercer and
Rachael DeLue have shown,
this moment was formative
for Bearden. His experi-
mentation with these scraps
would lead to his first col-
lages. In The Evening Meal
of Prophet Peterson (1964),
one of his earliest works in
this style, which he contrib-
uted to the Congress on Ra-
cial Equality for an auction,
we see his new form of visual
release—a cacophony of in-
fluences all coexisting on the
same flat, Cubist- inspired
plane. A male figure sits to
eat with his torso facing the
food while his face, made
from another piece of col-
lage, faces the viewer. A fe-
male figure serves food; she
has three faces spliced—two
black and one white—her
hair garlanded with flowers.
This new form of collage so
distorted black bodies that
Ellison found them “dis-
turbing.” Yet through this
distortion, Bearden found
means of pictorial declama-
tion. He ultimately enlarged
the scale of these collages
and rendered them as
black-and-white photographic works.
Ekstrom noticed one of them rolled
up in the corner of Bearden’s studio
and suggested they be called Projec-
tions for his upcoming Cordier and
Ekstrom Gallery show. Bearden exhib-
ited twenty- one of them to widespread
critical acclaim in the fall of 1964.
Projections are large, billboard-
scaled collage works that convey pub-
lic turmoil and uplift within American
life, set in cotton fields, the South,
Pittsburgh, and Harlem. Bearden cre-
ated them by photographing source
material with photo- sensitive paper,
collaging various elements, and enlarg-
ing the images. This new practice of
manipulation to create alternate visual
narratives signaled a shift from ear-
lier forays into wholesale abstraction
and figurative painting. This pictorial
language, built from a response to the
political moment, defined the works for
which he became best known.Campbell emphasizes that the civil
rights movement “attempted to forge
a new way of being American, to open
up the single narrative to multiple sto-
ries”; finding a form for this idea was
Bearden’s conceptual gift. His work
took contrasts—between cultures, be-tween people—and eradicated these
lines of division. Consider his Mother
and Child (1971). Natural perspective
is distorted—a head and torso of an
Afro- diasporic figure is next to half
of a white female face, while hands
that seem to be cut out from a Renais-
sance painting are placed alongside
part of a white child’s face apparently
from a modern photograph. He was
gathering photographs, prints, slashes
of texture and color, with a modernist
technique guided by improvisation, to
let cultures coexist visually as they ac-
tually do in life. “Bearden’s meaning is
identical with his method,” Ellison fa-
mously wrote. He pulled, juxtaposed,
and layered a range of images from,
for example, African diasporic art, the
Dutch Golden Age, and the Harlem
Renaissance to communicate the idea
of multiplicity, that what many consider
discrete cultures are not as distinct as is
often thought.
The series encompassed a whole
visual world—“unearthed and recon-
structed,” Campbell writes. It was “as
if he was telling a story in terms of
scale,” as Walcott put it, presenting our
layered, myriad selves to the viewer
all at once. For Projections, Bearden
didn’t choose between representation
and abstraction; instead, he “made
the representational profoundly ab-
stract,” Campbell says. “Images that
could easily be trapped in the provin-
cial precincts of race spiral outward,
explosively, dislocated by the clash of
multiple heritages.”
Campbell is forthright in addressing
what became a central part of Bearden’s
body of work during these years: his
often explicit representation of black
female figures. After coming into his
distinctive style, Bearden continually
returned to sacred and sensual female
forms—including the recurring “conjur
woman,” a black vernacular archetype
with the power to conjure, to transform,
and to transport—and made a number
of works depicting regal black women,
such as She- Ba (1970) and Palm Sun-
day Procession (circa 1967). In these
Bearden achieved, as Campbell sees it,
a classicization of black female bodies.
Campbell, who organized her first mu-
seum show in 1975 of Bearden’s works
depicting women, salutes the scholars
and curators, from art historian Ju-
dith Wilson to curator Lowery Stokes
Sims, who have given this topic com-
prehensive treatment. Sims astutely
set Bearden in the company of Degas,
arguing that he “makes us complicit
in his voyeurism,” showing us women
“in intimate settings or in private mo-
ments,” and in positions of power in
heroic myths. Campbell notes that
Wilson directly addressed what many
had missed: that “Bearden managed
to transcend the widespread stigmati-
zation of Black sexuality,” as Wilson
wrote, and purposefully contrasted the
exalted and the “low- down.”
By the 1970s, Bearden was at the
height of recognition during his life-
time—he received awards, commis-
sions, and a first retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
in 1971, the second-ever retrospective
for an African- American artist at the
museum. (The first had been in 1937
for the folk sculptor William Edmund-
son.) Calvin Tomkins, in a 1977 New
Yorker profile, wrote that “Bearden
is generally referred to as America’s
leading black painter.” But Tomkins
also rightly pointed out that much ofRomare Bearden: Mother and Child, 24 x 18 1/ 2 inches, 1971Private^ Collection/BillHodges^ Gallery,^ NewYork