Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South

By Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha

Romare Bearden (1911–1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed his family in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden's life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training, and rich knowledge of art history.

Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden's family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden's art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden's place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469667874

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is assistant professor of religion at the University of Miami.

Book preview

ROMARE BEARDEN IN THE HOMELAND OF HIS IMAGINATION

ROMARE BEARDEN IN THE HOMELAND OF HIS IMAGINATION

AN ARTIST’S RECKONING WITH THE SOUTH

GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE

A FERRIS AND FERRIS BOOK

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

This book was published under the Marcie Cohen Ferris and William R. Ferris Imprint of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed and set by Lindsay Starr in Monotype Dante by Monotype

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Romare Bearden, Profile/Part I: The Twenties, Mecklenburg County, Early Carolina Morning, 1978. Serigraph, 21 × 29¾ in. Image courtesy Romare Bearden Foundation and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. Art©Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, author.

Title: Romare Bearden in the homeland of his imagination : an artist’s reckoning with the South / Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2022] | A Ferris and Ferris book—Title page. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021052604 | ISBN 9781469667867 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469667874 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bearden, Romare, 1911–1988. | Bearden, Romare, 1911–1988—Family. | African American artists—Biography. | African American artists—Southern States. | Middle class African Americans.

Classification: LCC N6537.B4 G55 2022 | DDC 709.2—dc23/eng/20211217

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052604

A version of chapter 2 originally appeared as Glenda Gilmore, In Search of Maudell Sleet’s Garden, in Southern Cultures 27, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 26–37. Copyright © Glenda Gilmore by the Center for the Study of the American South. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.org.

To my family, Ben, Miles, Derry, and Mia-lia, who gave me the homeland that I once could not have imagined

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. Love in Slavery and Freedom

CHAPTER 2. Home and Away

CHAPTER 3. The Price of the Ticket

CHAPTER 4. Bearden’s Harlem Renaissance

CHAPTER 5. Lost in Abstraction

CHAPTER 6. From Darkness to Light

CHAPTER 7. Round-Trip Ticket

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Rosa Catherine Gosprey Kennedy and Henry Kennedy, ca. 1920

Sanborn map of Kennedy home

Romare Bearden’s sketch of Kennedy complex

Watching the Good Trains Go By, 1964

The Conversation, 1979

Pepper Jelly Lady, 1980

Rosa Catherine Cattie Kennedy, ca. 1880

Richard P. Bearden, ca. 1880

Conjunction, 1979

Cattie Bearden, Rosa Kennedy, Henry Kennedy, and Romare Bearden, ca. 1913

Kennedy and Bearden families, ca. 1920

Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Sunset and Moonrise with Maudell Sleet, 1978

Summer (Maudell Sleet’s July Garden), 1985

Family, 1986

Return of the Prodigal Son, 1967

Pittsburgh Memory, 1964

Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 1967

Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (Pittsburgh Memories), 1978

The Picket Line, The Crisis, 1934

Over and Above All the Shouting—, Baltimore Afro-American, 1937

George Grosz, The Suburb, 1917

The Block, 1971

Of the Blues: At the Savoy, 1974

Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: The Negro in an African Setting, 1934

Charles Alston, sketch of Bessye J. Bearden, ca. 1943

Cotton Workers, ca. 1941

Folk Musicians, 1942

Factory Workers, 1942

Carl Van Vechten, Bearden in Uniform, ca. 1944

Romare Bearden at Camp Davis, NC, ca. 1943

Private Charles Alston and Sergeant Romare Bearden at G Street Gallery, 1944

Lovers, 1943 or 1944

The Passion of Christ, Untitled (He Is Arisen), 1945

The Passion of Christ, Untitled (Roman Soldiers Beating Christ), 1945

Golgotha, 1945

Duccio di Bouninsegna, Crucifixion, 1308–11

The Passion of Christ, Untitled (Raising Lazarus), 1945

Now the Dove and the Leopard Wrestle, 1946

You Are Dead Forever, ca. 1945

Romare Bearden and Marvin Smith in Paris, 1951

Gardens of Babylon, 1955

Blue Lady, 1955

A Walk in Paradise Gardens, 1955

Nicolas Poussin, Nymphs Feeding the Child Jupiter, ca. 1650

Photostat of Nicolas Poussin, Nymphs Feeding the Child Jupiter

Harlequin, 1956

Circus: The Artist’s Center Ring, 1961

Projections: The Prevalence of Ritual: Evening, 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue, 1964

The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, 1964

The Family, 1975

Of the Blues: Mecklenburg County, Saturday Night, 1974

Of the Blues: Carolina Shout, 1974

Profile/Part I: The Twenties, Mecklenburg County, Early Carolina Morning, 1978

Profiles/Part I: The Twenties, Mecklenburg County, Liza in High Cotton, 1978

Moonlight Prelude, 1987

ROMARE BEARDEN IN THE HOMELAND OF HIS IMAGINATION

INTRODUCTION

You know, in Eliot’s poem, The Four Quartets, he talks about time, and you’re going back to where you started from, but maybe you’re bringing another insight, another experience to it. And things that may be nonessential have been stripped away, and you can see that the things that still stick in your mind must be of some importance to you. Like the people I remember, the pepper jelly lady, a little girl [who] kind of played with me, Liza. All of these things that now came back to me. —ROMARE BEARDEN, 1980

