- Welcome to Inside New York's Art World.
I'm Barbaralee Diamonstein
and our guest this
evening is Romare Bearden,
a well-known American painter
who has exhibited his
paintings and collages
throughout this country and abroad.
His most recent exhibit
at the Cordier Ekstrom Gallery,
entitled Phase 1, was this
past November and December.
It was derived from
incidents in his childhood
in North Carolina and Pittsburgh.
These facts were greatly elaborated upon
in a profile of the artist
in The New Yorker magazine
in November of 1977.
Mr. Bearden is one of
the few living artists
honored with a retrospective exhibit
at the Museum of Modern Art
in the spring of 1971.
Beginning March of 1980,
there will be another
retrospective showing
of the artist's work
originating at the Mint Museum
in Charlotte, North Carolina,
the city where Mr. Bearden was born.
This show will travel to various museums
throughout the United States.
Mr. Bearden has also written a book
called "The Painter's Mind"
together with his friend and colleague,
the late Carl Holty.
Harry Abrams published
"The Art of Romare Bearden"
in their series on well-known
artists during 1974.
Forthcoming will be another
book of color reproductions
on Bearden's collages by George Braziller.
Mr. Bearden began his
career as an exhibitor
following his Army service in 1945,
when he showed with the
Samuel Kootz Gallery,
where so many of the now famous artists
also began their careers
before the gallery going public.
A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Bearden.
- [Romare] Thank you.
- You are indeed a master of collage
and your work often depicts the daily life
and cultural heritage of black people.
But you've also tried in your paintings
to explore those things
common to all cultures.
You've said that you've tried
to forge a cultural synthesis
between the Harlem where you grew up
and the Harlem of the Dutch masters
that contributed to your
understanding of art.
What do you mean when you talk
about forging this synthesis?
- Well, art is a matter of processing.
The art of the world belongs to everyone.
And since I was doing so many
of the things in interiors,
I looked at the Dutch masters
like de Hooch and Vermeer
because they were really masters of that,
and I was able to study their work
and their rectangular way
of presenting their subject matter,
and I incorporated it in my own work.
I looked at them and used it
for what I had observed.
- From what did your own
interest in art stem?
- That's hard to say because
I first majored in mathematics,
and then I went to medical school,
and I kind of, like Gauguin,
not that I equate myself
with that great master,
but only to say that I started art late.
I gave up medicine to go into painting.
- How much time did you
spend in medical school?
- I was in my third year.
And when I came home, my mother said,
"What are you doing home so early?"
I said, "I quit."
She said, "Son, you're
throwing your life away."
So it's given me courage
to go on and do things
that anyway, because I always
thought my life was behind me.
(audience laughing)
- Well, those were significant words,
not only coming from one's mother,
but a mother as influential as yours.
Your mother was a very
well-known social force
and political activist in Harlem.
- [Romare] I didn't know you knew that.
- A newspaper editor.
I guess everybody knew
your mother in Harlem,
so when she made that pronouncement,
I guess she knew what
she was talking about.
Was having a mother as prominent
and as powerful as yours
a help or a hindrance
in your career?
- Well, she didn't bother me.
I think what she said, she meant well
because she felt that artists
would be living in a
garage and starving, and
she was 90% right, but
(audience laughing)
I can't say she was a hindrance, no.
And she died when I was quite young,
and so she never lived
to see me have an exhibit
or anything like that.
I think that would have pleased her.
So I can't say that she was a hindrance.
- Other than your studying one year or so
at The Art Students League,
you really never had
any formal art training.
- No, I didn't.
And after the war,
I got, as you mentioned
in the introduction,
with the Kootz Gallery.
And after a while, I felt that
I really needed to learn
something more about painting.
And I had read the journals
of Eugene Delacroix,
and all during these journals,
he would go to the Louvre
and copy the paintings
of Rubens and Veronese
and the other painters,
and I said, "Well, he's a great artist.
"If he did this, it might help me."
But I was too bashful to
go to The Metropolitan
or any other museums,
so there was a man named Wachelka,
back of Wanamaker's in that time,
and I had him enlarge
some of the old masters' paintings for me.
So I stopped exhibiting for
about three or four years
and I got large sheets of brown paper,
and then I began to copy.
- Rather than sitting
in a museum and copying,
you enlarged--
- Yes.
I enlarged the paintings.
Now they were in black and white,
so I had to imagine the color.
Now the only one that I
really had difficulty with
was a painting of Rembrandt
called Pilate Washing His Hands,
which is at The Metropolitan,
because every time I thought I had it,
I would see something else in
Rembrandt that I had missed,
and because he's the most
mysterious of painters
and his structure and all is hidden.
