A Close Reading of Romare Bearden: Paris Blues Revisited

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Introduction

Romare Bearden, one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century, is being celebrated nationwide in honor of the centennial of his birth. This Integral Post will discuss one of the current exhibitions, Paris Blues Revisited (Jazz at Lincoln Center, Frederick P. Rose Hall; September 24, 2011 – February 28, 2012).

Bearden used jazz in his work as subject matter and basis for improvisation, especially in his famous collages. For the contemporary visual artist, however, subject matter is secondary to the “decorative, ornamental and design values,” says author Albert Murray, in the essay “Bearden Plays Bearden,” from his book, The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement. (Pantheon, 1996)

From the 1950s, and especially after 1962, to his death in 1988, Bearden collaborated with Murray, his friend and colleague, on many art projects and exhibitions. Murray named many of Bearden’s works and ghost wrote essays and speeches by Bearden.

Here’s a short clip of them discussing a famous work by Bearden, The Block, a six-panel collage in tribute to Harlem now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

How Bearden relates his work, The Block, to music is very significant. The clip begins with Murray saying: “In dealing with The Block, for example, as suggestive as it is of the block, the statement is about something more than the block.”

Bearden says that the local details, the view from Murray’s window off Lenox Avenue in Harlem, were just a “jumping off point.” He mentions a liquor store and a funeral home, and his image of an Ethiopian angel receiving the deceased lady’s spirit in the great beyond.

He demonstrates the kind of sketching that later turned into a full-blown multi-media work. “Then I imagined, let’s say that there’s a family eating. And there’s a little boy up there and I put the big electric light bulb. And there are other figures sitting around. And then we went inside the building.”

Murray: “A lot of people think that you see that and then you have the painting in mind, [whereas] you actually fill the painting as the options open up, as you play with them, as you improvise. It’s an improvised thing.” 
    

Bearden then connects the visual and the musical. “But looking at those buildings now, Al. Those two red buildings, this one a little longer, and [the other] coming back to here. Actually, what I’m doing here is making a keyboard.

“Now the thing that we have to do is think about interval,” an idea he got from the piano playing of early jazz piano legend Earl Hines, and the influence of visual artist Stuart Davis. He mentions the light and dark areas of the work (that interplay being interval-like), and proclaims the visual artwork as akin to a musical composition. “Moving from one point to the other. And . . . you [also] have to look for things that repeat themselves. Like those chimneys. And you see these things going along, and you move your repetition.”

“And you see these triangular movements . . . and the first thing you know, you have a sonata.”

Paris Blues Revisited

Circa 1981, Bearden and Murray joined forces with Sam Shaw, a photographer known for his work in Hollywood. In fact, Shaw also produced the 1961 movie Paris Blues, which was originally conceived as a story based on Bearden’s sojourn in Paris in the 1950s.

But, alas, the film—which featured Diahann Carroll, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, and a cameo by Louis Armstrong—was disappointing to Shaw and to the composer who wrote the musical score, Duke Ellington. The message of the movie is that a group of jazz musicians are trying their best to get the attention of the official French academy. Turns out that jazz was a good source for music but was not sufficient in and of itself. The irony is that the music they were playing in the film was Ellington’s soundtrack, which was more than sufficient for the task.

So Shaw, Murray, and Bearden decided to make their own aesthetic statement via a book that would feature words by Murray, and collages by Bearden, which use the photo images that Shaw took in 1961 of Ellington, Strayhorn, Armstrong, and of Paris, and other people and places there.

The book never came to fruition, but the current exhibition Paris Blues Revisited, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in midtown Manhattan, displays much of the art created for the book project. Columbia University English and Comparative Literature professor Robert G. O’Meally led a team of scholars that curated the exhibit. O’Meally is the founder and former director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia. His latest work is Romare Bearden: Black Odyssey—A Search for Home, a catalogue for a show that housed a Bearden exhibit this fall at the D.C. Moore Gallery on Fifth Avenue. His new project is a full study of Bearden's uses of literary subjects.

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When I recently interviewed Professor O’Meally we discussed interpretations of several of the pieces. The first features a photo of Ellington and Strayhorn in a car, looking out opposite windows at the City of Lights, black and white renderings of iconic Paris sites and buildings as a backdrop, with the Mona Lisa painting inserted on top of a representation of the Eiffel Tower. There’s also a bird in the middle of the flat surface, mixed-media painting with the black and white photo in the foreground.

“I think Bearden intentionally puts the Mona Lisa there to suggest that these men are part of a long continuum of art,” says O’Meally. “It’s Montmartre in the background with the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. There’s, perhaps, a sacred dimension to the mission here. As with the Eiffel Tower.