Romare Bearden, among the most renowned artists of the twentieth century, could conjure only episodic glimpses of Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was born on September 2, 1911. As a historian, my first task was to recover the factual history of the Bearden and his forebears. Some of my discoveries contradict Bearden’s own and others’ accounts. Other recovered sources, reported here for the first time, add information that Bearden never knew; in fact, they include some things he could never have known. The contradictions between the historical record and how Bearden recounted his life and family background create a fruitful tension between how historical facts and one’s own lived experiences coincide and collide. It is my intention to credit both. Bearden’s accounts, based on what he believed to be true, carry historical weight in and of themselves.

He could not tell precisely what he remembered or what generalized African American culture, particularly Black southern culture, evoked for him. As he created paintings and collages, he often did not know what was real, what was partially real, and what was a dream. This creative conundrum drove his artistic expression and sparked his imagination. The contrasts of history and memory also testify to the violence that slavery and Jim Crow wrought on African American memory and self-representation. A century and a half of historical neglect, family secrets, silences, and a racist archive that hides the Black past stole a factual family story from Bearden, even as he often tried to capture it visually.

Bearden represented the fourth generation of the African American Kennedy-Bearden family, who lived together in a family compound in the midst of the growing city. He began life bathed in love and certain of his place in life. White supremacy drove his parents to Harlem in 1915, and he grew up there and in Pittsburgh. A formally trained artist, he devoted himself to his art from the 1930s until his death on March 12, 1988, even as he worked full-time as a social worker for thirty years.

Bearden’s artistic trajectory reflects the history of twentieth-century art. He moved from social realism in the 1930s, to abstract expressionism in the 1940s. When he turned to creating collage paintings in the late 1950s, he became a nationally acclaimed artist and produced hundreds of works. Through his entire career, he saw himself as a cubist, even as his work changed radically over time.

The traditional narrative of Bearden’s life is an American story that posits his family’s progress as linear, steadily improving, as racial discrimination inexorably faded from the Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. But Bearden’s life and those of three generations of his southern Black family before him belie the myth of Black people unceasingly rising as they climbed. Instead, the political economy of racism constantly remade itself to thwart the Kennedys’ and Beardens’ hopes. Their family story is a compelling saga of middle-class Black achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy.

Bearden’s great-grandparents entered Reconstruction with considerable advantages: literacy, a federal job, and small businesses. They owned outright a large Victorian home with a wraparound front porch, two rental houses, and a store. Each subsequent generation followed the playbook of the American dream: they became educated, worked hard, and were civic activists. But time and time again, the inexorable growth of direct white oppression and systemic racism always threatened their place. It diminished the values of their homes and businesses, forced college graduates into menial jobs, and caused them to flee the South for their safety.¹

Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination explores his own and his family’s lives through his art. It follows many essays on Bearden’s life, but only two other book-length biographies: Mary Schmidt Campbell’s comprehensive treatment, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden, and Myron Schwartzman’s oral history, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art.² Both offer deep insight into Bearden himself. Schwartzman’s work brilliantly uses oral interviews, and Campbell’s biography spans his life and art. Several major exhibition catalogs focus on his art and include essays with reflections on his life and expert analyses on his work that have also shaped the interpretations in this book.³

Existing biographical essays and monographs, with the exception of Campbell’s American Odyssey, are based primarily on oral interviews that Bearden gave throughout his life. Schwartzman adds limited archival work to his substantial oral interviews with Bearden. Yet in the thirty years since the publication of Schwartzman’s Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, as interest in Bearden’s life and family history has grown, new historical tools with which we can uncover the African American past have emerged.

Bearden understood the tension between history and memory. He told an interviewer, Time is a pattern. … You can come back to where you started from with added experience and you hope for more understanding. His memories slipped the bonds of reality and entered the realm of the mythical. Moreover, contributing to the tension between history and memory is that Bearden only rarely corrected others’ representations of his past. He did not object to reading that he was born and grew up in a southern farm cabin, when, in fact, he was born in a middle-class, urban home and left the South at the age of four. His concern was always with the universal human experience, not with his individual life as exceptional. If others identified with his past and found meaning there, he would not interfere.

Many writers assume a literalness in Bearden’s work that gives short shrift to his artistic practice.⁴ Schwartzman marveled, Bearden seems singular in having internalized much of the subject matter of his art by the time his memory was fully formed.⁵ But there was a far more complicated process at play. He always realized that he could not see these memories in full. Instead, they were fragments of a past that he found he partially recovered through the process of collage. He began with rectangular colors, added paper, put in cutout material such as illustrations or fabrics, and painted and drew his impressions across the disjunctures. He did it again and again in the same work.

This book uses his art as an archive in three ways: to illuminate his family’s and his own experiences, to explore his own Black imaginary, and to carry the narrative thread of his artist practice over decades. Seeing the art is critical to reading the text. Words alone won’t work with Bearden. Sometimes they get in the way. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín despaired: My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against the fullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry.⁶ Romare Bearden knew that words would not work against the fullness of his life, and in middle age his artistic work plunged into the rich chaos of his imagination.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t have words. He wrote scores of essays, artist’s statements, newspaper articles, and reviews, and coauthored two books. Yet, often oddly wordless in the face of his artistic production, he generally named a piece only after he pronounced it finished. Sometimes he asked friends to name them. Once, trying to explain to an interviewer that his artistic recall did not involve words, he recounted the advice that artist Henri Matisse gave to young artists who came to study with him: Now the first thing I want all of you to do is to cut your tongues out. Bearden described his own creative process by saying, This way of thinking is not verbalization.⁷

To understand Bearden and his work sometimes requires the historian to suspend verbalization as well and simply to look at what Bearden is showing us. Learning from Bearden as an artist has changed the way I tell this story. Influenced by his training as a cubist, I leave rough and jarring edges. Where there is disjuncture, I use the black outlines of Matisse and the Fauves—just as Bearden did—to join together the unjoinable. There are dark spots unfilled. Pieces of the past that I have uncovered sometimes are fragmented as collage. And finally, toward the very end of the eighteen years that I spent thinking about and working with Bearden, I learned to do what he had always wanted his viewers to do: to tell my own stories from his art.

Bearden’s art shows us what words will not. Reading it as a visual archive against the textual one explodes the linear narrative bound by history’s chronological imperative. Thinking about Bearden’s artwork as an archive offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. Those visual memories, their ragged edges and ruptured snatches, make a new world of their own.

I entered the Bearden saga as a historian of African Americans. My encounter with the family began in the late 1980s, reading the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church newspaper The Star of Zion. As I cranked the microfilm reel, I sat in a temporary library about three blocks away from Bearden’s great-grandfather’s former Charlotte home, while Italian craftsmen inlayed the mosaic of a huge Bearden mural at the grand city public library under construction. In The Star’s pages, I discovered Cattie Bearden, Romare’s grandmother, who was president of the North Carolina Woman’s Christian Temperance Union #2. She became one of the women in my book Gender and Jim Crow. Later, when I researched a second book, Defying Dixie—on Black southern expatriates who tried to overturn Jim Crow—I followed Bearden’s mother, Bessye, as she wrote a weekly column in the Chicago Defender on Harlem society and politics.

Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination begins with the enslavement of his great-grandparents, with whom he lived until he was four, and ends in the 1980s with Bearden’s artwork—and the man himself—taking by storm his birthplace, Charlotte. Grounded in the broad sweep of African American history from emancipation beyond the civil rights movement, it depicts the Black culture, politics, and society in which Bearden and his family lived. The book privileges his work on the South.

Bearden became an artist in the late 1920s and early 1930s, first by sketching and cartooning, then painting in the social realist style with aspects of cubism. He studied fine arts at Boston University for two years in the early 1930s and his teacher at the Art Students League, George Grosz, greatly influenced him. He moved to representational abstract expressionism in the 1940s, and produced his first collage in the late 1950s, while continuing to paint abstractly. He spent three years in the 1950s simply copying Old Masters works as self-education. He worked in watercolor, oils, and collage from the early 1960s until his death.

Art changed from decade to decade in the twentieth century. Black artists’ opportunities, fortunes, and subject matter changed radically as well. Bearden’s style at the height of his success in the 1970s and 1980s incorporated pieces of his entire experience and produced a glittering gestalt. Bearden put it this way: I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.⁸

The book is divided roughly into three parts. Chapters 1 and 2 follow his great-grandparents Henry Kennedy and Rosa Catherine Gosprey Kennedy from slavery to a prosperous existence in Charlotte, North Carolina. Henry had been enslaved as a sixteen-year-old to Woodrow Wilson’s father. Romare’s pious grandmother, also named Rosa Catherine Kennedy but called Cattie, was a young widow who brought up Bearden’s father, Richard Howard, and her other two children, while living with the Kennedys. Howard Bearden and Bearden’s mother Bessye returned to live there as well, until they fled Charlotte in 1915 for Harlem.

The book’s second part chronicles Bearden’s life as he grew up in Harlem, Canada, and Pittsburgh. Chapter 3 assesses the toll that migration took on his nuclear and extended family as well as the opportunities it presented. The moves were disastrous for Howard, wrenching for Romare, and invigorating for Bessye. Chapter 4 places Bearden as a socially prominent young Black man and artist in the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on his art education and his frustrating experimentation with different artistic styles.

In the final third of the book, chapter 5 sees Bearden off as a soldier in World War II. His mother died prematurely during the war, just as she had become a national