And you'd have to understand Rembrandt,
you'd have to look at his drawings
because his paintings have been cloaked
or clothed under so much varnish.
But I found that this
was very helpful to me
in learning how a
painting was put together.
It stopped my career
in painting, you know,
when the gallery split.
I felt that I needed that.
- As a successful and self-taught artist,
which artists other than
Rembrandt did you look toward
for both inspiration and direction?
- When you say self-taught,
I think all artists are self-taught
because even if you go to art
school, after you get out,
I mean, you'll have to learn painting
and sculpture is something
that can't be taught
and it's something that you either
have to make your own disposition toward.
- [Barbaralee] Well, you're suggesting
that academic training
is really not essential
for a student of art?
- Well, I don't wanna knock art schools,
but I think that it's what
I said, after you get out,
your study of art just begins.
And the thing that I would say
is wrong with art schools now
is that they teach success
instead of the fundamentals of art
in which a person can grow from.
What I mean by that, you find
some of the artists go out,
you remember when abstract expressionism
was the phase at the time,
they were teaching that in the schools.
So when they came out,
everybody was doing pop art.
So they could do an abstract
expressionist painting
or a pop art painting or this,
but a Picasso, for instance, or a Matisse,
if they wanted to do, could do anything
because they had the basic training.
This is what I meant when I say
that so much success is
taught in the art schools.
- Your first exhibition was
at the Samuel Kootz Gallery.
- [Romare] That's true.
- Can you tell us what memories
you have of that exhibition,
and how did that take place?
- Well, I had an exhibition in Washington
with a lady named Caresse Crosby,
and she'd opened a gallery
in Washington during the war.
And I think a biography I
saw of her husband came out,
Harry Crosby, who was a
kind of a poet and banker
living in Paris, and she the
Black Sun Press in Paris,
and then with the outbreak of the war,
she came to Washington and
opened the G Place Gallery.
And right after the war,
I had an exhibit at her gallery.
And then I met her in New York
and she was coming to see Samuel Kootz,
who had just opened his
gallery with a show of Calder.
And he was looking for
some of the young artists
at that time,
and Peggy Guggenheim had
closed her gallery of Baziotes,
of Pollock, of Bob Motherwell,
had come to Kootz.
And she said, "Well, I had
a show of Romare's recently.
"Why don't you look at his work?"
And he did, and he said,
"Well, I'll give you a show right away."
And so that was how it happened.
It was only there was so
few young American artists,
it's different now,
but I wouldn't have had the same luck
at the present time.
But Betty Parsons and Kootz
were only the two galleries
showing that kinda
vanguard art at the time,
so you see how things have expanded.
- It's difficult enough being an artist,
but I imagine even more
difficult being a black artist.
- Yes, that's true.
I mean, they have a
great deal of difficulty,
and for that reason,
with two other artists,
I opened a gallery for young artists
called the Cinque Gallery.
It's moved--
- [Barbaralee] That's in
the most recent period
that you've done that.
- No, it was--
- Several years ago.
- No, 12 years ago.
- Is it that long?
- In 1967.
It's 12 or 13 years ago.
So we give shows to artists,
and if they sell any work,
they get 100% of the money
and we defray all of the
expenses of the exhibition.
- Who is the we?
- It's not just open
to black artists, it was open to,
we felt, minority artists.
We've had Japanese, Chinese artists,
a young lady from Israel, anyone who--
- Who is the we that has
sponsored that gallery?
- I should have named
the other two artists.
An artist named Ernest Crichlow,
Norman Lewis, and myself.
Now in the last year, I'm
no longer with the gallery
because I've been out of town,
a little bit too busy to go around,
because we had to go around
searching for the artists,
looking at the work,
and I didn't have quite
the time to do that.
- [Barbaralee] And who
underwrites the gallery?
- Well, we put our own money in
and then we apply to the
Ford Foundation first
and then to the New York
State Council on the Arts
just to give it some help.
- Your recent paintings are filled
with very sophisticated imagery.
You used Egyptian hieroglyphs,
Japanese woodcuts, African carvings,
and Northern European motifs.
What caused you
to choose to revitalize
ancient history and myth
in your work?
- Well,
everyone here should read a book
called "The King and the Corpse"
by Heinrich Zimmer, who is
also a great art historian
with a particular emphasis on Indian art.
I don't mean American Indian,
I mean East Indian art.
Because I do try to deal
with myth and ritual.
For instance, a handshake
is an extension of a ritual.
And there's a painting
of mine of a young woman
taking a bath in a cabin, I guess,
and there's a woman, older
woman standing to her right
and a bird looking in the doorway.
