Memories |
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HarlemIt wasn't New York City, the place alone, that shaped Bearden as an artist, but the combination of that extraordinary metropolis with Bearden's intellect and energy. Harlem was the center of black intellectual life in the Unites States, and Bearden became a fixture among its well-known intellectuals, artists, and musicians. Harlem's famous jazz and blues clubs were nearby, including the Apollo Theatre--above which Bearden had a studio for sixteen years. The everydays of Harlem, noteworthy as well as mundane, daytime and nighttime, were Bearden subjects. He saw the parallels between the South and Harlem, where similar rituals and habits prevailed.
Romare Bearden,The Block II (detail), 1972, The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art
|  Harlem tenement houses, 1943, Library of Congress
"So much of life was lived out in the open, on the street..." Bearden recalled. With views into buildings on a Harlem block, daily rituals are revealed. One mother fixes a meal, another holds her baby. Friends visit. A man sits on a stoop (stair). Life--black life--takes center stage through the eyes of a fellow African American, revealing, as Ralph Ellison described "a world long hidden by the clichés of sociology..." |
A voracious reader, Bearden tapped into
the mythic and biblical associations of his experiences, presenting
black life in a universal context. Mother and child, a sacred bond
in all races and times, expresses the Christian model of Mary with
the baby Jesus. 
Romare Bearden, Mother and Child, c. 1972, Peg Alston
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