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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Elsewhere

October 23, 2003 by Terry Teachout

Hilton Kramer has a great piece in the New York Observer about the Romare Bearden retrospective which just opened
at Washington’s National Gallery, and which I can’t wait to see:

What’s new to me in this exhibition is some of the early work from the 1940’s, executed in the vernacular expressionistic style that was then a common pictorial idiom for painters attempting to align themselves with the politics of social protest. As an African-American, born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem in the Jim Crow era, it was all but inevitable that Bearden would ally himself with that imperative. As early as 1934, in an essay called “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Bearden affirmed that alliance in declaring that “An intense, eager devotion to present-day life, to study it, to help relieve it, this is the calling of the Negro artist.”


Yet even in this early period, Bearden’s art never conformed to the simplistic conventions of the 1930’s social-realist school. Picasso was a more potent influence on his work than, for instance, the likes of William Gropper, and when Bearden hit his stride in the 1960’s, it was in the medium of Cubist collage that he found a style in which he could triumphantly integrate the demands of his modernist aesthetic aspirations with those of his embattled social conscience.

Click here to read the whole thing. Yes, I know, Kramer is the Antichrist of art criticism in certain way-cool circles, but the man knows his stuff–and he writes about what he sees, not what he thinks he should have seen.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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