I call it Susannah at the Bath,
and instead of the elders, as
in the old masters painting,
looking at Susannah, I had the bird,
so that the painting doesn't relate
to the particular place.
It has a relevance to old masters painting
and then to the art of bathing
as a ritual as old as what people used to,
as bathing as a ritual on the Euphrates.
And so I use the ritual
to try to give extension
to the work.
- Let's go back to some
of your earlier work,
your work of the 1940s.
- [Romare] 1940s?
- Yes, some of those works
dwell on religious and biblical themes.
What was your motivation in that period
for biblical allusions?
Are you a very religious person?
- I suppose so,
but not in the sense of going to church
or things like that.
I used some of the religious
themes because again,
I was dealing with myth and ritual.
Although I hadn't thought too
much about it at the time.
It was just something
that intuitively I did.
- And then your trip to Paris in 1950.
- Yes, I had been, as you'd mentioned,
in the Army for some time,
and I had the GI Bill,
and I had always wanted to go to Paris
and I'd been there recently.
I had a show at the Albert Loeb Gallery,
but it changed quite a bit
since after the war, when I was there.
I had a room,
oh it was a studio, (mumbles)
on three meals a day
at 37.50 a month, so
(audience chuckling)
you can't do that in a day there now.
But it was a kind of a wonderful
place to be at that time.
And Kootz, you remember you had mentioned
I was with the Kootz Gallery,
gave me a letter to Matisse
and to Picasso and Brancusi,
so I never could get
down to do any painting,
but I had a wonderful time
going and meeting these people.
(audience laughing)
- You in fact said that you could never
do a painting in Paris.
- [Romare] Pardon?
- You said, you have said in interviews
that you could never
do a painting in Paris.
- Yes, it's a bad place to
go to try to find yourself
because it's so seductive,
especially at that time that you were
always going some place,
or to a party or something like that.
- Well, perhaps that may be the reason
that during that period,
your canvases tended to assume
rather austere color tones.
- Did they?
(audience laughing)
- [Barbaralee] Certainly in contrast
to all of your later work.
- Used to smoke cigarettes
when I was in Paris.
I gave up smoking
when I read it wasn't too
good for you later on.
And when I ran out of
the American cigarettes,
I smoked the French, the Gauloises.
And there was a woman
that I knew from here,
she and her husband had
a nightclub in Paris
and I used to frequently go by there.
Her name was Inez Cavanaugh,
and in the Paris at that time
was Chez Inez, everybody
knew where Chez Inez was.
So I went there, I was talking
to this her this night,
and I didn't realize that
at the back of her place,
it was a Chinese gentleman
who owned the whole place
where she was,
and he had a kind of a
gambling casino in the back.
She said, "Well, we don't
smoke those old Gauloises."
I took one of the owner's cigarettes,
but I didn't known it was hashish.
(audience laughing)
'Cause the Gauloises
was so bad that I didn't
tell the difference.
(audience laughing)
I smoked a cup of this hashish,
and when I had first come to Paris,
there's a poet here now
named Samuel Menashe.
So Menashe had taken me to
see the Notre Dame at night,
you know, when they, the
(speaking in foreign language)
where they put the
lights on the buildings,
and went down there.
It was so impressive to me.
So after I smoked this hashish,
I said, "You know, I must go
and see Notre Dame again."
(audience laughing)
And I don't know, it seemed
to me the next thing,
I was there on the bank of the Seine.
You know, I'd gone down from the cay,
looking in the Seine.
And I thought I saw an angel
walking across the Seine.
(audience laughing)
And I said, "Well, this is wonderful.
"I'll run and confess
my sins and everything."
But then, the angel was gone.
So I came upstairs and it was
about two o'clock at night,
and the only person in the street
was a lady of the evening,
but I felt I had somebody to talk to.
So I said, "You know, I saw
the most wondrous thing,
"and I was standing
around here and an angel
"walked across the Seine."
She said, "You men are all alike."
I said, "What do you mean?"
She said, "Do you see those
angels holding up Notre Dame?
"Don't you think they get tired
"and they want a little walk at night?"
(audience laughing)
So I said, "You know,
I was gonna paint that.
"I hadn't painted everything,
"but you just wrecked a painting for me."
But that was the only
painting that I had thought
that I might do,
and it was wrecked.
(audience laughing)
But one of the things in looking at it,
it did come to me when
you looked at Notre Dame from down the cay
and it was lit.
It seemed to go endlessly into the sky.
I think the gothic symbolism
was that the top spire
was like the finger of God
pointing to the heavens.
And I got a tremendous feeling of height.