“I think Bearden wants to make the point that though they came to play, these are some serious artists. Notice that pensive, serious look as they’re trying to put Mona Lisa together with the Eiffel Tower. And there’s the tradition represented by Sidney Bechet and Josephine Baker. And the church—there’s a whole lot of shakin’ going on in there. And that bird flyin’ across the middle, you know, there’s a freedom song in there. 

“To me, it’s important that this is around 1960-1961, and the Civil Rights Movement is shifting gears. We’re anticipating the March on Washington, we’ve had Little Rock. That this is a freedom show isn’t escaping anyone’s notice.”

The next piece is one of the masterpieces of the exhibit.

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Robert G. O’Meally:
   

“On that video of Bearden and Murray from the documentary Bearden Plays Bearden,Bearden says that if you look at those houses lined up it’s a keyboard. We see the keyboard and the vertical stripes; I think they both recall the towers of the city, or the row houses of Harlem and all over New York. I don’t mean tenements. I mean those like when he was making The Block and The Street. I see an abstract urbanscape there. The towers always remind us that New York City and the other cities [Paris, New Orleans] are musical cities. To emphasize the point he has the keyboard riffing against the musical score sheet.

“I also enjoy Bearden the colorist. Early in his career he worked with black & white and shades of grey. Later he said that if he used color he wanted to introduce color that would walk around like big men and not shyly stand in the corner. When he gives us these bold blues and pastels, he’s recognizing Ellington and all of his tone parallels, and what Ellington called transbluency.  All of those colors of the man who had thought about a career in visual art. And that Pops [Armstrong] is a great colorist.

“I read that face closest to Ellington’s, and all three, as you do: mask-like. . . I’m fascinated by the idea that Armstrong’s smile is not all there is. Some people just see the smile and think that he’s just some grinning clown who conforms to a stereotype, and behind that is a contemplative, inward-searching genius, who’s doing his best to bring as much as Ellington to this business of composition, making art as serious as it can be. And if that’s not enough, don’t forget that there are the long centuries of African art, and its part in the modern project.

“He makes the composer and the great soloist stand eye-to-eye. He has the sheet of composition paper on Armstrong’s side, as if to remind that he’s a composer too, and there might not be anything written in the usual sense, but he’s bringing more than just the notation.

“Bearden is giving you layered individuals; you need to look and look again to realize that there are many more dimensions than usually meets the eye. As you said, Greg, it’s almost three-dimensional. He’s doing his best to give you what Picasso talked about: a piece of sculpture on a flat surface.

“In Murray’s essay about Paris Blues, he writes that Ellington’s challenge was to write a piece for the soloist. He says that of course Ellington had been doing that from the beginning of his career, so he was very familiar with the kind of collaboration involved with someone seeing the whole score, and someone busting loose any score that tries to hold him too tight.

“I had a wonderful afternoon talking with novelist Toni Morrison a few years ago. She owned a couple of Beardens, some that had been given to her by the artist. I asked her if there were things that Bearden could do that she couldn’t. She said, ‘Well, since language is so explicit, you feel like you can do anything. But I made the character Pilate in Song of Solomon, but believe me, by the time Romie took out that knife of his, and started to make Pilate the way he made her, he was getting to things I couldn’t possibly get to. You can draw, with a knife, things that you can’t draw with a pen.’

“Oh, man. This sense that life has its masks and masquerades, and its layers and composition that runs right into the piano.

“There’s an interview with Bearden where he’s asked what kind of mask he presented in his work, Carolina Shout. Bearden said he didn’t force himself to know that. African-Americans came from so many places that he felt it would be stupid for him to make all of them from one specific part of one specific area. He made a point that we are a various people; that’s implied too.

“Another is that music involves going inward, being contemplative, as well as the humor and ecstatic moment that involves Armstrong.

“I also see the work of John A. Kouwenhoven through the towers and the Manhattan skyline, but also Murray and this idea that carnival and rites of passage underlie music.

“I also like that it’s not so busy. Bearden said that he wanted to leave what he called an open corner, a space where the eye could rest, and also where the viewer could enter. He wanted to know from that viewer, what do you think is going on here? Let’s make the collaboration include the viewer. I see that violet, or any of those long, clear, relatively free spaces as invitations, a continuous conversation with the viewer.

“As far as influences, I think he wants you to think Matisse, Picasso and Braque, but I think that in the same way that there are all of these deep traditions implied in the keyboard and the masks, you can’t but look at this and say ’This is a Bearden.’ You can see the influences, but he’s wearing them, they’re not wearing him.”