"Inscription at The City of Brass": An Interview with Romare Bearden
1988; Johns Hopkins University Press; Issue: 36 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2931510
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoWe had to take the subway down from Harlem to the other end of Manhattan, where Romare Bearden lived in a walkup apartment overlooking Canal Street. Albert Murray knocked when we arrived No doorbell, I thought. Romie might not hear us, he said. I'd better call him from the bar there. I was a bit startled because we had already phoned him before we left Mr. Murray's home up in Harlem, and, more, because the front of Mr. Bearden's apartment building looked like a commercial establishment. In fact, nothing about this neighborhood looked residential. His apartment was truly apart, up three flights of stairs form street level. And, so situated, it was quiet, peaceful, serene -the perfect place to read and think, and if so moved, to paint. A man like Mr. Bearden, a thinker and supreme artist, needed a refuge, ever so often, from the endless sirens and idle chatter and honking taxis and shouting vendors of New York City streets. And, most of all, from the throng of so-called painters who sought his praise for their puerile images and from the hangers-on who prey upon the famous to validate themselves. Though Mr. Bearden's home was set apart, if he wanted, he could view, from his third floor window, the world of Canal Street. I was not surprised when I first saw Mr. Bearden in person. The many photographs I had seen of him had sharply captured his face, so much like Nikita Khrushchev's. His voice, though, like his paintings, immediately announced the community to which he belonged: Black America, North and South. The South-Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where he was born. The South-its people, their rites and rituals, etched into his consciousness-became the subject of some of his most well-wrought paintings and collages: Cypress Moon, Baptism, Morning of the Rooster, Carolina Shout, Maudell Sleet's Magic Garden .... Mr. Bearden's memories of Pittsburgh, his first home in the North, are transformed in Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket. Uptown New York-its nights filled with the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines -gave him his images of the jazzer, the quintessential American artist, represented in Show Time, At Connie's Inn, and Out Chorus. But it was the view of 141st Street from Albert Murray's balcony that was the source for The Block, that vast collage mythologizing the inner city North. As a lifelong resident of the South, I have always associated the North with coldness, detachment, abruptness. Although Mr. Bearden had spent most of his life in New York City, his manner seemed quite Southern to me. With grace and gentleness, he welcomed us up to his apartment. He led us up those three flights of stairs, all the while expressing his delight that he
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