When you look at the Empire
State Building, it's nuts.
People don't usually look up
because man is engulfed by it,
just as you would be in the Grand Canyon.
But Notre Dame was made
in the exact proportion
sitting down there with men
to get a feeling of height,
men and women, I'd be careful these days,
to get a feeling of height.
And it was very important
to me in understanding space
and how to articulate a painting.
You see that these adjustments
that you need to make.
And so I found that was one experience
that I took from that that came out later.
- There was a period that you
turned away from painting.
In fact, your career has
certainly been varied.
I'm talking about that period
that you refer to when,
in fact, you were copying
photographs of masters.
Was in approximately that same period
that you turned to another
one of your interests.
- Well, I wasn't so interested in it.
You mean when I tried to write songs.
- Well, not only did
you try to write songs,
you wrote a hit song.
- [Romare] Yes, I did.
- I'm still waiting to hear
the lines of "Seabreeze" now.
(Romare mumbling and chuckling)
How does it go?
- If I had a piano, I
could do it on one finger,
but I won't burden your class with that.
- Well, tell us what
the first two lines are,
for those of us who are not
familiar with "Seabreeze."
- I think they asked
me, if I'da remembered,
I'da brought the lead sheet to you,
but I'll think about that,
but you see, when I came back,
I wanted to go back to Paris,
and in the studio was a piano.
So I said, "I'll sit down
"and write a hit song."
- This is in New York?
- This is, I'd come back to New York.
- Is this this building that you shared
with the Apollo Theater
and Louis Armstrong
and Duke Ellington?
- Right.
Well, I said, "They were
writing all those songs,"
so I said, "I'll sit down and write
"like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin,
"and I'll be able to go back to Paris."
If you don't think this way,
there's no use being an artist.
(audience laughing)
That you could do anything,
like it's so, I just wasted,
and I said, "No, I didn't waste."
I took four or five years
of my life doing that.
And I ran into a man,
and there was a Seagram's Whiskey Company
was promoting a gin
drink called a Sea Breeze
with the gin mixed with tonic.
So since the whiskey couldn't advertise,
he said, "You know, if you
write a song with that,
"we'll get Seagram's
Whiskey Company to back it
"and we'll buy a lot of the records."
So I did.
And Billy Eckstine recorded it.
It's been recorded maybe 20,
'cause I still get money from ASCAP on it.
But after that, I gave it up because,
(audience laughing)
so a lady that you may have
known named Hannah Arendt,
and her husband was--
- [Barbaralee] She was
a close friend of yours.
- Yes, and Heinrich
Blucher, more her husband.
So he called me and said, "Romy,
if you continue to do this,
"you'll never paint again because
you really have no ability
"as a songwriter," and he was right.
And then I began to
get nervous.
I hadn't painted in a long time and
I was walking down the
street, 103rd Street,
remember, and Lexington Avenue,
'cause I've been going to the doctor.
I find everything that was wrong with me.
I said, "What's wrong with me?"
I knew just enough
medicine to mess myself up.
(audience laughing)
And he said, "What's wrong?"
I said, (mumbles) "Cancer of the stomach."
They'd give me all kinds
of tests, heart trouble.
I was back to Dr. (mumbles),
a very great physician, every week.
So I got to this 103rd Street
and I couldn't take another step.
But the next thing I knew,
I was in bed some place,
and I asked the nurse, I
said, "Where's this place?"
She said, "You're at
Bellevue Psychiatric Ward."
(audience laughing)
I said, "Jesus."
And then finally, a doctor came by,
and I said, "What did I
do, what's the matter?"
He said, "You'll be all right, young man.
"You just blew a fuse."
(audience laughing)
So...
- What happened?
- Well, I mean, all this,
by writing the songs and not painting,
had just had its effect on me.
And then my father was living then,
and I think I tell you that story
because this is the difference
in what an artist has to do.
When I was released, my father came down.
You have to have a
relative to take you out
because they're scared.
If you're a nut, you might
get a hatchet on the street
or something or harm someone.
And when I got into the auditorium
on a corridor of Bellevue,
I felt I'd been here before, not as a nut,
but I had been there before some way.
And I remembered in the '30s,
I had met or I knew a Mexican plasterer
who had plastered the frescoes
for Orozco and Rivera,
and they had done a
fresco in that auditorium
and Miguel had been the plasterer.
So I was telling my father
and I pointed out to him,
I said, "It was over there
that they had whitewashed it
"or painted white over it."
And when you do a fresco,
it's done, you paint in wet plaster
and you have to paint
into this wet plaster
and you have to do it 'til,
you have to stay there 'til you finish,
or else you'd have to
knock the plaster down.
