An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell (review)

What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence.

—August Wilson on the art of Romare Bearden

Although the two men never met, playwright August Wilson was deeply affected by the art of Romare Bearden, drawing directly on the latter's collage work for two plays of his 10-play Century Cycle, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson. "Once I stood outside 357 Canal Street in silent homage, daring myself to knock on his door," Wilson wrote soon after Bearden's death, "I am sorry I didn't, for I have never looked back from the moment when I first encountered his art."

Reverent affection and a spirit of collaboration animate An American Odyssey, Mary Schmidt Campbell's fine biography of Romare Bearden (1911–1988). The book marks the 30^th anniversary of the death of the artist whose paintings and collages presented "an enormously affirmative vision of black life and black people," according to a Publisher's Weekly interview with Campbell. His work opened up a mostly invisible (some would argue ignored) culture and did so in a modernist style markedly different from the prevailing trends coming out of Europe and New York. Bearden has been the subject of extensive scholarship and exhibitions in recent decades. Campbell finds a new way into this well-trodden ground by situating Bearden's origins—his family history and the environment in which he grew up—in an area that has received much attention recently: the role of photography in shaping black society and black identity. Campbell's approach coincides with a recent spate of exhibitions and books on how the increased popularity and accessibility of photography in post–Civil War America aided the abolitionist cause and enabled blacks to shape their public image. We see this in renewed interest in the work of regional photographers such as North Carolina's Hugh Mangum and Virginia's Rufus Holsinger, who in storefront studios or traveling around the region depicted celebrities, dignitaries, and the average citizen, black and white. Campbell also cites Frederick Douglass, whose influential 1860s lectures on photography, "Pictures and Progress," allowed one of the most photographed men of 19^th century to extol the richly expressive medium as a sign of progress and a means to confer dignity on its subjects.

Bearden's grandparents and parents took full advantage of photography not only in formal studios but also in more casual settings; the artist always kept nearby a photograph of his family sitting on their porch. Fred Howard Romare Bearden was raised in a prosperous household in Charlotte, North Carolina, headed by his great-grandfather, a businessman and property owner. The family's securely middle class existence began to fall apart with the passage in 1900 of new voting laws that required voters to prove literacy and to pay a poll tax. Race riots, vigilante justice, and lynchings became commonplace. In the case of the latter, photography played an appalling role. Until the practice was outlawed in 1908, picture postcards of lynchings—with photographs made by the new Kodak cameras and developed on the spot by portable printing machinery—were widely circulated. With Jim Crow making life in the South untenable, the family joined the Great Migration, moving first to Hell's Kitchen in New York and then on to Harlem.

As Bearden matured, the New Negro movement took shape as thinkers such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois offered "a new civic narrative," one whose ideas about race and representation aimed to restore autonomy and progress in a time of loss and oppression. A large part of this effort was the use of "a visual language to transcribe the complexity of black life," an understanding...