The title for the Romare Bearden exhibition currently on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum is taken from a remark the artist made during an interview for a profile by the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins that appeared in 1977. “I really think the art of painting,” Bearden said, “is the art of putting something over something else”—a thought that would seem to relate even more to the artist’s favorite technique, collage.
Having his life story told by someone else prompted Bearden to tell it himself, visually. Between 1978 and 1981 he created a collection of autobiographical collages he called the Profile series. Bearden presented the artworks in two groups.
The first, exhibited in 1979, conjures his memories of the early decades of the twentieth century in Charlotte, North Carolina, and surrounding Mecklenburg County. Born in 1911, Bearden was an only child. His college-educated parents moved the family to Harlem in 1914, but they returned to the South often on trips. The first group also includes collages such as Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket that evoke his teen years in Pittsburgh, where he lived for a time with his grandmother, who ran a boardinghouse that catered to steelworkers.
The second group, which debuted in 1981, draws on Bearden’s experience of young adulthood in Harlem. His mother, Bessye, was a newspaper writer and political activist. His father, more low-key, worked as an inspector in the city health department. They made many friends during the artistic efflorescence known as the Harlem Renaissance, and gatherings in the Bearden apartment might include luminaries such as Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. One of the most interesting compositions in this group, Johnny Hudgins Comes On, celebrates a Harlem vaudeville performer. “He was my favorite of all the comedians,” Bearden wrote in a caption that accompanies the work. “What Johnny Hudgins could do through mime on an empty stage helped show me how worlds were created on an empty canvas.”
The exhibition, which was organized by and debuted last fall at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, includes thirty works from the Profile series, which are being shown together for the first time in almost forty years.
‘Something Over Something Else’: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series · Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio · to May 24 · cincinnatiartmuseum.org
