“Pressing on Life Until It Gave Back Something in Kinship”: An Introductory Essay

Abstract

Expressionism—modes he never completely abandoned—toward his signature printmaking and collage. Yet most of the essays in this section are written by novelists and poets, lending this part of the book a bias that is unmistakably literary. How apt that in response to Bearden’s paintings, where so often scenes and characters are drawn from literature, these writers return the favor in flying word-colors! What this means is that in their heft and quickness of signification, and in artistic qualities so difficult to put into words, these literary responses to Bearden stand up to his paintings. Note, for example, the sinewy language of playwright August Wilson, who recalls, in the essay included here, making his way to the artist’s apartment on New York’s Canal Street, but then failing to muster what it took to knock on the man’s door—Bearden’s art had been so profound a guide for him: I have never looked back from that moment when I first encountered his art. He showed me a doorway. A road marked with signposts, with sharp and sure direction, charting a path through what D. H. Lawrence called the “dark forest of the soul.” I called to my courage and entered the world of Romare Bearden and found a world made in my image. A world of flesh and muscle and blood and bone and fire. A world made of scraps of paper, of line and mass and form and shape and color, and all the melding of grace and birds and trains and guitars and women bathing and men with huge hands and hearts, pressing on life until it gave back something in kinship.13 In several cases, these writers create a practical vocabulary to spell out ways of working that they share with Bearden and with visual artists in general, and perhaps with all artists. All require structure, color, and rhythm, says Toni Morrison.14 Put her triad alongside Bearden’s assertion that all painting is “putting something over something else.”15 Is not all art a matter of placing one thing over the other (in the case of the writer, placing many-storied words and storylines one over the other): of collage-like layering? Put this query alongside Bearden’s declaration that he learned much about the art of painting from jazz musicians, improvising layer on layer of rhythm and tune over the chord changes of a blues melody or atop a popular song like Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” Jazz musicians have coined a wonderful phrase for improvisations on this Gershwin standard: “playing the ‘Rhythm changes.’ ” I like to think of Bearden, too, as playing “Rhythm changes.” (See Albert Murray’s essay on Bearden and jazz in this volume.) This part of the book has something to do, as well, with questions of influence and translation, not only from painter to painter but from painter to writer, writer 6 robert g. o’meally Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/685608/9781478002260-001.pdf by guest on 31 October 2019 An Introductory Essay 7 to painter, from painter and writer to musician—back and forth. One wonders if Brent Hayes Edwards is not right that all true works of art cry out for translation into other languages, including into the terms of other artistic forms.16 Bearden belongs in the ranks of leading modern artists who translated literature and music into visual art. And how many writers, not just August Wilson, have taken Bearden and other painters as models for poetry and fiction? Taking the advice of his friend Stuart Davis, whose jazz paintings Bearden much admired, Bearden studied masters of jazz whose additions, subtractions, and other rearrangements of received material, note-by-note and chord-bychord, had made Davis think of painting as playing the intervals of a piano keyboard in the tradition of Earl Hines, in particular. “Interval” is a key word for Bearden studies: the spaces between. Miles Davis said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play. . . . Play what’s not there.” Bearden listened closely to what was there and not there in the work of jazz keyboardists as well as horn players and singers who could pronounce one note that implied several others; and who, in the cases of Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk, could make a single note swing. So many of Bearden’s rhythmically placed images of singers and horn players, keyboardists and keyboards—some of them urban row-house keyboards—suggest jazz rhythms and layers: John Coltrane-like sheets of sound on canvas.17 By the early 1960s Bearden began to arrange his rectangular shapes in compositions that were strongly influenced by the Cubists and Dutch Masters Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, in a way that gave his work more movement—the element he said was missing in the Europeans’ paintings. As models for his jazz series, the Europeans offered “a classic quality to rival the Greeks,” Bearden told an interviewer. But the jazz works forming in his mind could not be “as static as theirs.” “I listened