And then the next day, they
try to (mumbles) in it.
And if you're a good plasterer,
you have just a little seam.
So I was going through this wall,
looking for these seams
to see if this was the right place.
So a guard was standing there,
just so you know, when
you're going down the hall.
(audience laughing)
So he called my father
and he said, "Is this your son?"
(audience laughing)
My father said, "Yes."
He said, "Well, I'm afraid
he's coming back here."
(audience laughing)
So you see, I tell that story because
is art and these things has no,
especially the art of painting,
has nothing in its
ingredients to be lachrymose,
that the artist has to take these things,
and out of the things
that have happened to you,
out of this cauldron, make it your art.
- Well, a remarkable thing about your life
and your work and your art is that
it is all attached to a story
and it is often the
story of your own life.
It seems that your art is very anecdotal.
Would you agree with that?
- Yes, it...
Anecdotal.
I like to refer to things that,
out of the fulcrum of my memory,
especially in these last few shows.
Some of them are not.
But in this last one, then it was.
They weren't anecdotes.
They were not reality
because we don't know what reality is.
They had to do with a
kind of actuality of mine.
- Before we come up to date again,
let's talk about that period
when you turned away from painting.
In fact--
- [Romare] Back to Bellevue or when?
- No.
(audience laughing)
Back to working for the city.
- [Romare] Oh yeah.
- You took a legitimate job.
You worked within a structure.
How did you come to work for the city?
- I worked for the city because I felt,
and this again, where I'm
gonna get into trouble.
I think that the worst
thing that an artist can do
is teach art.
It's obvious that an artist
is very lucky if he's
able to live with his art,
from his art.
And the simplest thing seems to teach.
When you teach art, they psychologically,
you feel that you've done your work.
But if you're digging
ditches or something else,
you're glad to get through with it
so you can come and do your work.
So I was offered or took this
job working with gypsies.
- Was that part of the
Department of Welfare?
- Yes, of the social--
- Social welfare.
- Yes, and I did that
until I felt that in the early '60s
that I wanted to paint,
and I told my wife to
get a job and support me.
(audience laughing)
- But you worked with the
Department of Social Welfare
for about 14 years.
- Wow, 14 years, they say.
- And it isn't even that
long that you have stopped
having a full-time job,
that you became a full-time painter.
- Yes, about '64.
Well, I was always a full-time painter.
Even when I was working,
I was thinking about it.
- Along about the 1960s,
in the midst of the civil rights movement,
yourself and a group of other
painters, black painters,
formed a group called The
Spiral Group of Black Artists
in 1963.
What caused you to come
together as a group
and what was it that
you try to accomplish?
Firstly, how did the name evolve?
- Well, they took it from
the Archimedean spiral.
An artist named Hale
Woodruff suggested the title.
He's going to have, I
think, a retrospective show
at the Studio Museum in Harlem,
in April or May.
I hope it's May,
'cause he asked me to write a
little introduction for him.
Which is moves upward, but expands,
and which goes back to
what you were saying
about what I try to do.
And that was a time, you remember,
of the March on Washington,
that the artists, we were going down.
A number of people went down as a group,
and so they said, "Let's
continue getting together."
And they used to come to my studio
or Norman Lewis' and others--
- [Barbaralee] Who were
the other artists involved?
- Well, it was Norman Lewis,
Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston,
Merton Simpson, Calvin Douglass.
- [Barbaralee] Merton Simpson, the dealer?
- Yes, he's a painter, too.
- [Barbaralee] Yes.
- Emma Amos.
Was about 15 artists.
I'm getting senile, I
can't think of the others
at the moment, but there
were about 12 or 15.
- Was it to form a group
among other things?
- Al Hollingsworthsworth,
that you know.
- As a means of social protest?
- No, it was just coming
together and talking about art.
- And you never evolved
into any political form?
- [Romare] No.
- Do you think it's because
a good part of that group
really came of age before World War II?
- No, they didn't come
to any political form
'cause all of the art organizations
that I've been associated with,
artists just can't agree on anything.
- Anywhere. (laughs)
- No.
(audience chuckling)
They need one particular.
- One of the ideas that the
Spiral Group had in mind
was to paint collaboratively.
Was that a very good idea
and was it a success?
- Well, they didn't have it in mind,
but it came up one time.
Instead of one artist painting a picture,
let's see if two or three
of us could work on one.
But the question there
was how to bell the cat.
When I came home one evening,
I saw some of my wife's ladies magazines,
you know, Vogue and the others.
I said, "Gee, if I cut some
of these pictures out here,"
and that was the one of
the artists I forgot,
Richard Mayhew.
