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ROMARE BEARDEN FOUNDATION
Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition
Introduction by Pamela Ford. Text by Robert G. O'Meally, Kobena Mercer, et al.
Known for his rich, complex collage works that depict large-scale themes via African-American subjects, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) drew inspiration from myriad cultural influences--from historical and modern art to music and literature. According to The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, "His genius, aside from his poetic knack for piecing scraps of photographs and other tiny tidbits together, was to see collage as an inherent social metaphor: that its essence was to turn nothings into something, making disparate elements cohere; that it was about mixing and adding, a positivist enterprise." Based on the 2007 National Bearden Symposium, this volume examines Bearden's relationships to modernism, postmodernism and the avant garde, through his wide-ranging interests and associations with artists, intellectuals and musicians of his era--including Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison and Stuart Davis, to name a few--as well as his practices.
Featured collage is "Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Mill Hand's Lunch Basket" (1978), reproduced from Romare Beardon in the Modernist Tradition.
"The best shape with which to think of Romare Bearden's relationship to the modernist tradition is a triangle. Embracing the everyday world of African American life as his primary subject matter, Bearden established a commitment to modernist principles at the very outset of his career by making stylistic and iconographic choices that rejected academic naturalism. His early paintings of factory workers, folk musicians, and rural families all foreground his expressive subjectivity rather than documentary reportage. Previous generations of African American artists and writers had turned to modernism as an alternative to the dominance of realism in representations of 'race'--one thinks of Aaron Douglas in painting or Jean Toomer in literature--but as he cut his way through mid-twentieth-century paradigms of expressionism and abstraction, Bearden's arrival into the medium of collage in the 1960s resulted in a unique method for the construction of pictorial space that exists nowhere else in twentieth-century art."
FORMAT: Pbk, 8 x 11 in. / 134 pgs / 26 color / 9 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $30.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $35 ISBN: 9780615202914 PUBLISHER: Romare Bearden Foundation AVAILABLE: 7/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: *not available
Published by Romare Bearden Foundation. Introduction by Pamela Ford. Text by Robert G. O'Meally, Kobena Mercer, et al.
Known for his rich, complex collage works that depict large-scale themes via African-American subjects, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) drew inspiration from myriad cultural influences--from historical and modern art to music and literature. According to The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, "His genius, aside from his poetic knack for piecing scraps of photographs and other tiny tidbits together, was to see collage as an inherent social metaphor: that its essence was to turn nothings into something, making disparate elements cohere; that it was about mixing and adding, a positivist enterprise." Based on the 2007 National Bearden Symposium, this volume examines Bearden's relationships to modernism, postmodernism and the avant garde, through his wide-ranging interests and associations with artists, intellectuals and musicians of his era--including Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison and Stuart Davis, to name a few--as well as his practices.