to jazz,” Bearden continued, “and just drew. I did this for three months or so, just trying to pick up these rhythms. . . . By turning my rectangles from here to here, you make certain interval relationships which give a sense of movement.”18 Bearden’s acuteand oblique-angle tilting of these rectangular boxes within his paintings gave them something of what the artist considered jazz’s “speed.” The Harlem painter did not want a Cubism that was too square! This jazz analogy makes us wonder how August Wilson’s plays or Ralph Ellison’s fictions may also be jazzlike in their shapes, spaces, and colored improvisations—and what, as these influences circle around, Bearden learned from writers about jazz. How can literary works, which like paintings may be regarded as fixed on silent two-dimensional surfaces, nonetheless make a kind Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/685608/9781478002260-001.pdf by guest on 31 October 2019 of music? (Ellison’s phrase for his technique for writing across the art forms is “planned dislocation of the senses.”19 Toni Morrison says she takes pains to use language that makes her readers literally move their lips and sound out her words aloud while reading.20) How to make literature speak and move? How to give it an improvised musical quality? The jazz composer/reed master Henry Threadgill calls literally all art improvisatory.21 When, he asks, are Beethoven’s first drafts of a sonata’s score not like Charlie Parker’s first takes on an on-thespot blues composition like “Parker’s Mood”? When not like the successive canvases (or layers on canvas) of a painter? With such questions ringing in the air (coloring it and, to borrow a term from Thelonious Monk, “rhythm-a-ning” it), Part III explores what Morrison terms the “liquid” spaces where the art forms melt, meet, and flow together.22 It was the search for better understanding of this liquid space that informed my choosing so many literary writers to comment on this highly literary and musical painter. “Improvisation,” said Bearden’s friend Murray, “is the ultimate (i.e., heroic) endowment . . . even as flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique competence which generates the self-reliance and thus the charisma of the hero.”23 Consider how many of the most heroic characters in Bearden’s paintings, figures male and female, from this or some other world, are improvisers of the first degree. Consider his many Billie Holidays, Louis Armstrongs, Duke Ellingtons, Charlie Parkers. Or his many drop-dead beautiful Circes, as well as conjure women, Obeah women, and other supernaturals—all gifted with the peculiar strength and skill of the improvising artist to turn the world around (see the essays herein by Rachel DeLue, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Richard Powell). Routinely presenting such charismatic shape-shifters in his paintings, Bearden celebrated jazz as a model for the visual artist, while he developed ideas about improvisation required not only of Americans but also of citizens of the globe everywhere. What would it mean for the planet if more of us had the sense of self and community as one swinging band implied by the improvised music of top jazz musicians— whether in slow time or at the tempo of emergency? Parts I and II of this anthology emphasize that for Bearden—as for many American artists black, white, brown, and beige—“the quest for identity” stands front and center. One is reminded of James Baldwin’s definition of the layers of iden8 robert g. o’meally Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/685608/9781478002260-001.pdf by guest on 31 October 2019 An Introductory Essay 9 tity as loose robes “through which one’s nakedness can always be felt.”24 Interview by interview, essay by essay, Bearden raises the question of what it means to “know thyself, ”25 to explore the planet from the hub of home and self. The question was connected directly with his art: “I didn’t know what to paint,” he says, over and over again, to his interlocutors. Indeed, in public pronouncements, Bearden usually approached the question of identity in terms of finding his way as an artist: his search for subjects, perspectives, and techniques. His search, one might say, was for artistic “ancestors.”26 But Bearden also would surprise listeners by broaching these big subjects from a side door with references to his career as a young athlete—an important aspect of the artist’s identity that Bearden scholars almost never mention. In 1931– 32 Bearden was the starting fullback on the football team at Boston University, where, during the spring seasons, he was also an ace pitcher on the freshman and later the varsity baseball teams. During those years, Bearden earned summer money on a professional baseball team called the Boston Colored Tigers, a Roxbury-based sandlot outfit that was good enough to challenge top-ranked Negro League teams when they passed through New England. Bearden smiled when telling about his close loss of a pitching duel against