Romare Bearden’s long and varied career has generated a weighty shelf of art-historical scholarship, but various aspects of his life remain elusive. In May 2011, The New Criterion published the outstanding essay “Romare Bearden at 100” by David Yezzi, who begins by asserting that “Little enough is certain about the painter Romare Bearden (1911–88) that even the pronunciation of his name remains unclear.” At that time there was as yet one biography, Myron Schwartzman’s interview-reliant coffee-table book, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (1990). Now there are more, including An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden (2018) by Mary Schmidt Campbell, an art historian who knew Bearden, and a new volume, Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South by Glenda Gilmore, a professor emerita of history at Yale. While each of these new biographes is useful in its way, both have modest ambitions—Campbell’s has 308 pages of narrative; Gilmore’s has 114.

Yezzi’s 2011 assertion mostly holds true, despite the advances made by these books. Bearden’s name, the pronunciation of which (roam-a-ree) was never really a mystery, still gets mispronounced all the time—something Gilmore seems to excuse, even as one of her discoveries is the unearthing of important details around the origin of the name. It has long been known that Bearden was named after his great-grandfather’s friend Paul Fred Romare. Gilmore has found that Henry Kennedy knew two men named Paul Fred Romare: