Romare Bearden: Call and Recall
on view until Jan. 4, 2004

Alumnus Bearden Becomes First African-American Artist Featured in Solo Show at National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

By James Devitt

In his lifetime, Romare Bearden broke social and artistic barriers with his painting.

Now, 15 years after his death, Bearden has reached a new plateau by becoming the first African-American artist featured in a solo retrospective at Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition, titled “Call and Recall” which began Sept. 14, runs until Jan. 4, 2004 at the 62-year-old gallery. The retrospective includes some 130 pieces, from 1941 to 1986, including paintings, costumes, and stage sets.

Bearden, a 1935 graduate of the School of Education, explored many thematic boundaries with his work, ranging from religious subjects to jazz clubs and brothels to history and literature. He is best known for his collages Watching the Good Trains Go By and Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings, part of a series of works that recall his upbringing in the south and his adult life in Harlem. Other locations where Bearden lived and worked, including Pittsburgh and St. Martin, also inspired his art.

“Romare Bearden’s collages match a precise, disciplined command of structure and form with a content that is probing and authentic,” said Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts and a noted Bearden authority. “Using African-American culture as a point of departure, he was able to explore the complexities and contradictions of a multitude of themes: history, music, family, home, women, and the modern condition, and he did so in works of remarkable beauty.”

In addition, the Romare Bearden Foundation, located at 27th St. and 7th Ave. in Manhattan, found in its archives a children’s book manuscript, which Bearden had written. The manuscript, Li’l Dan the Drummer Boy: a Civil War Story, was published by Simon & Schuster in September.

Other prominent artists and writers who graduated from the School of Education, renamed the Steinhardt School of Education in 2001, include sculptor George Segal and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt.

“The Art of Romare Bearden” will be at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art from Oct.14, 2004 through Jan. 9, 2005.

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