(Bearden: "Once it was mid-September again, it was back to Miss Pinkney and books, black-boards, rulers and finger nail inspection.") — This is the first work in the series and depicts Bearden’s earliest memory, aged six, of the first day of school. While the series is Bearden’s personal story, Heydt says, it might not be 100% factual. For instance, Heydt says, there has been debate over—and research into—whether or not Miss Pinkney was a real schoolteacher in Bearden’s hometown of Charlotte. “But I think that really isn’t the point here,” Heydt says. “It’s really about this experience—the sort of anxiety and excitement that you feel on that first day of school... a universal expression.” Romare Bearden, “Profile/Part I, The Twenties, Mecklenberg County, School Bell Time” (1978) © 2019 Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(Bearden: "The sporting people were allowed to come but they had to stand on the far right.") — This is the only picture in the series that directly relates to a story in the New Yorker profile, Heydt says. When Bearden was a young boy in Pittsburg, a slightly older boy called Eugene Bailey, who lived in the same boarding house, owned by Bearden’s maternal grandmother, taught him to draw. “Bearden really attributes this relationship with Eugene as the seed that was planted for him in terms of the power and role of art in someone’s life,” Heydt says. Eugene died when they were just boys, in 1925, and Bearden chose to depict his friend’s funeral, rather than their time spent drawing together, which Heydt says she always found curious. “This memorial to Eugene in the series is the last picture that he includes part one… it’s sort of concluding his childhood memories,” she says. Romare Bearden, “Profile/Part I, The Twenties, Pittsburgh Memories, Farewell Eugene” (1978) © 2019 Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

(Bearden: "He was my favorite of all comedians. What Johnny Hudgins could do through mime on an empty stage helped show me how worlds were created on an empty canvas.") — The series is “almost like a Kunstroman—where the artist is sort of looking back identifying all the things that influenced him”, Heydt says, so she says it is “not insignificant” that this depiction of the stage performer Johnny Hudgins, whom Bearden credits as a major inspiration, comes right before Bearden’s depiction of himself as an artist in the series chronology. “To juxtapose [this image of Hudgins] with the very next picture where he’s showing himself in his performance mode, which is as ‘artist’, is the benefit of pulling together the series,” Heydt says. Romare Bearden, “Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Johnny Hudgins Comes On” (1981) © 2019 Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

(Bearden: "The trains in the stories she told always ran North.") — This work shows a familiar figure in African American communities in the rural south during Bearden’s childhood, a lady who would go door-to-door selling pepper jelly, and “the train in the background is suggesting his travelling between those two worlds”, of the rural south and the north, Heydt says. This collage juxtaposes with the next picture in the series, “Midtown Sunset”, which shows New York. The way the picture is rendered, with bright colours, and a cut-out figure in profile form using black paper, is similar to Bearden’s Odysseus series of collages, made shortly before the Profile series, Heydt explains. This depiction of the pepper jelly lady “becomes a fairly iconic image for Bearden”, Heydt says, and is turned into a lithograph, of which the High has a version. Romare Bearden, “Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Pepper Jelly Lady” (1981) © 2019 Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

(Bearden: “Every Friday Licia used to come to my studio to model for me upstairs above the Apollo Theater.”) — The High Museum acquired this picture in 2014, leading to this exhibition. While Bearden does not depict himself in most of the works in the series, this one is “a classic self-portrait in a way”, Heydt says. The chronology of the Profile series is “a little hazy”, Heydt says. This part of the series is the 1930s, but this work must have dated to the early 1940s: Bearden has his arm over a collaged rendering of 1941 gouache painting, The Visitation—which sets the Biblical story of the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, both pregnant, in rural North Carolina—now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Romare Bearden, “Profile/Part II, The Thirties: Artist with Painting & Model” (1981) © 2019 Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

1/5
Romare Bearden
gallery

Portraits of the artist as a young man: Romare Bearden's autobiographical collages

A selection from the artist’s Profile series, which will be reunited for an exhibition at The High Museum of Art

Victoria Stapley-Brown
6 September 2019
Share

The US artist Romare Bearden, who died in 1988, is having his autobiography re-told at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta this month with the exhibition Something Over Something Else. The show will reunite around 30 collages from this two-part Profile Series in which Bearden looks back at his life as a boy and a young artist in the 1920s and 1930s. Bearden made the works following Calvin Tomkins’s 1977 feature-length biography in The New Yorker magazine’s “Profiles” section, titled “Putting Something over Something Else”, after Bearden’s statement: “I really think the art of painting is the art of putting something over something else”.

The collages—the largest section of the group exhibited since New York shows in 1979 and 1981—are placed in their original chronology with the handwritten captions that Bearden concocted with his friend, the writer Albert Murray. “I was especially fascinated by the captions that went with each of the objects, which really felt unique in Bearden’s oeuvre,” says Stephanie Heydt, the High’s curator of American art, who co-organised the show with the Bearden scholar Robert G. O’Meally. In the series of collages, Bearden “engages almost every kind of approach to artmaking that he had used over the course of his career”, Heydt says, referring to the magazine clippings, colour paper, layered fabric, watercolour and gouache. With these small-format works, “I feel like he’s begging you to come close, engage with him” Heydt says.

• Something Over Something Else: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 14 September-2 February 2020; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 28 February-24 May 2020)

Romare BeardenExhibitionsIn PicturesHigh Museum of ArtAtlanta
Share