Abstract

An Artist Beyond Category

The article discusses the history surrounding the work of artist Romare Bearden. Crossing from the first to the second room of the generous retrospective of Romare Bearden's art, on view through January 9, 2005, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is not simply to move from one phase to another in Bearden's development; it is to leave one art historical period for another. Bearden was successful in both periods--in the 1940s of the first room, he showed with Samuel Kootz, whose gallery was dedicated to advanced art of the time; and in the 1960s of the second room, he was one of the stars of the important gallery Cordier and Ekstrom. But his work of the two periods was deeply different. Bearden abruptly became Bearden around 1964--a miraculous year for him as an artist, when he broke through into a mode of representation distinctively his own and entered the calm waters of a marvelously personal style that was never again challenged, from without or within. Bearden was liberated by Pop to find his own language, and the urgency of black liberation gave him his subject. He became a leading artist of the black experience. The train is a recurring symbol in Bearden's art, perhaps because it was a central symbol of the black migration, carrying people between North and South, city and country, as in August Wilson's great play The Piano Lesson, whose title is drawn from one of Bearden's paintings.