32 The New York Review
his work questioned what, precisely,
that term might mean. “He confounds
the taxonomies of conventional art,”
Campbell writes, “and it is tempting to
see him as an artistic Everyman. His
beginnings were rooted in a sharply
divided American culture, and recon-
ciling these divisions was one source of
his artistic restlessness.”
Bearden also worked as a researcher,
chronicler, author, editor, and curator.
In 1967 he co-organized, with Car-
roll Greene, a wide- ranging exhibition
of fifty- five black artists called “The
Evolution of Afro- American Artists:
1800–1950,” at Harlem’s City Col-
lege, for which he and Greene located
works that hadn’t been exhibited for
years, and mounted a monumental re-
search effort to write the catalog (dif-
ficult because many of the artists they
were exhibiting did not have extensive
archives).
“Black culture is involved far more
into the whole cultural fabric of Ameri-
can life than we realize,” said Bearden,
leading the 1969 roundtable “The
Black Artist in America” at the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, which featured
Sam Gilliam Jr., Richard Hunt, Jacob
Lawrence, Tom Lloyd, William Wil-
liams, and Hale Woodruff. “But it is up
to us to find out the contribution that
we have made to the whole cultural
fabric of American life. No one else is
going to do it.”Bearden’s work has inspired the an-
thology The Romare Bearden Reader,
in which the artist’s own groundbreak-
ing essays sit alongside those by schol-
ars and writers including Elizabeth
Alexander, Ralph Ellison, Farah Jas-
mine Griffin, Toni Morrison, Kobena
Mercer, Albert Murray, Richard Pow-
ell, and August Wilson—making the
volume “unmistakably literary,” as edi-
tor Robert O’Meally w r ites in his intro -
duction. The collection underscores the
rich exchange—influences and transla-
tions, across media and generations—
that has blossomed between Bearden
and the artists who have followed him.
Two essays in The Romare Bearden
Reader, by Morrison and by Alexan-
der, complicate an interpretation of
Bearden’s use of collage as a meta-
phor for social and racial fragmenta-
tion, arguing instead that it indicates
a mode of understanding race as part
of a layering and a “refusal ever to
be only one thing.” Alexander argues
that Bearden is a significant “theorist”
about the “complexities of African
American identity” as well as an artist
without whom it is “difficult to imag-
ine twentieth- century American Art.”Morrison confesses that her own writ-
ing process is “responsive to the work
that Romare Bearden does,” and con-
siders the “layered exercise” of her
work as one that “has more elements
in common with painting than with
literature.”
O’Meally sees Bearden as caught up
in the eternal broader search for what
it means to know oneself: “What does
it mean to be ‘modern’? ‘Black’? Or
‘American’? What does it mean to be
an ‘artist’?... These were Bearden’s
touchstone questions.” Campbell sees
such questions as inextricably linked
to Bearden’s role as a leader in the
civil rights movement, and to his abil-
ity to find a unique visual idiom that
could also communicate and be part of
politics.
Scholars from Campbell to Alex-
ander make clear how many artists,
writers, scholars, and educators—of
all kinds—are in Bearden’s lineage.
In Campbell’s biography, Bearden’s
handwritten letters to her are included
as an appendix (they began a corre-
spondence when she was in graduate
school), and show that he graciously
and methodically disseminated infor-
mation to many young artists in a kind
of pollination. Likewise, Alexander, in
Poetry and Possibility (2007), tells of
cold- calling Bearden in college withquestions about his work, and says he
responded with generosity and wisdom.
Congressman Lewis has made many
other pilgrimages: he saw nearly every
version of Bearden’s first museum ret-
rospective when it traveled from At-
lanta to Memphis, with many stops
between. When I asked Lewis about
him, stories began to pour out, and
he confessed that he was asked once
to part with a work by Bearden for a
fund raiser. Generous as he is, he po-
litely refused.
Bearden’s work as an artist and leader
shows how the multiplicity of the black
experience is central to understand-
ing America. In 1964 Bearden told the
critic Dore Ashton, “As a Negro, I do
not need to go looking for ‘happenings,’
the absurd, or the surreal, because
I have seen things that neither Dalí,
Beckett, nor Ionesco, nor any of the
others could have thought possible.”
