30 The New York Review
Romare Bearden: Assembling America
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
An American Odyssey:
The Life and Work
of Romare Bearden
by Mary Schmidt Campbell.
Oxford University Press,
443 pp., $34.95
The Romare Bearden Reader
edited by Robert G. O’Meally.
Duke University Press,
413 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Every year, Congressman John Lewis
has made a pilgrimage to honor the an-
niversary of the campaign to march from
Selma, Alabama, to the state cap-
itol in Montgomery. The journey
began on Sunday, March 7, 1965,
when Lewis, then twenty- five
years old and chairman of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
ing Committee (SNCC), was se-
verely beaten and nearly killed
by state troopers as he led six
hundred peaceful protesters in
a march that started at a church
in Selma and was forcibly inter-
cepted by police on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge, named after the
Confederate general and grand
dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
During the month of what
culminated in a roughly fifty-
mile protest, the path of Amer-
ica changed. African-Americans
made up more than half the pop-
ulation of Selma’s Dallas County,
yet violently enforced voter sup-
pression meant that only 2 per-
cent of African- Americans in
that county managed to make
it through the registration pro-
cess to exercise this legal right.
Numbers can be abstract. As
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s research
found, John Lewis’s great- great-
grandfather registered to vote
after emancipation in 1867, but
due to the backlash of Jim Crow
rule, no one else in Lewis’s fam-
ily could do so for nearly one hundred
years. The coverage of Bloody Sun-
day, as the Selma violence came to be
known, in print and on television gal-
vanized the nation and helped lead to
the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights
Act that summer. After the passage of
that bill, Congressman Lewis and his
parents could vote in Alabama.
At the end of Lewis’s most recent
pilgrimage from Selma to Montgom-
ery, he wanted to speak at a gathering
with other congressional leaders about
the catalytic role of images for the his-
tory of justice in this country. I was sur-
prised to receive the invitation to join
him for this talk and expected that we
would want to discuss the indispens-
able craft of civil rights photographers,
from Spider Martin to Danny Lyon
(who was a roommate of Lewis’s in
the early 1960s in Atlanta, where they
worked together on SNCC). But Lewis
also wanted to speak about something
else—how artists Jacob Lawrence,
Charles White, and especially Lewis’s
friend Romare Bearden contributed
to the long arc of the civil rights move-
ment by changing the narrative about
African-American life. Why would
Bearden’s work have such resonance
with Lewis’s journey? A new biography
on the artist offers a revealing answer.
An American Odyssey: The Life
and Work of Romare Bearden by
Mary Schmidt Campbell, the distin-
guished art historian, former direc-
tor of the Studio Museum in Harlem,
and president of Spelman College, tells
the captivating story of how Bearden’s
heritage, education, community, and
politics informed the evolution of his
artistic career. It addresses a founda-
tional question: What is the role of the
artist in the history of race and rights
in this country? Campbell opens with
a brief reflection on the work of Fred-
erick Douglass. Before the New NegroMovement and the civil rights move-
ment, it was Douglass who argued that
images—specifically, the new medium
of photography—had the potential to
help America see itself more critically
and capaciously. In lectures delivered
during the Civil War, Doug lass argued
that pictures and images could help
America out of its democratic crisis. As
the most photographed American man
in the nineteenth century, Douglass
knew that photographs could inaugu-
rate counter narratives that expand our
notion of who counts, who belongs in
society. His was a new argument about
the power of representational justice—
he asserted that being represented
justly was a crucial tenet of democracy.
At the end of one speech, Douglass said
that, over a century later, others might
develop these ideas. Bearden, who rec-
ognized the potency and complexity of
images at an entirely different moment
in American history, is the kind of fig-
ure Douglass had in mind. How this
came to be, but almost didn’t, and how
his family prepared him for the ordeal
and triumph of it all, is laid out fully in
An American Odyssey.To many in the field, Bearden is as
important as Picasso; others still needan introduction. I could not teach many
of my art history courses without dis-
cussing Bearden, but I can never as-
sume that students will know his work.