He's a landscape painter,
maybe the trees and things,
then he could do this
and others of us could put in figures,
and let's see imaginatively
what we might evolve.
And I told the other artists about this,
and everybody was enthusiastic,
so we were to meet one Saturday
and no one came but me.
So I began to put these things together,
and that's how I got
into doing the collages.
- [Barbaralee] Is that how
you began to experiment
with collage?
- Yeah.
- From the cutouts of magazines
that you found at home?
- [Romare] Yes, that's right.
- And how did that evolve?
- As I told you.
- [Barbaralee] I mean, what
happened from that point on?
Did you find collage such
an ideal medium for you?
- It was such an ideal
medium for me because
at that time, I was
interested in doing something
that would say you're there, you know?
And there's so much conditioned
now by the television
and the size of the television screen
and the immediacy of it.
And also, as Paul Valery says,
"Man's patience has been
killed by the machine."
And so if you put all the
great artists together,
you couldn't paint something anymore
with the realism of van Dyck and Durer
and these artists.
Even the magic realists,
you know that it comes
from the photograph.
You know this, but your
patience to sit down and this.
So I could cut out the pictures
and make the collage from that,
and that was how I first did it.
And then I said, "Look, you know,
"I'm cutting out pictures,"
like these two ladies
sitting here in the front.
So they might sue me for doing this,
and then I had to think
of other ways of doing it
so that it wouldn't be actual people.
And so now, a lot of people say,
"Oh, you must have a great morgue
"of photographs and things."
No, I don't.
All of the things that I do, if I cut out,
I just make up.
And it's a really, and the
way I do my collage now
is like drawing or painting,
and that's how it has
evolved at the present time.
So it's no face that you
see in there that is actual.
You know, they're all cut
out and put together like,
you might say like a mosaic.
- There are certain images
that do recur in your artwork.
For example, there are
trains and there are birds
and there's that famous conjur woman.
Do they have a symbolism,
these recurring themes?
- Yes, I guess each artist,
but I am working on a
ballet now for Alvin Ailey,
which I think will be the first time
that Alvin will do a full-length thing.
This would be a three-act ballet.
So the whole evening will be
given to this ballet
about a year and a half off,
and it'll have a conjur woman in it
as one of the principals.
- Perhaps you might describe
who this conjur woman is
and what she symbolizes--
- Well, a conjur woman is,
that type of thing is
gone at the present time,
but it was a woman who knew herbs
and the people went to her for advice
on family matters, love matters.
A lot of people like myself
were frightened of them
as a little boy.
And it comes from the word
conjuration, like magic.
- What does the conjur woman,
what do the trains, what
do the birds symbolize
in your paintings?
- Well, they can bring you to a place
and also take you away,
and that was the image
of one particular culture
and the image of another.
- Is that part of your
North Carolina to Pittsburgh
to New York boyhood?
- I suppose so, yes.
And I always wanted to be an engineer
because this was the,
just as I imagine a young boy now
would wanna be a pilot of an airplane.
- Did you spend a lot of--
- I had never, things change so fast.
As Bertrand Russell said,
that things in the past centuries
that took 100 years to accomplish,
in the 20th century, take a decade.
And I remember well in
North Carolina one day,
we lived in the country,
and my grandmother
was always after a young
man who delivered our food.
He drove a red delivery truck.
And it was the first truck, actually,
that had come to this part of the country
because the roads were
made for a horse and wagon.
And you could hear his delivery truck
coming a half mile away
with the two cylinders,
the horses neighing and the chickens.
When he stopped it,
she'd always lecture him,
he was going about 15 miles an hour,
how fast you were going and be careful.
So I had seen pictures of an airplane,
but I'd never actually seen one.
So this particular day, I
was standing on the porch,
and I saw this red airplane
and I was just beside myself.
So I was jumping up and down the porch
and I called my grandma.
She thought that something
had happened to me.
So she came running out.
So I said, "Grandma, look, look!"
She said, "Oh my God, I
told that boy to be careful
(audience laughing)
"the way he drove his thing,
"and now I wonder how in God's
name he's gonna get down."
So I know better to tell her
that this wasn't the truck up there,
(audience laughing)
it was somebody flying,
because I knew I'd get a whipping.
But you see how swiftly
things had changed.
See, she couldn't encompass the fact
that something could get up
there and fly like a bird.
(audience chuckling)
- You say that
the images that you have created--
- [Romare] Pardon?
- The images that you have created now,
you said you might call them a mosaic.
Is that what you mean when you say
that you prefer to create images
that are not too specific?