If Walt Whitman could collapse the
world with words, Bearden could col-
lapse it with form. Campbell’s biography
masterfully illuminates how Bearden’s
life and work was put in the service of
the mission of our age, how grasping the
method behind his practice allows us to
understand the promise of America—
a collage approach with an ecumenical
embrace of co existing difference that
honors all of human life. QIn October 1922 Conservative mem-
bers of Parliament voted to fight the
next election as a separate party, call-
ing time on their coalition with the
Liberals, with whom they had gov-
erned Britain since 1915. David Lloyd
George resigned immediately as prime
minister, never to hold office again.
Over the next twenty-four months,
there were three general elections, four
governments, and four prime minis-
ters. So the recent turbulence of Brit-
ish politics, with its three elections and
three prime ministers since May 2015,
wasn’t u nprecedented. I n October 19 2 4
the Conservatives under Stanley Bald-
win swept away the first-ever Labour
government in a landslide, and in De-
cember 2019 the Conservatives under
Boris Johnson likewise routed the La-
bour Party. Baldwin was educated at
Harrow and Cambridge and was at one
time president of the Classical Associa-
tion; Johnson went to Eton and Oxford
and likes to parade the classics.
And there the comparisons end.
Baldwin had damned Lloyd George—
“A dynamic force is a very terrible
thing; it may crush you, but it is not
necessarily right”—in words that could
apply to Johnson, who has been com-
pared to Disraeli and even Churchill
but may resemble Lloyd George more
than either. “His rule was dynamic and
sordid at the same time,” A.J.P. Tay-
lor wrote of “LG”; “he repaid loyalty
with disloyalty,” and, not least, he was
“the first prime minister... since the
Duke of Grafton [in the 1760s] to live
openly with his mistress,” until now.
“A very terrible thing” describes how
his enemies and critics see Johnson,
but he has certainly crushed them. By
backing Leave in the 2016 referendum
on British membership in the Euro-
pean Union, seizing the leadership of
the Conservative Party last summer,
precipitating an election, and then win-
ning a large majority, he has achieved
total command of domestic politics.
In October Johnson called for Brit-
ain “to be released from the subjection
of a parliament that has outlived its
usefulness,” which one commentator
called “appallingly fascistic” words,but they worked. The parliamentary
stalemate of the past three years is bro-
ken. Any forlorn hopes of somehow re-
versing the result of the referendum are
finished, the Brexit legislation has been
passed, and on January 31, after forty-
seven years “in Europe,” the United
Kingdom leaves the European Union.How did this startling turn of events
come about? In 2015 David Cameronand the Tories confounded the pundits
by winning a parliamentary majority.
As I wrote in these pages at the time, a
real portent at that election was the rise
of the United Kingdom Independence
Party (UKIP), the right-wing Europho-
bic party led by Nigel Farage.^1 UKIP
has only ever elected one MP to Parlia-
ment, but in 2015 it won 12.6 percent of
the popular vote, and its candidates ran
second in 120 districts, forty-four of
them held by Labour. Farage has never
himself won a parliamentary seat, but
he has some claim to being the most in-
fluential British politician of our time.
Even so, the Parliament elected in
2015, like those elected in 2010 and in
2017, contained a clear majority of MPs
who supported remaining in the EU,
including most Tory members.
Before the 2015 election, Cameron
had promised to hold a referendum on
EU membership, as a tactical maneu-
ver to neutralize UKIP and the noisy
Europhobes in his party. In 1975 Har-
old Wilson had done the same: two
years after the United Kingdom had
joined the European Economic Com-
munity (EEC), he held, and easily won,
a referendum to confirm its member-
ship as a way of dealing with divisions
in his Labour Party. In 20 04 Tony Blair
announced out of the blue and to the
horror of his Europhile supporters
that a referendum would be held on
the new European Constitution. This
was the result of a private deal he had
made with the relentlessly Europhobic
Rupert Murdoch, in return for the con-
tinuing support of Murdoch’s tabloidThe Opportunist Triumphant
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Boris Johnson(^1) “Britain: The Implosion,” June 25,
2015.