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| ART HISTORIAN RENEE ATER | |
 October 27, 2003  |
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Renee Ater, an art historian at the University of Maryland, discusses Romare Bearden's use of collage, and gives her perspective on what the artist was trying to accomplish through his pieces. |
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JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think that Bearden's use of collage is tied to this attempt to fit the art to the times or respond to the times? RENEE ATER: I'm not sure that's really what he's doing with the collage. I think that he turns to collage, I mean, there's kind of a mythic story that it was going to be the group project for Spiral and that, you know, he came with his bag of cut-outs and they said, "We're not interested in doing collage." I think that when you read Bearden's own writings about how he turned to collage, is that first of all, it was about the structure of, of painting, that he was very interested in being able to create kind of new forms on a two-dimensional surface. So I think we have to keep that in mind about Bearden's work. I think, because of the subject matter, it, it is apparent that it responds on some level to black life in New York City, to black life in Harlem, but there's never any explicit kind of political overtones in Bearden's work in that sense. You know, it's not mural painting that the black arts movement, for example, was involved in. It's not a Betye Saar Aunt Jemima liberated kind of image. So he's doing something quite different. So I think we want to read it as, you know, a response to the '60s, because that's when it happens. And it may be that it's an evolution of style partly that also turns him to collage. JEFFREY BROWN: So is there a -- we're going through different periods here kind of quickly -- RENEE ATER: Yeah. JEFFREY BROWN: But is there a way to -- you looked at his life, you looked at his writing. Is there a way to kind of sum up his approach to what he was trying to do in his art? RENEE ATER: Well, you know, when you read Bearden's writings and you read his formally published materials, what astonishes me is how much they're about form. How much he talks about, well, I'm interested, for example, where he has an article called "The Rectangular Structure of My Montage Paintings," where he talks about the actual creating the rectangles on the surface as a way to then build up the, the surface of the, of the collage. He talks about, you know, in one of his collages titled "The Street," where in fact he doesn't talk about the content as much as to talk about the formal aspects. So he said, yeah, I use -- some of the heads are not necessarily there to function as the human form, but to function as passive space, so that one's eye has a place to rest and to enter in the collage. So that's a very interesting -- is to hear him talk about it in that way and not necessarily say what, you know, what is the, the historical or political or cultural context for the work, but to say, well, I put that piece there because I wanted the red to counteract kind of the overall gray tone of the image. Or I wanted that head to be, you know, a place where, if you're looking this very busy surface of the collage, you could actually have a moment of kind of respite in the image. So it is interesting to see his own writings about the formal aspect of his, of his collages. |
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