- No, what I said, the
technique that I used
of putting these things together,
it might considered mosaic-like.
But I think you're using
mosaic in another way now.
You mean a mosaic of various impressions
or what do you mean by that?
- But you have said,
I'm comparing what you've
just said to what I've read
in interviews with you
when you said you prefer
not to create images
that are too specific.
And I assume that collage technique
that is mosaic-like,
that is what you mean.
- Well, not too specific
because the best kind
of painting or sculpture
is when the viewer has to finish it.
You know, that he's allowed
some entrance into your work,
like you invite somebody into your home
and make them welcome,
where they can play their
own part in finishing it.
This is why Chinese painting
maybe is the greatest of
painting because they,
there's always an open corner
in the great Chinese
paintings where you can enter,
and this is why I try not
to make things too specific,
because I want you to go in
and see what you could do about things.
You're asking good questions and that's--
(audience laughing)
- Your work has a direct relationship
to the black experience.
Is there something that can
legitimately be described
as a black aesthetic in the
visual artists in this country?
- Yes, jazz music.
- [Barbaralee] In the visual arts.
- Oh, the visual arts?
I guess I hadn't thought
about that very much.
What I do is, as you said, yes.
Just look at my work,
Jacob Lawrence,
Pippin, a few others that I
don't want to go any further.
I might miss somebody, you know?
- I want to come back for a
moment to the Spiral Group,
who in the midst of the
fervor of the 1960s,
were a group of minority artists
that never participated in
the civil rights movement.
Did they never convey,
did you all never convey your opposition
to existing laws,
to the continuing discrimination
and social injustice?
- Yes, they had some--
- How did that express itself?
- I had a show just in black and white,
and some artists did.
Like I remember Alston or Norman Lewis,
even though it was quite
abstract and nonrepresentational,
had a very moving painting.
Some of my early things,
some did and some didn't.
You live in a democracy
and people make their
own choices that way.
- And what was the choice that you made?
- Well, I don't have any of those pages.
You asked me to bring a poster or some,
I couldn't find any.
But if I'd had slides or
something of those early things,
you could've seen, but maybe sometime.
- Good.
- Write me back.
- We would like to do that.
- Okay.
Just show my slides, then you'd see.
- We talked about a black aesthetic
and you referred to
jazz almost by instinct.
You grew up, I guess,
surrounded by the music
of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
and Fats Waller and Billie Holiday.
Is there a common meeting ground
between jazz music and your own artwork?
How influential were they on that?
- It was very interesting.
I was looking in one of the art magazines,
and there was an article on
Jackson Pollock and jazz.
And I know that the...
You see, we mustn't confine ourselves,
'cause I remember coming up at that time
with the abstract expressionist phase.
Most of 'em painted to jazz music.
And the aesthetic of
abstract expressionism,
the dissonance, the action,
the so-called action painting,
the rhythm, the certain colorations
have a lot to do with jazz,
and it only could have
been done in this country
because it was the first
time Americans had created
you might say a kind
of a style of their own
and it is rooted into
the American experience.
So I mean, the American,
for instance, James Joyce
is a much more of a black writer
than James Baldwin, whose
style is very limpid
and owes very much to
someone like Oscar Wilde,
while Joyce's style is very much the style
you'll hear of people on the street.
So these things don't run in (mumbles).
When I was a little boy, Babe Ruth
was the big baseball player.
He hit a home run and Lou
Gehrig shook his hand.
Everybody does this,
(hand slapping)
black or white.
So the blacks coming into baseball,
basketball and these things,
though they didn't invent it,
have changed the complexity
of the way it's played.
So anyone who becomes an American
becomes four things.
He becomes part Indian,
he becomes part black,
he becomes Anglo-Saxon,
and he becomes part frontiersman
because these are the roots
of which the American experience grows.
So that's why I say we
mustn't be too confining.
You confine and find
yourself in some place
so that you can expand.
- When you were a student
at The Art Students League
in the late 1930s, one of your teachers
was the German emigre, George Grosz.
Did his rationalistic artwork
that depicted German society
provoke your own bent toward
depicting the American negro
as a subject?
Was he a great influence
on you artistically?
- Mmhmm, yes Grosz was--
- Were you doing cartooning
before that?
- I was trying to do
cartoons, yes, before,
'cause Grosz used to tell me,
said, "You don't have the same problems
"as the other art students
because they're just,
"but you just don't observe anything.
"You just blast it all over.
"Why don't you draw a hand or something
"or a nose as big as
the whole piece of paper
"so you're really looking
for that something?"
So he was a great teacher,
but you don't have these
other people like that
that are going, Vytlacil,
Grosz, and the others.
