Romare Bearden, American master

August 4, 2005 8:47 AM

Romare Bearden was probably the least-known great American artist of the 20th century. A glance at the Google image search will give you an idea of his exciting colors, bold designs, and joyously crowded canvases; here's a picture of the artist with cat, a brief appreciation, a Derek Walcott poem ("How you have gotten it! It's all here, all right..."), and a bunch of reproductions. There are good introductions here and here; I saw the latter at Plep, which reminded me I'd been wanting to make a Bearden post for ages (there's a book based on the National Gallery exhibit). Enjoy!
posted by languagehat (8 comments total)

This is a great post. Thanks. I go back and forth about Bearden's art, some of which I like a lot while other stuff I'm not as thrilled by. I've never done any reading about him, though, and now that I see that he was a cartoonist at The Baltimore Afro-American, which is located in my neighborhood, I might go down there and see what I can find.

The art links at the Romare Bearden foundation are all broken, which is too bad; but the other links have plenty of material. I especially liked this page brought up by Google, because it puts Bearden into some context as you scroll down to get to his stuff.

Has anyone read any of his essays or books? I'm pretty curious.
posted by OmieWise at 9:14 AM on August 4, 2005

still trying to decide whether I like bearden or not... self-ish-link
posted by dorian at 9:25 AM on August 4, 2005

OmieWise: That is a nice page; I never would have thought to compare Bearden with Rauschenberg, for instance, but seen next to each other, the similarities are striking.

I was on the fence about Bearden myself until I saw an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum a decade ago; I was especially blown away by the "Odysseus Suite," but the whole thing had me in a daze and I went right out and called everyone I knew and told them to go see it. You really can't judge art without seeing it in the flesh, so to speak.
posted by languagehat at 11:57 AM on August 4, 2005

As a stained glass artist, I always thought that Romare Bearden's work would lend itself well to the medium and it turns out it does.
posted by princelyfox at 4:00 PM on August 4, 2005

I had Romare Bearden beaten into my skull in college -- he's very well known. And way over-rated, IMO; he's putting colorful twist (I guess) on work that was accoplished by the cubist/dadaist collagists nearly forty years previous. If he wasn't a minority, he'd be an unknown. Very much like Hannah Hoch, recent attention to his works are an indication of social trends in the academy, not some formerly unheralded greatness.
posted by undule at 6:44 PM on August 4, 2005

Romare Bearden has long been heralded the "Great Southern Hope" in the (admittedly small) Southern art scene. In Charlotte, NC, we have a road named after him. :)
posted by scarymonsterrrr at 9:10 PM on August 4, 2005

I saw an exhibit of his work in San Francisco, and it was a lot of fun to get up close to it. Some of it was very rich and complex, and some was rather bland, but what the hell do I know.
posted by r3tr0 at 6:48 AM on August 5, 2005

[this is good]

I first saw Bearden whenI was a kid visiting the state art museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, and it blew me away. I hadn't seen much of his stuff for years (aside from the occasional poster or notecard), but I caught the big exhibit at the National Gallery last year, and it blew me away all over again.

Great post!
posted by Vidiot at 9:07 PM on August 6, 2005