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Indelibly Layered: Bearden & The Multiplicity of The Black Experience

Romare Bearden’s depictions of the Black experience have continued to resonate with multiple generations of artists. But it is his insistence upon honoring and respecting his Black subjects that interests me in my understanding of how narratives surrounding Blackness in art are constructed. Many of those who have written on Bearden’s art and legacy have chosen to highlight his dignified depictions of Blackness. 

The history of Black artistry in America is a complicated and colorful history often outlined by our relationship with Black pain and injustice. Historical depictions of Blackness from predominantly European art spaces are often far from dignified portrayals. Due to the popularity of owning Black persons as servants and slaves in mid 15th century Europe, images of Black servants being featured alongside their masters was common as a suggestion of status for the owner. The color black was used in Medieval and Renaissance art as a means to evoke a negative feeling or image while the color white, considered its opposite, was used to convey positive emotion. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, those who persecuted Jesus were often depicted as Black in religious paintings, sometimes with exaggerated features throughout the later middle ages and images of the martyrdom of saints often showed the executioner as Black. 

Ingres, Jean Auguste, La Grande Odalisque, Oil on Canvas, 1814, Musée du Louvre, https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/une-odalisque.

For centuries Black people have appeared in art as servants, slaves, and exotic novelties to be either gawked at or pitied. Even the story of how slavery became illegal in Britian was depicted artistically during the time period without much regard for the efforts or even the humanity of Black individuals. Slowly the story of abolition became whitewashed in the imaginations of the British public and became centered on a triumphant narrative which glorified the efforts of white abolitionists and the British government. As a direct reflection of this cultural norm, much of the art that was made in relation to themes of abolition of the British slave trade chooses to emphasize the role of white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp rather than highlight the contributions of black campaigners like Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. The often ahistoric imagery of this time period persisted into the daily lives of prideful white abolitionists. A white jasperware medallion produced by Josiah Wedgwood for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade features an African man, enchained and looking upwards with his hands clasped as if praying for the mercy or the intervention of God. Created by Wedgewood for the purpose of being worn by members of his white Christian abolitionist group, the medallion is self congratulatory at best and dehumanizing at worst in its depiction of the desperate Negro. The image was subsequently reproduced in both Britain and the American colonies through the end of the American Civil War. It was used to decorate the covers of multiple anti-slavery publications, stationary, boxes of tea, books, oil paintings and prints. Similarly to much of the abolitionist art created during this time period, the popularity of the medallion was rooted in its ability to make some sort of an emotional appeal to those who saw it. In its effort to make this emotional appeal to those who wished to uphold the structures of Slavery, it presented Black people as the passive victims of the slave trade who were desperately seeking the mercy of white Christian society. This idea of the docile, passive Negro permiated both European and American culture and has persisted into modernity. Much of the art that has been celebrated by white curators has involved the depiction of Black trauma, poverty or suffering. 



“Let’s consider any establishment or orthodoxy that says, “Yeah but it’s so special - it has to do with the black people catching hell in the South, or still being happy in a certain kind of way. “ So you have this absurdity of an empire pronouncing its benediction on the very fucking suffering it caused! So it says, “Oh yes Jacob Lawrence is fantastic.” Why is he so fantastic? Because he shows all these niggers tryin’ to get to heaven, you know, material heaven. And that’s why he’s fantastic… so he’s fine. “Horace Pippin is fantastic” because he’s a humble nigger who couldn’t paint very well, but he had that charm that is really a quality of the primitive…. But Romare… was genuinely erudite.” - Derek Walcott (Bearden’s Caribbean Dimension)