- To the works of what other
artists do you most respond?
Would it be fair to say
that the form of Matisse
was influential in the
development of your work?
- Artists like any
artist that can help them
in their own work at the time.
So whoever you need for
help is who you like, 'kay?
- [Barbaralee] And who do you like?
- Well, as you said, Matisse,
as I had met Matisse,
because I'd mentioned
that Kootz had given me
a letter to him,
and I went to see him,
and this was shortly after the war.
And someone said, "You
know, he likes chocolate."
So I went to the Army PX
and I got some chocolate,
but he didn't like it.
He said, "This is American chocolate.
"This is awful stuff."
(audience laughing)
- [Barbaralee] He wanted Swiss chocolate.
- So the first interview wasn't so good.
(audience laughing)
But after that, then I saw
him two or three times,
and the last time I saw him,
I was sitting in the,
I believe the dome of the cafe in Paris,
and someone hollered, it was twilight.
I think the French, some
of the French, especially
in the small farming areas or something,
always refer to (speaking
in foreign language),
the time between the dog
and the wolf, twilight.
And it was that time,
which is always a kind of
a quiet and placid time,
and someone said something,
I forgot the exact words,
but, "The master's passing by."
We didn't know whether the
guard had come back or what,
but there was Matisse.
He was very elderly.
A young man was supporting him.
There were two young ladies like yourself
walking behind him.
I guess they were models.
And all of the way,
there's about 10 waiters
who went to the front of the
cafe and began to applaud.
And the people, and they all
stood up and began to applaud.
And it made me as a
young artist feel so good
because it wasn't Maurice
Chevalier or Brigitte Bardot,
but a man who had changed
the way people saw life.
And Matisse was oblivious
to what was going on
'til a man called his attention,
and then he went and shook
hands with all the waiters.
So it was a very touching thing,
and (coughs) excuse me,
it was the last time,
he would die shortly after,
but this was on the avenue
and it certainly was a big
lift in that sense to me.
So go ahead.
- Take a risk.
- Pardon?
- Not only did Paris
obviously enlarge your vision,
it enlarged your palette as well,
at least I think so,
or your use of colors.
- Yes, both palettes.
- Uh huh. (laughs)
(audience laughing)
And...
(Barabaralee laughing)
Lost the question now.
Think I'll go back.
Oh, I know what I wanted to say,
was thinking of your use of color.
In a recent magazine interview,
a number of artists were asked
what they would do to redesign New York.
And I wondered if you would
share with us your reply
to that question,
how you would redesign New York.
- Oh, I said that I would take New York
in its various sections and
then paint it different colors.
So when you flew over, it
would be orange and blue,
and it would be a nice pastel effect.
- Aerially?
- Yes,
when you went across the city.
- And how would you choose what
section to paint what color?
- Well, you might take
Yorkville and paint it blue
or another section and paint it orange.
- As like a kind of
segregation, do you mean?
- Huh?
Well, all segregation isn't bad.
When you put colors down,
there's an orange and there's a blue,
and there's this.
It doesn't have to be blue.
You might paint it like
Seurat, you just dot it all
or whatever you wanted to,
(audience laughing)
if you felt that way.
- Do you think that your
audience sensationalizes,
in a sense, the fact that
you are a Harlem painter?
How do you feel about that?
- I don't know, I never,
I must ask some of the people who buy it.
I'd assume they buy it
because they see some
artistic values there.
- And one assumes that,
but there is that whole other aspect.
- I don't know.
I hope they see something else in it.
- If you were to make any--
- But the main thing is
that they keep buying,
and if they buy it for that reason,
maybe in time, they
will see something else.
- Do you have any suggestions or thoughts
that you would give to young
painters starting out today?
- No, because everyone must find
their own particular way, you know?
What can you say?
Because each young artist
is going to do his or her
thing in a different way,
so there's no common denominator.
I couldn't imagine the same two artists.
- Had a varied and complex
and interesting life.
If you had it to do over again,
is there anything you might do otherwise?
- I probably would have gone
on and finished medical school.
(audience laughing)
- [Barbaralee] Do you mean that?
- I mean that, yes.
- [Barbaralee] Did you
ever expect your life
to unfold the way it has?
- No, life is a matter of discovery.
If you were a hunter,
you couldn't say I'm going
out and shoot a deer,
a partridge or a sparrow.
You have to take what you find.
And this is what life is.
You take what you find and
do the best you can with it.
- Well, you've done very
well with us tonight.
Thank you very much for
coming, Romare Bearden.
- [Romare] Well, thank you.
- And thank you, audience,
for being with us, too.
(audience applauding)
