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Music and Aesthetic ChoicesVisual equivalences?English critic and essayist Walter Pater once wrote that "all art constantly aspires to the condition of music." Not all would agree, and some would reject the idea of any correspondence at all. Bearden did not paint with sound, of course, but he, more than most artists, seems to have sensed a real connection between music and the formal properties of his art.The slipped (often flatted) notes of blues and jazz, the blue notes, produce an effect like the offset planes of Bearden's collaged faces. They are naturalistic in their parts, photographically so even, but abstract in the whole. Stepped, constructed, faceted, with features tumbling like rapid notes. Like music itself, Bearden's faces are part expectation and part surprise.  Romare Bearden, The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism (details),
1964, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, gift
of Joesph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 |
"One of the things
I did was listen to a lot of music. I'd take a sheet of paper and
just make lines while I listened to records — a kind of shorthand
to pick up the rhythm and the intervals."
Working in a print workshop in 1985, Bearden listened as a recording by drummer Max Roach and trumpter Clifford Brown came over the radio. "And I just took a brush and painted the sounds, the color rhythms, and the silences...." He gave the print that resulted to Roach. In 1986 he joined musician Jackie McLean on stage in Hartford, Connecticut, to perform "Sound Collages and Visual Improvisation." While McLean played African drums, piano, and alto sax (his main instrument), Bearden drew with markers. Before devoting himself fully to painting in 1955, Bearden received encouragement and advice from post-cubist artist Stuart Davis. Davis, who formed his own jazz ensemble, urged Bearden to study jazz for visual analogies. Particularly, he suggested Bearden listen to Earl Hines on the piano. Davis likened his own color intervals to the way Hines used space. "Listen," Davis told Bearden, "to what he isn't playing. What you don't need is just as important as what you do need." |
Stuart Davis, Swing Landscape, 1938, Indiana Univeristy of Art, Bloomington
Bearden complied:"I listened for hours to recordings of Earl Hines at the piano. Finally, I was able to concentrate on the silences between the notes. I found that this was very helpful to me in the transmutation of sound into colors and in the placement of objects in my paintings and collages. I could have studied this integration and spacing in Greek vase painting… but with Earl Hines I ingested it within my own background. Jazz has shown me the ways of achieving artistic structures that are personal to me, but it also provides me continuing finger-snapping, head-shaking enjoyment...." Romare Bearden, A Walk
in Paradise Gardens, 1955, Robert L. Johnson from The Barnett-Aden Collection, Washington, DC
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