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Murray andVisual Art 77 realism did not) but also brought him into what Murray calls “the ritual dimension [that] takes [Bearden] beyond his province” (qtd. in Gelburd 57). Moreover, Murray and Bearden also took from Malraux the idea of “art through art”; however, they did not rigidly adhere to the idea. There seems to be an uneasy coexistence in Bearden and Murray of art both as a closed, self-referential system and as one permeated by experience. Of course, in real life, as most people would agree, art is a little bit of both. Experience, the black experience in particular, was not something they were willing to ­ dismiss in the mysteries of the creative process. While close to their own idiom, its depiction is reflected through a larger lens, that of the world’s art. As Murray puts it: “Not that Bearden’s work is ever idiomatic in any ethnic, folk, or provincial sense. Being a visual artist, his definitive influences . . . have always been other visual artists, not musicians. Thus his fundamental objectives and procedures are best understood in the context of his apprenticeship to the works ofGeorgeGrosz, Peter de Hooch,Vermeer, classicalChinese and Japanese flat painting, the Byzantine designers, African sculptors, such preRenaissance Siennese as Duccio and Lorenzetti, plus the Cubism of Picasso, Braque, and Leger, and Mondrian (whom Bearden sees as a direct extension of de Hooch andVermeer)” (“Of the Blues” 2).This is pure Malraux.Yet at the same time, in terms of Bearden’s subject matter, there is strong experiential, idiomatic content. Addressing the ubiquitous presence of jazz (blues) musicians in Bearden’s work, Murray writes: “Blues musicians, it so happens, were not only far more prevalent in the Harlem of his formative years than were, say, ballet dancers in the Paris of Edgar Degas, but the music itself, perhaps because its typical use was as an element of mere entertainment, was infinitely more obvious in comprehensive reflection of the actual textures of every day life in America than classical ballet has ever been of life in Europe” (“Of the Blues” 2). Thus, their allegiances to modernism and to the traditions of Europe in general were always pragmatic, never dogmatic. Put less diplomatically, their procedures (Bearden’s specifically) consisted of an “aesthetic ransacking of high art and culture” (Patton 14). But, in cases where Bearden’s own idiom offered what another culture’s offered, he chose his own culture’s model: “I listened for hours to the recordings of Earl Hines at the piano. Finally, I was Devlin 78 able to block out the melody and concentrate on the silences between the notes. I found that this was very helpful to me . . . in my placement of objects in my paintings and collages. I could have studied this integration and spacing in Greek vase painting, among many examples, but with Hines I ingested it within my own background” (qtd. in Patton 10). Hines, the jazz pianist and bandleader, was first, before influencing Bearden, perhaps the primary nonpainterly influence on the (white)American painterStuart Davis (1892–1964), a friend of and influence upon Bearden. Davis himself was overwhelmingly­ influenced by the “numerical precisions of the Negro piano players” (Kelder 2).Above all “Negro piano players,” Davis was influenced by Hines.As Murray put it, “Davis was forever regaling [Bearden] about Earl Hines, whose fantastic sense of interval Davis claimed had been of crucial significance to his own development” (“Of the Blues” 2). This poses a dilemma. Although Davis genuinely adored Earl Hines, even naming his own son Earl, was he guilty, or at least a bit unethical, in his own “aesthetic ransacking” of jazz? Bearden clearly did not think so; he was “deeply moved” by Davis’s study of jazz (Patton 12). However, when one does not show due respect to a work from a culture that is not one’s own, or if the work is condescended to by a member of an oppressor’s culture, it can become sad and awkward, leading to outrage and disgust.W. H.Auden’s travesties of blues lyrics, while well meant, are an example of the sad and awkward.At the same time, this did not prevent Murray from saying “[Auden] couldn’t write the blues but he could write everything else” (From the Briarpatch File 153). In the foreword to Mitchell and Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz, a book in which William Zinsser, the white journalist, tells the story of two black jazz musicians, Murray writes, “[O]rdinarily...

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