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JOAN FISHMAN Romare Bearden, August Wilson, and the Traditions ofAfrican Performance A painter and a playwright. Romare Bearden and August Wilson. Perhaps with nothing in common. Romare Bearden grew up among the elite, acquainted with Duke Ellington and Eleanor Roosevelt. August Wilson grew up on the street. Bearden is schooled. Wilson is self-taught, a high school dropout. When Bearden began his work, he had studied classical forms and painting history for years. When Wilson began, he had not read Shakespeare, or Moliere, or Williams, or O'Neill. And yet, as if they stood side by side peering through the same window on life, Romare Bearden and August Wilson created art that similarly presents the human condition: art that simultaneously captures the energy of the Mrican American experience and releases it back into the world, art that speaks clearly to African Americans and is heard clearly by all audiences, and art that speaks for a generation and to a generation. What brings these two artists together is the incorporation into their art of the elements that define traditional African performance forms. In the selection of their themes and the portrayals of their characters, they incorporate the true-to-life and the familiar into ritualistic drama recognizable and influential to their audiences. They present a rainbow of the life cycle incorporating the past and the present, the dead and the yet-to-be-born, offering images and inspirations intended to heal the community. They offer conflict and struggle not within what Wole Soyinka identifies as the traditional Western context, which sees "human anguish as viable only within strictly temporal capsules," but rather within the African context, "whose tragic understanding transcends the causes of individual disjunction and recognizes them as reflections of a far greater disharmony in the communal psyche." 1 Wilson and 134 R 0 /ItA Ii. REB E Ii. R DEN Ii. N D Ii. U GUS T W I L SON Bearden searched for and found the ritualistic roots that reward their work with universal application. In these efforts and results Bearden's paintings and Wilson's plays share many qualities. Romare Bearden's painting career spanned fifty years and included experimentation and mastery of social realism, abstract design, figurative painting, and the photographic and textural collages for which he is perhaps most well known. Bearden was fifty-five when he left his civil service job to paint full time. Still, in his lifetime, he had ten solo exhibitions, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1966, he was elected to the American Academy ofArts and Letters and the National Institute ofArts and Letters. In 1987, the year before his death, Bearden was awarded the President's National Medal ofArts. When Wilson discusses the history of his playwriting, he notes a very specific moment of inspiration: "I discovered the art of Romare Bearden." My friend Claude Purdy had purchased a copy of The Prevalence ofRitual, and one night in the fall of 1977, after dinner and much talk, he laid it open on the table before me. "Look at this," he said. "Look at this." The book lay open on the table. I looked. What for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem so simple, so easy. 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. It was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience. I don't recall what I said as I looked at it. My response was visceral. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn't thought of before and have never ceased to think of since. In Bearden I found my artistic mentor and sought, and still aspire, to make my plays the equal of his canvasses.2 Two of Bearden's collage/paintings directly inspired Wilson plays. Wilson first saw Bearden's 1978 work Millhand's Lunch Bucket in a magazine. This Bearden work came from his series of paintings titled The Twenties and was one of his Pittsburgh memories--':"'works which came from the childhood years Bearden spent at his maternal grandmother's boardinghouse in Pittsburgh. Millhand's Lunch Bucket fascinated Wilson, who was particularly drawn...

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