Campbell does not concern herself
with the fact that his is not, as she says,
the “household name” that some argue
it should be. Derek Walcott, writing
about his friend, did not mince words:When people talk of the great
American artists I am irritated
that they hardly mention Bearden.
His name should be called along
with people like Jackson Pol-lock—as he was clearly one of the
greatest American artists of the
twentieth century. And of course,
he is left out because he was Black.
We know that.While Campbell does not dwell
on the obstacles that Bearden faced,
she does offer one example. In 1961
president- elect John F. Kennedy
worked from the Carlyle Hotel in New
York City. On the wall of his suite hung
Bearden’s abstract painting Golden
Dawn, a placement that Bearden’s then
gallerist and dealer, Arne Ekstrom,
had worked hard to secure. Campbell
notes that Bearden’s name was left off
the official list of those represented by
the Samuel Kootz gallery two decades
before. “Kootz, when interviewed years
later for the Archives of American Art,
lists all of the artists who exhibited in
his gallery during the 1940s—except
Romare Bearden,” Campbell writes.
What could seem like a small omission
is a signal of a larger pattern.
“To tell Romare Bearden’s story,”
Campbell writes, “his personal odys-
sey, is to recount as well the story of
how that world came to be.” Campbell
crafts this story as a multi generational
tale. She begins by describing how
Bearden’s great- grandfather HenryKennedy, or “H. B.” as he was known,
began working as a servant for Wood-
row Wilson’s father. He became a suc-
cessful businessman, landowner, and
with Bearden’s great- grandmother
Rosa, a homeowner, when they moved
to the virtually all- black third ward
of Charlotte, North Carolina, where
“Romie” was born in 1911. Bearden’s
parents, Howard and Bessye—who
grew up around the turn of the twenti-
eth century with racial segregation and
the violence of the Black Codes of the
South—soon became part of the Great
Migration that changed the hue and
tone of American cities. Yet we
know from the influential work
of Sherrilyn Ifill, Bryan Steven-
son, and others that the north-
ward migratory movement was
fueled not only by opportunity,
but also by fear of lynchings
and other forms of extrajudicial
violence—retribution for resis-
tance to Jim Crow rule.
Campbell points out that
Bearden came of age at a time
when the political efforts to dis-
enfranchise African-Americans
used the arts and the printing
press as weapons. “Visual nar-
ratives were etching themselves
into national consciousness,”
Campbell writes. Widely dis-
seminated prints, engravings,
and cartoons spread narra-
tives that had reduced African-
American families to “allegories
of sloth, or worse, a threat to the
moral order.” Bearden and his
parents left Charlotte for New
York City, eventually settling
permanently in Harlem in 1915.
Bessye Bearden, far more so-
cial than her husband, was a civic
leader and fixture of the Harlem
Renaissance, and Romare grew
up in the vibrant heart of the
movement; artists and writers
including Zora Neale Hurston,
Countee Cullen, and Lang ston Hughes
came to salons hosted by his mother in
their home. The young Beardens lived
near the Lafayette Theater, and were
friendly with their neighbors Hannah
Arendt and Heinrich Blücher.
Campbell chronicles Bearden’s
childhood in Harlem, and the earlier
shorter stays in Pittsburgh (where he
also briefly lived, with his maternal
grandparents) and Charlotte. He was
a careful and curious observer of the
different ways of life in each place,
and the varying experiences of these
three homes would later figure in his
art. After studying at Pennsylvania’s
Lincoln University and Boston Uni-
versity, Bearden transferred to New
York University as an art education
major and began drawing cartoons for
magazines like W. E. B. Du Bois’s The
Crisis, for which he also wrote, and en-
tered debates about the stakes of black
representation. He was part of the Har-
lem Artist’s Guild, worked with Au-
gusta Savage at her Studio of Arts and
Crafts, and in 1936 joined the informal
but critically influential 306 studio on
West 141st Street. At the Art Students
League he studied with George Grosz,
who had recently fled Germany after
the Nazis withdrew his citizenship be-
cause of his political caricatures. GroszRomare Bearden: The Street, 12 7/ 8 x 15 3 / 8 inches, 1964; from Bearden’s ‘Projections’ seriesMilwaukee^ Art^Museum/John^R.^ G
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