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“Something Over Something Else” at the High Museum of Art
January 1, 2020 @ 10:00 am - February 7, 2020 @ 5:00 pm
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“SOMETHING OVER SOMETHING ELSE” BY ROMARE BEARDEN
On view through February 2, 2020
In 1978, Romare Bearden (American, 1911–1988) launched an autobiographical project organized by the decades of his life. The Profile series begins with Bearden’s earliest memories as a boy in North Carolina in the 1910s and concludes with his life as a young artist in Harlem in the early 1940s.
This exhibition draws its title from the 1977 New Yorker article that spurred Bearden to create the Profile series. Authored by Calvin Tomkins for the magazine’s “Profiles” section, the biographical essay, “Putting Something over Something Else,” was titled after Bearden’s own words describing the creative process. The experience of being interviewed for this article, and recounting moments stretching back to childhood, inspired Bearden to create his own word-and-picture elaborations on the decades of his life.
Bearden exhibited the Profile series at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York—Part I in 1979 and Part II in 1981. For each collage, Bearden and his friend Albert Murray, an author and critic, co-wrote titles and short statements about people and places from Bearden’s past. When first exhibiting the works, Bearden hand-wrote these captions onto the gallery walls next to each collage, giving the “feeling of traveling through a personal diary,” as one reviewer described it.
We often understand our past as a series of events strung together, with beginnings, climactic moments, and conclusions. Bearden offers an alternative. With Profile, memories become singular events: a funeral, a comedy show, a neighbor gardening, a train ride at sunset. Bearden layers these separate moments, one on top of another, creating a collage, rather than a story, of his life.
“Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series is the first reassembling of the Profile exhibitions. A majority of works in the series are brought together in their original order and exhibited with the text as Bearden first intended.
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Once it was mid September again, it was back to Miss Pinkney and books, black boards, rulers and fingernail inspection.
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I can still smell the flowers she used to give us and still taste the blackberries.
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You could tell not only what train it was but also who the engineer was by the sound of the whistle.
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The mills went 24 hours a day with three 8-hour shifts.
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The sporting people were allowed to come but they had to stand on the far right.
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The trains in the stories she told always ran North.
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He was my favorite of all the comedians. What Johnny Hudgins could do through mime on an empty stage helped show me how worlds were created on an empty canvas.
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Every Friday Licia used to come to my studio to model for me upstairs above the Apollo Theater.
“I really think the art of painting is the art of putting something over something else.” —Romare Bearden
Born in in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, Bearden spent his early childhood living with his mother and father in the home of his paternal grandparents. After his parents relocated to Harlem, he returned for visits.
As a child, Bearden often visited his maternal grandmother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summers. In 1927, Bearden left Harlem for Pittsburgh to attend high school, living with his grandmother in the boardinghouse she ran in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood.
Bearden’s early adult life was spent in Harlem where he was influenced greatly by the music halls, the working girls, and famous acts at the Lafayette Theater. Jazz becomes an important influence for Bearden during these years.