Jacob Lawrence is likely mentioned here in reference to his Migration Series. The Migration Series, which was originally titled The Migration of the Negro, is a group of 60 individually painted panels by African-American painter Jacob Lawrence which depict the migration of African Americans to the northern United States from the South that began in the 1910s. The series of paintings was published in 1941 and funded by the The Works Progress Administration. Many of the panels depict the dire state of Black life in the South and the hardships that people faced that forced them up north and caused them to struggle along the way. These people were facing struggles from economic hardship due to low wages or loss of crops, racism, systems of injustice, and poor living conditions which laid the grounds for tuberculosis outbreaks within their community. The series has long been heralded as an example of great African American artistry and, due to a split donation in 1942, can be seen highlighted within both the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The series comprises sixty tempera paintings on seperate 18 × 12″ composite boards. Each work is accompanied by a descriptive caption detailing what is depicted within the panel. Even today, the work continues to be held as a shining example of what should be highlighted from African American artists and the MoMA exhibition of their panels from the series features multiple new interpretive materials. From installation photographs from Edith Hal pert’s Downtown Gallery exhibition where the series was first shown in New York in 1941 to a newly edited and remastered video featuring an interview with Jacob Lawrence himself. The museum’s description of the exhibition declares that Lawrence “has powerfully expressed the African-American experience. A modern-day griot, or storyteller, his words and images convey metaphors of injustice, strife, change, hope, and beauty.” It is the strife and injustice mentioned here that Walcott brings a critique for. 

In Bearden’s own depictions of the Southern Black experience, he masterfully incorporates the fact of poverty without centering it is the defining element of the figures he portrays. In Tomorrow I May Be Far Away (1966/1967) , Bearden shows us a man sitting in front of a small home, arms crossed, bowtie straightened, and his gaze not meeting the viewer’s. He sits beside a small washtub of water and is missing his left black dress shoe. A woman peers out from the window above him. Her manicured hand reaching out from the windowsill. Bearden depicts the pair as being without much in the way of lavish means but with an abundance of pride and satisfaction in what they have. Richly interwoven with metaphor and memory, informed by art historical tradition and life experience, and steeped in a vibrant African American cultural heritage, Tomorrow I May Be Far Away is, according to the National Gallery of Art’s description, “quintessential Bearden in its expression of the human condition.”

The conversation surrounding depictions of Black pain in media and art has been ongoing for generations. The term “Black trauma porn” has been coined to describe the commodification of Black pain and suffering, usually seen in the media through television and film. Storylines featuring themes of racism, violence, and overall despair often play a role in shaping one’s narrative and how they’re perceived by the general audience. Both film producer/director Lena Waithe and rapper Joey Bada$$ have been heavily criticized recently for creating projects that center traumatic, Black lived experiences. Lena Waithe recently released a miniseries on Amazon called Them in which a Black family is haunted by a racist, evil force within and outside of their home. More specifically, the terror/trauma depicted in Them includes, but is not limited to: White characters spewing the N-word at Black people; White characters graphically assaulting, torturing, and (occasionally) murdering Black people; a creepy minstrel character rendered in blackface, and filicide. Joey Bada$$ has produced a film in partnership with Netflix titled Two Distant Strangers, where a young Black man is stuck in an endless looping cycle in which he is repeatedly murdered by a police officer while trying to walk home. “Them” creator and executive producer Little Marvin has said his admittedly upsetting images are designed to convey the savagery of racism. Critics maintain that, while they respect the right of the writers, directors and producers to make strong artistic statements about race and racism, the ferocity of some of these images is more triggering than impactful. The images are particularly unsettling given the country’s real-life reckoning with police brutality against unarmed Black men, a divisive presidential election and the resurgence of white supremacist groups. While some may believe that showing Black pain and our experiences with injustice is a powerful way to humanize us and garner sympathy from those in power, others argue that it serves to further desensitize us and normalize our trauma. Marsai Martin is known for her role as Diane Johnson in the ABC comedy series black. • ish and for being named the youngest Hollywood executive producer in history. In March of 2021, Martin told the Hollywood reporter:



 “I have a couple of rules when you come into my office… I don’t do no Black pain. If it’s Black pain, I don’t go for it because there’s so many films and projects about that, so that’s not who I am. I want to make sure that it is diverse and real in its own way.”

While it is undoubtedly necessary to make space for acknowledging what Black people have been through and continue to endure, artists like Martin are asserting their responsibility for the stories we tell and the impact they may have. It is necessary to provide representation for all Black stories and narratives, not just those that focus in on Black agony and suffering. 

