The Bearden Project, Studio Museum, Harlem
Contemporary artists mark the centenary of Romare Bearden, whose oeuvre encompasses lush sensuality and political toughness
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Romare Bearden dismantled reality and then reassembled it, slightly askew, in dense, kinetic collages. His narratives, made of newspaper clippings, captured the grotesqueness of growing up in rural North Carolina and Harlem in the 1920s.
“As a Negro, I do not need to go looking for?.?.?.?the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dali, Beckett, Ionesco, or any of the others could have thought possible,” he wrote.
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Bearden filtered African-American life through tough 1960s activism, but he had a sensual side too; his collages bristle with clashing textures of layered paper. And there’s a lushness bordering on decadence in the late work, where patterns and washes of brilliant colour echo Matisse’s ideal of “luxe, calme, et volupté”.
Bearden would have been 100 years old in September, and the Studio Museum in Harlem has marked his centennial by inviting 100 artists to take his work as a starting point for new creations. The multifarious tribute compounds an artistic question – does Bearden still matter? – with a barrage of more probing conundrums: does being black give a young artist a sense of identity in a theoretically “post-racial” world? Do today’s art-stars pay homage to Bearden for his intuitive sense of beauty or his labour-intensive technique? Does his early political boldness outweigh his later placidity? What’s the core of his legacy, his style or his self?”
The first widely scattered answers to these implicit provocations are now on the wall (although the museum will continue to add things throughout the run of the show). A few respondents chose to integrate Bearden’s aesthetics into their own; others opted for a more imitative approach, and a third contingent couldn’t find common ground with Bearden at all, and just did their thing.
Wangechi Mutu easily grafts Bearden’s vision onto her own way of pasting together pictures of human parts. Here she musters fragments from ethnographic, pornographic and couture magazines into a cackling witch with a gaping, toothy grin, coiled in layers of puckered flesh and snakeskin. In this bizarrely beautiful collage, Mutu stays true to herself, to Beardon, and to their shared ancestors, the Berlin Dadaists and connoisseurs of the grotesque, Hannah Höch and George Grosz, who cobbled together barbarous bodies in response to the epochal slaughter of the first world war. Bearden, and now Mutu, protest other forms of savagery, with weird and abrupt changes of scale and faces chopped apart and reconfigured as monstrous masks.
Other artists stray further from familiar terrain to salute Bearden’s style. The usually austere Glenn Ligon abandons his brainy black-and-white style for an almost voluptuary nostalgia. In “Pittsburgh Memories Redux”, he’s collected flashes of mass experience into a haunting, vivid image of a butterfly. The shards are difficult to read: there are scenes of military actions, dead cows lying on a devastated beach, political slogans, jigsaw puzzles, football victories, all shredded and remade into a thing of beauty that evokes a shared past. Trauma is the chrysalis that gives birth to the future.
David McKenzie, who generally sticks to pop-oriented conceptualism and performance, has crafted an elegant, inscrutable meditation on Nefertiti. The ancient queen’s face, culled from an unusual array of reproductions, reappears upside down, right side up and sideways, garlanded by graceful body parts and beribboned with tangles of colour. The mood here is less the harsh smirk of Dada than surrealism with a smile.
While McKenzie and Ligon stretched beyond their comfort zones, others try to squeeze their usual routines under Bearden’s umbrella. Julie Mehretu’s homage “Untitled, 2011” is the same sort of watery, placid abstraction she always makes, a nest of vortices cradling a few brightly coloured shapes. Mickelene Thomas, who likes to dress up in vintage gear and then undo as many blouse buttons as she can, exposes herself to the lens four times in “Photomontage 12”, and surrounds each version with a cluster of overlapping frames. In the museum’s call-in audio guide, she hazily explains: “I learned from Bearden’s figures, and the way he constructs incredibly communicative figures with just the most sparse elements.” Thomas’s stale, narcissistic gambits are anything but communicative, and their threadbare critique owes more to Cindy Sherman’s film stills than anything by the great collagist.
Of all the artists here, only Stacy Lynn Waddell fixes her sites on the elder Bearden, who gazed contentedly at the incandescent sea and grass near the house he built on St. Maarten. In those late works, you can smell the coconuts, feel the heat radiating from sun-warmed palms, and hear the music pulsing from saxophones, double basses and singers’ throats. Wadell’s “No Place Like” sparkles with tiny Austrian crystals strewn across its surface, intensifying the shimmer of palm trees against a turquoise sky. A clipper ship hovers on the horizon, its golden sails lit up by the sun. But like Bearden’s most colourful constructions, Wadell’s Caribbean fantasy insinuates an undertone of darkness. That antique ship – is it carrying slaves sailing towards the sugar-soaked land of their nightmares? A more rigorous inspection of the water reveals that what looked like waves are actually swarms of the letter “B” (for Bearden? Or black?) branded thickly into the surface of the paper. Waddell leaves it up to us to decide whether to skim the glistering surface or delve into the depths of history and memory.
‘The Bearden Project’ continues until March 11, www.studiomuseum.org
By Ariella Budick