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Having moved to a larger scale, he could use paint more freely and combine his effects with the "pure" collage, the painted and cut sheets of paper without printed design, that his idol Matisse had employed in his last decoupages. Bearden was a gifted colorist whose yellows, deep blues and fuchsias played against the photographic gray and produced, in works like Three Folk Musicians, 1967 (his riff on Picasso's Three Musicians in MOMA), a truly lyrical zing. But always the human effigy predominated: those crowded faces and bodies, shouting, working, grinning, making music, suffering, pressed with ebullience and awkward grace against the picture plane like people on the other side of a window -- Here I am! Notice me! "I felt," Bearden once explained, "that the Negro was becoming too much of an abstraction, rather than the reality that art can give a subject. What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic." In this he succeeded, and the show is the proof.