It was a quaint, neighborhood restaurant, far from the beaux-arts bustle the dinner patron had experienced during his earlier salad days in Paris.
Picasso was a friend, as was Miro, and he had walked the broad boulevards with the rest of the painters, the dancers and the literary lions who would define the modern art of the 20th century. The Paris years had been formative but, as with so many expatriates, it took his return home to fix his course as a major force in modern art.
Now, with the turning of his leaves, Romare Bearden made his home on Canal Street, in lower Manhattan. His dinner table away from home was a Chinese family eatery a few blocks away. The famed painter wasn’t fussed over, though; in her understated way, the matronly owner revered him as the big talent in the room. Several times over the years I knew Bearden, we dined at the spot and, outside his second-floor walk-up, he seemed nowhere more at home. It was more fitting, for Chinese artists ranked high in the orbit of Bearden’s universe. He claimed none as an influence, but placed their works almost beyond the reach even of the most noteworthy of the European masters.
“Cezanne, in his last watercolor, and Rembrandt, in his last drawings, are comparable to the great Chinese masters of the ninth and 10th century,” Bearden told me over green tea. “Rembrandt spoke to the essence of what humanity was intended to be. In Cezanne’s case, it was the landscape” where he approached the mastery of the Chinese. “No other European (painter) had (achieved this level of art)” as a liberating force.
“When the great Chinese masters painted a waterfall, they didn’t need to put everything in it. They arrived at the essence of the water and the rock.”
To spend an evening with Romare Bearden was to be exposed to a painter with a view of art as a clear force of nature as liberating as the rush of a waterfall. He was a great painter and collagist, to be sure. And much is properly being made of his major contribution to modern art with the dazzling retrospective, “The Art of Romare Bearden,” which is traveling the country. Currently at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, the exhibition was curated by Ruth Fine for the National Gallery, in Washington.
As art must be seen to be appreciated, the Bearden retrospective is not to be missed.
What stays with me about the artist and the man is just how keen and conscious Bearden was, not only about what his art preserved, but also what it did not attempt.
Bearden spoke often of complex American life as consisting of the influence of Native Americans, the New Englanders descended from the Puritans, the frontiersmen and the African-Americans. Yet, he made no bones about his arts being unabashedly centered on preserving aspects of the hometown ritual and vigor of black culture.
Despite this authentic essence of his art, Bearden did not see himself defined — and certainly not limited — by black subject matter. Critics then, though increasingly not now, attempted to limit his contribution by referring to him as a black artist. He used to joke that, despite the racism of these critics, he was no more a black artist simply than Jack Johnson was a black heavyweight champion. “Jack Johnson used to ask critics: ‘Who is the champion and where is he?”‘
Once I asked Bearden if America might have accepted him quicker and more fully had he painted white subjects and rituals. “Let’s take one of your collages,” I said. “Do you think it would make a difference to America if your flat black figures were made more beige, or white?”
“It wouldn’t work, Les, because it isn’t just the face. It’s the whole ambience in which I have placed them in the relationship. It would have to be done in a different way.” And by a different artist, Bearden made clear. “It would say, in (my) particular environment or ambience that Mrs. O’Toole, and I don’t mean to make fun of that name, just does not belong.”
Similarly, I pursued whether Bearden, so remarkably influenced by the music of Earl Hines and other jazz artists, could just as easily have been influenced by Hank Williams or some other hillbilly musician. Bearden recoiled as if I had pulled a pistol on him.
“That music is just not sophisticated enough,” he said. “If you listen to John Coltrane . . . the harmonic progressions were of such sophistication and novelty that other jazz musicians would drop everything and follow Coltrane.” This inter-relatedness of music and painting Bearden explored with much success. The authentic mission of both artists, he felt, was to preserve a distinct part of a life they’d lived. “There’s something out there for each artist that is waiting to be liberated. I hope that in my case it was Mecklenburg, N.C.”
