It’s often the case these days that one’s pleasure at seeing an admired artist receive deserved recognition in the form of a museum retrospective is tempered by the way in which that effort is undertaken. Sometimes one’s disappointment involves only the omission of important, or favorite, works. On other occasions, however, it goes further, extending to reservations about the very way in which that artist is presented, about what we are asked to make of him.

This is very much the case with Romare Bearden (1912-88), a retrospective of whose work was shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem last summer and is currently touring the country.¹ (It’s been Bearden season. Last month the ACA Galleries mounted its own Bearden show drawn from the artist’s estate, including the marvelous Family Dinner [1968] shown in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1971 Bearden retrospective.)

Bearden was one of those artists who have always eluded easy categorization.

Bearden was one of those artists who have always eluded easy categorization. During the 1960s, when painting dominated the art scene, he chose to work in (and dramatically re-invented) collage, a genre that had not been operating at the center of artistic thought for nearly halfa century.

He invoked personal experience and reminiscence at a time when Pop and Minimalism had made irony and aloofness the common currency of art. This gave his work a quasi-representational character that stood at odds with the prevailing climate of abstraction. One indication