‘The Art of Romare Bearden’ at the
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York.
October 14, 2004-January 9, 2004
The Romare Bearden retrospective that Ruth Fine organized for the
National Gallery of Art has now arrived at the Whitney Museum of
American Art where it is playing to large, boisterous crowds—not
surprisingly, for even in its rare dark moments, Bearden’s is an
art of powerful sensuality and considerable emotional uplift.
Although the show has traveled to two other cities since opening
in Washington last fall and has still one stop remaining (the
High Museum, beginning in January) there is something
particularly appropriate about the Whitney as a venue. This isn’t
simply because Bearden (who was born in 1911 and died in 1988)
spent his entire career in New York, where he made collages
depicting contemporary black life in Harlem and the rural south,
as well as more exotic subjects such as mysticism and witchcraft.
It’s because Bearden’s art answers the question implicit in the
museum’s name, “What’s ‘American’ about ‘American art’?” Like
many American artists and writers before him, he steeped himself
in the culture of Europe—in his case the pictorial
culture—internalizing it and refashioning it into a language
capable of giving voice to a uniquely American experience, in his
case, that of a black living through the socio-political
conflicts and transformations of his time. (There is an excellent
essay in the catalogue by the National Gallery curator Sarah Kennel on
Bearden’s sources.)
Bearden’s language