In Albert Murray’s analysis of Bearden’s work, he asserts that the most distinctive, definitive feature of Bearden’s treatment of the figurative elements in his work is “the pronounced emphasis that is almost always given to the ceremonial dimension of each scene and event.” He compares the dignity and specialness felt from within Bearden’s posed portraits to the images of Africa and African people provided by National Geographic magazine. The difference here being stark. Bearden respects his subjects and wishes to see them as whole, complex, dignified beings with stories to tell. Murray’s analysis compares Bearden to the work of yet another heralded artist in saying: 



“Compared to the ceremonial dignity of Bearden’s radiant still-life’s, Degas’s great snapshots of ballet dancers, for example, look almost as genre as Millet’s peasants. By contrast, not only are Bearden’s North Carolina cotton pickers anything but genre, his folk and jazz musicians are depicted with a ritual formality that suggests characters in a ballet.”



Bearden's conjure woman served as an alternative representation of Black women that Bearden felt he could provide. With her power and intrigue coming from a magic we may not understand rather than from any form of physical seduction, Bearden's conjure woman is neither eroticized nor made into a passive, objectified figure for ridicule or pity. This dignified representation of Blackness is an important theme throughout Bearden's work and he puts it to the test here. His honoring of Caribbean spiritual traditions through the dignified depiction of the conjure woman as a provider or healer rather than a dark, malevolent being out to cause harm to those around her is a significant decision. He purposefully makes the conjure woman indistinguishable from her male counterparts apart from donning a skirt and scarf. This may have been part of his efforts to desexualize the figure. Artists throughout history have struggled with the politicization of the female nude and have attempted to avoid the relation to religion or classicism that would have originally been tied to nudity by shifting toward orientalism. Orientalism, a term used by art historians to describe works that includes imitations or depictions of aspects in the Eastern world or elements from other races and cultures, allowed them to eroticize the feminine form by distancing themselves from it. Perhaps, in Bearden’s own depictions of femininity in his conjure woman, he slips and falls into the trap of making his conjure woman exotic and different from himself. Does Conjur Woman (1964), with her feather in hand, harken back to Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque and its depiction of an “odalisque”, stemming from the Turkish term for concubine, laid nude in a suggestive pose with her face turned towards us and holding a fan of peacock feathers? 

While there is much to critique in terms of how the policing of women and our sexulaity through this act, Bearden is attempting to offer up some sort of alternative to what he sees available in depictions of Blackness. The majority of Americans today still closely associate the term “Voodoo” with satanism, witchcraft and barbaric sacrifice. Yet, far from these ill­formed depictions and misconceptions— which first took root through the western dominance of 18th century colonial Haiti and have been perpetuated through mediums of popular culture ever since—a closer look into Caribbean spiritual practices shows that the connection between the Black experience and these traditions add a sacred layer to our shared narratives. 

Bearden was intentional even in his depictions of self. Many images of the artist are photographed in a way that seems to better encapsulate the energy and multiplicity of Bearden than any simple portrait could have. Photographed alongside his work, books, small cats and even holding large fish, portraits of Bearden reflect the artist’s desire to be seen as a layered man rather than a monolith. This idea of a complex, layered individual is translated over into his depictions of figures in his work. The idea of his collage work itself is an attempt at layering his commitments to the high modern thos of individuality and complexity with the call-and-response ethos of Black American folk culture. In doing so, he demonstrates his interest in “what happens in the hyphen that articulates African and American to form a distinctively composite identity.”



While Bearden avoided being called a political artist, his understanding of his own responsibility as an artist to build and expand upon the narrative that happens in that hyphen is clear. Bearden’s desire to connect, celebrate and honor all that lives within that hyphen flows throughout his work. By centering elements of the African-American lived experience and tying them to those across the diaspora, from the Caribbean to the continent, Bearden weaves the thread that connects that hyphen. By choosing to dignify and respect these elements in his portrayals, he positions his subjects as the owners of this woven, layered narrative. Tossing aside the docile, desperate or invisible figures that have historically represented Blackness in art celebrated by white critics, Bearden moves in favor of holding his people in high esteem and allowing for their complicated, composite narrative to breathe freely and without judgment. 

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