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Indeed, one of the most moving aspects of his work is the way he thought constantly about his heritage, including that of Modernism. This reflection sometimes becomes the essential subject of the collage. A particularly fine example is Artist with Painting and Model, 1981, a veritable love letter to Matisse. Bearden plays marvelously with the ambiguous nature of collage. The figure of the model is a reddish-brown silhouette, but the artist's studies on the floor are real drawings of a standing model -- pencil on paper -- pasted down, and the painter's white shirt is more used drawing paper whose accidental smudges become purposive shading: three levels of representation, to begin with.
On the way to such images, Bearden traversed a lot of ground and did not find himself early. The son of intellectuals in New York City, themselves deeply involved in the Harlem renaissance of the '20s, Bearden spent long stretches of his boyhood and youth in the rural South and industrial Pittsburgh. The range of his acquaintance, from field hands, ironworkers and Storyville pimps to such heroes of black culture as Duke Ellington, was large: wild enough to make a novelist -- or, in Bearden's case, to give the young artist an abiding love of actuality and pictorial anecdote that abstract art could not possibly satisfy.
He went the route of many young American abstract painters in the late '30s and '40s: colonial Cubism diffused into WPA-style figure painting. His sympathies did not lie with Abstract Expressionism, the avant-garde style of '50s New York. "When Delacroix began to transcribe his romantic vision," Bearden wrote, "he had the heritage of Herder, Schelling, Schiller and all the French Romanticists who were of his time. So when I look at Stamos, Baziotes and the rest, I wonder what point their work has, and to what end does it drive."
An excellent question, to which Bearden found no answer. In 1951 he went to Paris and there suffered a severe attack of painter's block, from which he gradually extricated himself by copying old masters and then, in the late '50s, doing derivative, pastelly Ab-Ex pictures. What caused this crisis neither the exhibition nor its catalog indicates. But he got out of it through collage.
Bearden's largish photocollages of the '60s and '70s remain his most distinctive work, for two reasons: their use of the medium and their sharply observant, full-blooded, encyclopedic imagery of black life. Since the work of artists like Max Ernst, John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch in the 1920s, collage had always been small -- keyed to the actual size of the reproduced images in print, which the artist cut up and rearranged. Bearden, however, had the original images, his source material, photographically blown up so that the . eyes, faces, hands and mouths could make larger, more wall-holding pictures. The human features were all cut to a razor profile, with sudden abutments, breaks and repetitions that functioned, for him, as a visual equivalent to the jazz he loved.