ROMARE BEARDEN IN THE HOMELAND OF HIS IMAGINATION

A reassessment of one of America’s greatest 20th-century artists and his role in defining Black experience.

In this incisive study of Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Gilmore, a professor of history emerita at Yale, pays close attention to both the significance of the artist’s connections to his extended family and the influence of his extensive formal training. Part of the Great Migration, Bearden’s parents fled the dangers and injustices of Jim Crow with their young son, relocating from North Carolina to New York City. The status of Blacks in the South became a lasting theme for Bearden, who continually returned to his childhood memories as he sought a representative vision of Black life in America. Gilmore frames much of Bearden’s oeuvre in relation to those memories, which sometimes deviate from the historical record and often suggest the construction of a mythic past. “As he created paintings and collages,” writes the author, “he often did not know what was real, what was partially real, and what was a dream. This creative conundrum drove his artistic expression and sparked his imagination.” In tracing the arc of Bearden’s artistic development, Gilmore emphasizes the importance of his training at schools such as New York University and the Sorbonne and his immersion in a range of styles and movements. He experimented with cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, social realism, abstract expressionism, and, from the late 1950s onward, in what became his most celebrated mode, collage. Gilmore revealingly sets individual works in the context of Bearden’s own recollections, his engagement with and deviations from particular conventions, and the broader cultural milieu in which he lived. A late work such as Family (1986), for instance, is understood in relation to the family photograph (and the complex interpersonal dynamics) that inspired it, along with techniques associated with artists such as Matisse and Cézanne that Bearden creatively adapted.

A thoughtful, illuminating investigation of Bearden’s place in—and shaping of—20th-century American art.