Romare Bearden: Quotations

from an exhibition at the National Museum of American Art, Washington DC

Memory and Metaphor:
The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987
October 2, 1992 – January 3, 1993

Compiled by Ralph Dumain, 2 January 1993

(from texts on the walls of the exhibition itself:)

Really, all sorts of people want to live and if you let them they will help you. There are roads out of the secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others. (1967)

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You have to have some object to harness your affections to.

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I will continue to paint man and more man. (1947)

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You must become a blues singer ― only you sing on the canvas. You improvise. You find the rhythm and catch it good, and structure as you go along — then the song is you. (1984)

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I create social images within the work so far as the human condition is social, I create racial identities so far as the subjects are Negro, but I have not created protest images because the world within the collage, if it is authentic, retains the right to speak for itself. (1964)

(from Romare Bearden: Selections from his Published Writings and Interviews, binder accompanying the Romare Bearden retrospective:)

I believe the function of the artist is to find ways of communicating, in sensible, sensuous terms, those experiences which do not find adequate expression in the daily round of living and for which, therefore, no ready-made means of communication exists.

I believe that art is an expression of what people feel and want . . . that this fact, plus horse-sense, resolves all questions as to the place of “propaganda”, the role of the artist in society, the subject matter of painting, the good or bad health of any particular work.

In order for a painting to be “good” two things are necessary: that there be a communion of belief and desire between artist and spectator, that the artist be able to see and say something that enriches the fund of communicable feeling and the medium for expressing it.

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As a Negro, for instance, I do not need to go looking for “happenings”, the absurd, or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dali, Beckett, Ionesco, nor any of the others, could have thought possible.

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Proust once wrote “What us important about an object is what it does to you.”

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An artist is an art lover who finds that in all the art that he sees something is missing; and to touch at the core of what he feels is missing, to put there what needs to be there, becomes the center of his life’s work.

Romare Bearden on Black American Culture vs. the European Avante-Garde

The Street (Composition for Richard Wright)
(image) by Romare Bearden

August Wilson on Jorge Luis Borges

Black Studies, Music, America vs Europe

Surrealism: Selected Links