An abstract painting, a collage, three musicians, two guitars and a banjo.
Romare Bearden, Three Folk Musicians, 1967, collage of various papers with paint and graphite on canvas, 50 x 60 x 1 ½ inches (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). A conversation with Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Dr. Leo Mazow, Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Dr. Steven Zucker
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:12] We’re in the the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, looking at a large painting which is also a collage. This is Romare Bearden’s “Three Folk Musicians.”
Dr. Sarah Eckhardt: [0:13] We have three figures made up of cut-out pieces from magazines as well as from paper that Romare Bearden painted at an earlier time with abstract stripes in different colors — blues, whites, greens. He’s used those to form the bodies of these three figures.
Dr. Zucker: [0:34] These papers are in fact glued onto a previous all-over abstract painting, the kind of thing that a Pollock or a de Kooning would do.
Dr. Eckhardt: [0:45] You also have a shifting in scale that he’s able to achieve by using these cut-up images. Some of the fingers are really large, other fingers are smaller, but that also gives you this sense of movement, rhythm, across these instruments.
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] So we have painted paper that has been cut out and reassembled on top of a pre-existing canvas, creating this complex image. So complex, in fact, that at first glance it may be hard to locate the three figures who are each musicians holding an instrument.
Dr. Leo Mazow: [1:16] We have, from left to right: guitar, guitar, banjo. The literature on Bearden will remind us of his close friendship with musicians, people like Fats Waller and Duke Ellington.
Dr. Zucker: [1:30] It seems to me that the artist is responding to the history of modernism. In fact, the very subject of three musicians is one that has become, by 1967, a trope. It had become a recognizable form.
Dr. Mazow: [1:43] You’re referring to “The Three Musicians” by Picasso and the manner in which the artist gives us a building up of form.
Dr. Eckhardt: [1:52] I also think it’s important when we talk about what an art historian Romare Bearden was. He was not only looking at Matisse and Picasso, but he was also looking at African art.
Dr. Zucker: [2:01] And that was an important current in the Harlem Renaissance early in his life, the reclaiming of African culture in an American context.
Dr. Eckhardt: [2:09] It went on to be a really important part of the Black Arts Movement. He continued to be a mentor to many of the figures who participated in the Black Arts Movement.
Dr. Mazow: [2:17] This is a work that treads a very interesting back-and-forth between abstraction and representation.
Dr. Zucker: [2:24] This is a moment in the artist’s career when he has moved on from abstraction. Here, reintroducing the figure.
Dr. Eckhardt: [2:32] He’s returning to figuration, but he’s done that through abstraction. And there really is this oscillating back and forth.
Dr. Mazow: [2:39] He’s also thinking about what a musician thinks about, and that’s reconciling the parts with the whole. How is it that the parts of a story, or of a song, become reconciled, amassed together in a whole?
Dr. Eckhardt: [2:52] In 1963, a group of artists meet in his studio and form a group called Spiral. They start to think about how they are going to respond as artists to the civil rights movement, and what it means specifically to be a Black artist. That is when he begins to return to the idea of collage.
Dr. Zucker: [3:11] So not only does the artist have a responsibility to his own career, to his own art making, but also a social responsibility of what it means to be Black and to make art in the midst of the civil rights struggle.
Dr. Mazow: [3:22] I do think that this is of a piece with the folk revival, in which individuals, going all the way from Pete Seeger to Joan Baez…We see the African banjo in those settings, the mixing with the western European guitar, over and over. And so this is a piece that repeats that type of Afro-European synthesis that we find in the folk revival. He’s drawing a connection between music and visual art.
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