Romare Bearden (1911-88) spent more than 30 years striving to be a great artist, and in the early 1960s, when he took up collage in earnest, he became one. A small exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, organized to celebrate the centennial of Bearden’s birth, delivers this message with unusual clarity. It contains only 21 collages, all superb, in an intimate context that facilitates savoring their every formal twist and narrative turn, not to mention the ingenious mixing of mediums that takes them far beyond collage.
The works at Rosenfeld were made from 1964 to 1983. Some are not much larger than sheets of typing paper; others are more than four feet on a side. Their suavely discordant compositions involve both black-and-white and color photographs and occasional bits of printed fabric; almost all depict some scene of black life, past or present or imagined. Their varied subjects include jazz musicians bent over their instruments; rural families cooking or eating dinner; and a dressmaker who, with the nude figure of her client changing clothes, offers a wry variation on the artist-with-model theme. There is also a radiant storybooklike rendition of the fall of Troy, with black-skinned soldiers. And amid the prevailing, exquisitely nuanced complexity there are moments of utter and serene simplicity, like “La Femme de Martinique,” on her way to market, all but filling a narrow strip of masonite with her regal Egyptian stance. The colors in these works are sometimes bright and flat in the manner of Matisse’s papier-collés, which were a clear influence. Sometimes they have been sanded away, distressed in ways that conjure both the urban poverty Bearden frequently depicted and the fading Italian frescoes he so loved. And sometimes, as in a worn and rosy work titled “The Tenement World” (1969), crumbling architecture, frescoes and Matisse all come to mind. As historical shows go, this one feels unusually of-the-moment. For one thing the improvisational cross-fertilizing of art mediums that Bearden helped pioneer via collage is more and more the norm; for another, paper has probably never been more popular as an art material, for work in both two and three dimensions. Most obviously the scaled-up version of collage that he favored and his propensity for pieced-together, abstraction-infused figures have many echoes in the work of contemporary artists, from Mark Bradford to Anya Kielar to Matthew Monahan. Bearden took up collage sometime in the late 1950s, after a relatively fallow period during which what little painting he made was mostly abstract. A trip to France and Italy with his wife in 1961, to see many of the museums and churches he had visited 10 years before while studying painting on the G.I. Bill of Rights, may have reconnected him to figuration. In 1963 he helped organize Spiral, a group of African-American artists interested in finding new ways to portray black life in America. Bearden suggested that the group collaborate on collage, an implicitly collaborative medium. This didn’t happen, but evidently he found his métier in the process of demonstrating the possibilities. Read More >>>>> 
