Romare Bearden (1912-88) was one of the finest collagists of the 20th century and the most distinguished black visual artist America has so far produced: the only one, perhaps, who rivaled in his own time and field the achievements of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Alvin Ailey and Arthur Mitchell, Earl Hines and Duke Ellington in theirs. His retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem is an exhilarating show marred by a sloppy catalog. This will not matter too much to the audience the exhibition will acquire as it moves around the museums of America, ending in 1993 in Washington. The art, as always, is what counts.
Without making a real point, the catalog strikes postures about the slights handed down to Bearden by a hegemonic white art world. He had at least 10 museum shows in the last quarter-century of his career, including one in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From 1964, when he first displayed his photo-based collages at Cordier & Ekstrom gallery in Manhattan, he had a steady market at high prices -- not, certainly, the crazed inflationary ones of the '80s, but respectable all the same. Most artists would kill for this kind of neglect and misunderstanding. So what does the case for Bearden-as-unjustly-marginalized-artist rest on? Apparently his exclusion from the "mainstream" of American art as defined by American white art historians, which happened, the catalog implies, because Bearden was black.
Now the concept of a "mainstream" is a phantom, an artifact of overcategorizing minds. The Tiber as a symbol of aesthetic transmission has been replaced by the Everglades. The idea of the "mainstream" is kept alive by pluralists, rather as Stalin maintained the memory of Trotsky -- as a bogey. But whatever prejudices and illusions "mainstream" thinking once depended on, racism was not among them, and Bearden got left out of the history books because those who wrote them lacked the imagination to find a frame in which to put his work. Such was the fate of the reflective, mildly conservative artist -- which Bearden certainly was -- in a culture dedicated to the proposition that only "radical" change matters. The complete institutional sweep made by Abstract Expressionism, by hostility to narrative and by the cult of the huge-object-as-spectacle rudely elbowed Bearden to the side. But this also happened to a lot of fine artists who happened to be white: try finding references to Fairfield Porter's work in the books of the time.
The catalog's nagging about the "mainstream" seems all the more pointless because Bearden possessed a deep aesthetic education: he was immersed in the self-sufficient culture of Western painting from Giotto right through to his own time, as well as in African art. It may be that curator Sharon F. Patton thought she was paying him some kind of compliment in writing that "like Pollock, de Kooning . . . and Rothko, Bearden, too, rejected the modernist tradition," but this is nonsense: none of those artists, Bearden least of all, did any such thing.