Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition

Known for his rich, complex collage works that depict large-scale themes via African-American subjects, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) drew inspiration from myriad cultural influences--from historical and modern art to music and literature. According to The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, "His genius, aside from his poetic knack for piecing scraps of photographs and other tiny tidbits together, was to see collage as an inherent social metaphor: that its essence was to turn nothings into something, making disparate elements cohere; that it was about mixing and adding, a positivist enterprise." Based on the 2007 National Bearden Symposium, this volume examines Bearden's relationships to modernism, postmodernism and the avant garde, through his wide-ranging interests and associations with artists, intellectuals and musicians of his era--including Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison and Stuart Davis, to name a few--as well as his practices.