Bearden was born in Charlotte, N.C., but his parents migrated north to Harlem when he was 3. His father, Howard, worked on the railroads and as a sanitation inspector. Mother Bessye was a politically active society correspondent for the black newspaper The Chicago Defender, and the likes of Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and Duke Ellington frequently dropped by the Bearden household. In 1935 Bearden earned a degree in education from N.Y.U. He started out in art by drawing editorial cartoons (they’re quite good–simple, bold and heartfelt) and taking night classes at the Arts Students League with the German expressionist painter George Grosz.
To keep a roof over his head Bearden had to labor 34 years–with time out for military service during World War II–as a caseworker for the city’s Department of Social Services. It might have been the demands of that 9-to-5 job, or the astonishment he experienced on a six-month sojourn to Paris under the GI Bill in 1950, or his allergic reaction to the abstraction-crazy art scene that greeted him upon his return to the United States, but Bearden was in his 40s before he found his own style as an artist. In 1963, he suggested to fellow members of the black artists’ group Spiral that to support Martin Luther King Jr.’s upcoming march on Washington they should collaborate on a huge collage. His colleagues demurred, and Bearden took his folder of cutouts home, to work on alone.
It was like Louis Armstrong’s picking up the trumpet. Bearden poured–or rather, pasted–into his art not only the contents of his life (early memories of the rural South, a childhood spell with his grandparents in gritty Pittsburgh in the 1920s and, of course, the bustle and pulse of Harlem), but also his ideas about religion, Greek mythology, the old masters and modern artists like Cezanne and Picasso. In fact, he wittily took the cubism that Picasso had derived from African sculpture and applied it to cut-up photographs of that same sculpture to create some of the most poignant and noble faces of ordinary people ever to grace gallery walls. (Bearden wasn’t afraid to tweak whites’ generic perceptions of blacks by occasionally rendering a face with a single, flat piece of brown paper.)
His crisp, bold combinations of paper, paint, drawn lines, and bits of fabric and shiny foil make him the orchestrative equal of the granddaddy of modern collage, Kurt Schwitters. At times, Bearden is even right up there with Matisse. His sense of composition is so solid that in 1973 he could turn abruptly from his usual modest format (there’s almost nothing in this show of 130 works that wouldn’t fit comfortably over a mantel) and pull off a commission for a 10-foot-by-16-foot collage-mural for the city-council chambers of Berkeley, Calif. Color, though, is Bearden’s real forte. Operating somewhere between the lushness of sunset and the brash glow of neon, Bearden contrasts gorgeous bursts of red and blue–always, emphatically, a particular red and blue–with dark plowed fields, gray city blocks or green tropical forests. Even his sole effort in sculpture is a fine one.
He’s not a perfect artist, though. (Who is?) Bearden can occasionally and unnecessarily sand or spray-paint some pictures into confusion. And his complex collages sometimes contain little pockets of mawkish sentimentality or prefab imagery. But which artist has ever been able to overcome the visual cliche of jazz horn players on a bandstand? These tiny flaws only serve to emphasize what a full and complete artist Bearden is. He tries to shoehorn just about everything under the sun into his pictures and, most of the time, succeeds in turning everyday existence into profundity, and the tried and true ingredients of pictorial beauty into the freshest things you’ve seen in your life. All of which makes him a universal artist if there ever was one.
