Romare Bearden: Odysseus Returned

Abstract

Romare Bearden's best known work-his glowing, jewel-toned, deeply evocative collage and assemblage paintings-is an art of walls and the tearing down of walls. Perspective is meted out in small, precious glimpses. As our eyes move across the picture plane, we encounter by turns the suggestion of depth, the vertigo of a sudden glance into an abyss, the closed stare of a face transformed into a mask, all of which refuse us the familiar resolution of commonplace proportion and balance. Instead, artist and viewer collaborate in a subtly disorienting psychic journey beyond the literal reality of the scenes and people that Bearden depicts. We move with him beyond the barrier wall of the looming foreground to the realm of myth, dream, and childhood memory. There colors are purer, more harmonious than they can ever be again; there light falls more glowing, more tactile than in our waking experience. The paradoxes of time and space, of race and culture, of history and experience, are revealed in all their ancient complexities. They are not resolved; they are, as in all truly great art, contained and transcended. .. .[W]e must build our mansions on old mother form and technique-but in a new way, Bearden wrote in 1950.1 Among those painters he took as his masters of form and technique were Duccio and Pintoricchio. In their work Bearden contemplated the intricate geometry of celestial hierarchies arrayed in gilded vertical splendor. He studied the precipitous diagonals in paintings of ancient fortified cities whose walls barely contain the teeming crowds that re-enact the old Biblical dramas. His mind journeyed through the kaleidoscopic interiors which frame scenes of religious mystery. In the work of Brueghel, Bearden found a narrative impulse akin to his own. Like Brueghel, he was a product of the urban, educated middle class. Both men, however, were moved by the power of rural landscapes. Both drew on the energy, dignity, and creative resourcefulness of the lives of country people to provide the basis for some of their greatest work. The influence of Vermeer is suggested in Bearden's glowing interior scenes of women at daily occupations. Approached through a geometric maze of walls and curtains, their physical and emotional contexts are defined by the alternately bold and subtle play of light from various sources, some seen, some hidden. Other artists whose work proved influential in the development of Bearden's distinctive style and vision were Ingres, Delacroix, Rembrandt, and Mondrian. Copying their work to develop and refine his hand and eye, Bearden plunged into their profound explorations of the tensions between surface and depth, between light and darkness, between the eloquent power of stillness and the seduction of sensuous, even violent, motion.