“Right now, it is almost impossible to go into a bookstore and not come across a book with Romare Bearden’s art on its cover.” So writes Thelma Golden in the catalogue accompanying “Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections 1964.”[1] As someone who frequents bookstores, I can vouch for her observation. Bearden’s imagery is in demand for books which, as Golden states, “have something to do … with the ‘black experience.’” This is fitting, of course, for Bearden’s great subject was (in his own words) “the validity of my Negro experience.” In his finest work, the collages of his maturity, Bearden created a deeply felt and rigorously complex chronicle of black America. It is a rooted and elegiac art but also a joyous one, embodying African-American life, in all its multiplicity, with pictorial know-how and an unabashed humanity. No wonder book-jacket designers love him.

The quotation marks Golden places around the phrase “black experience” are telling. She knows that generalities can be as constraining as they are convenient, and writes that the “common reduction of his work to a mere visual record of the black experience” is “an underlying problem in the literature on Bearden.” Indeed, attempts at classifying Bearden (or his audience) are antithetical to the spirit of his work. It is important to recall that he wanted “to paint the life of my people as I know it—as passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel painted the life of the Flemish people of his day.” So