Bearden Projections

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Signifying Identity: Art and Race in Romare Bearden's Projections

Lee Stephens Glazer

The Art Bulletin , Vol. 76, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 411-426.

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Signifying Identity: Art and Racein Romare Bearden's Proiections

ee Stebhens Glazer

In his 1958 essay on the jazz musician Charlie Christian,Ralph Ellison writes:

Each tn~ejazz mo me nt . springs from a contest in whicheach artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, orimprovisation represen ts (like the successive canvases of apainte r) a definition of his identity: as an individual, as amember of the collectivity and as a link in the chain oftradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in anendless improvisation upon traditional materials, thejazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.]

The compositions and spatial interplays of the AfricanAmerican artist Romare Bearden have often been comparedto jazz, bu t I begin with Ellison's observation not to comp areBearden's collages to a musical form, but because in talkingabou t jazz, Ellison raises the very issues of identity-individual, communal, and artistic-with which Beardengrapp les in his work.

In 1964, when Romare Bearden exhibited a series ofimages of black life entitled Projections, he initiated thesimultaneous improvisation o n canonical art history and thechallenge to pop ular images of African Americans that wouldcharacterize much of his subsequent work. Conceived in part

as an assertion of aesthetic mastery and in pa rt as a responseto contemporary politics of race, Projections combinedBearden's knowledge of art history and his personal experi-ence as a black man with a progressive notion of art as anope n-ende d semiotic system, a preexisting visual vocabularythat the artist must acknowledge and revise according topersonal and social-historical imperatives. This semiotictheory of art and art history in turn shaped Bearden'sworking methods: he created the montage paintings andphotostat enlargements that comprised Projections by trans-forming fragments of art-historical reproductions and im-ages from current magazines into unified compositions thatreworked the spaces and structures of prior paintings. This

technique, combined with narratives of black life, allowedBearden to acknowledge the significance of the art-historicalpast even as he revised its forms to accommodate newrepresentat ions of African American identity.

Identity formation (or, more accurately, re-formation)throug h a rt is one way to revise received images of blackness.Contemporary scholars, among them Robert Stepto, Hous-ton A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have argued

that the quest for a representative and representable iden-tity, dating to the slave narratives of the nineteenth century,is one of the master tropes of African American culturale x p r e s ~ i o n . ~he critical theory and cultural praxis of iden-tity formation have been aptly described by Gates in TheSignzbingMonkey:

The "finding of the voice" of the speaking subject in alanguage in which blackness is the cardinal sign ofabsence is the subject of so much Afro-American discoursethat it has become a centra l trope to be revised, as well as asign of that revision and hence of the inner process ofAfro-American literary history."

To find one's voice thus signals a notion of presence that isnot autonomous but intertextual. The assertion of identityacknowledges its origins in prior discourse, even as itsupplements and thereby revises earlier texts. In Moderrlzsmand the Harlem Renazssance Houston Baker investigated twoseminal examples of the "finding of the voice" as anintertextual act: W. E. B. Dubois's Th e Souls of Black FolkandBooker T. Washington's C p from Slave?. Dubois, Bakerargued, "deformed" the mastery of hegemonic discourse

through his exploration of black vernacular speech andcustoms, while Washington "mastered" the form of the latenineteenth-century text of moral and economic progress inorder to unde rmine contemporaly stereotypes of black life asexisting outside the forward march of h i ~ t o r y . ~

-1-0 follow Baker's terminology, one might say tha t by thetime of the Ha rlem Renaissance, the deformation of masteryhad joined with the mastery of form to provide AfricanAmerican writers and artists with a powerful means ofrepres enting the difference of black culture, the value of thatculture's aesthetic production, and the relationship of Afri-can American identity to mainstream American art. In the

1920s, participants in the New Negro movement such asAlain Locke an d Aaron Douglas advocated the self-consciousimitation of African sculptu re and design as a way ofdeforming both academicism and exoticism and of master-ing, with a black difference, the formalist ideals and pureexpression praised by avant-garde artists an d critics. Byemula ting African art, contemporary black Americans could,Locke argued, "recapture ancestral gifts and reinstate lost

I would like to thank Chr~stine oggi for sugges- 1. R. Ellison, The Charlie Christian Story, Satur- Modernism and the Hnrlewl Renatssance Chicago,tions, criticism, and encouragement on an earlier da s Rez~ie711May 17, 1958, in R. Ellison, Shadout and 1987; H. L. Gates, Jr ., The Tro pe of the Newversion of this essay. 1 am also grate ful to Clare nce Art New York, 1964, 229. Negro an d the Reconstruction of the Image of theB. Sheffield, r., for referring me to the 1957 issue 2. See, e.g., R. step to, Narration, Authentication Black, Representatzons xsn., Fall 1988, 129-55;of Yale French Stt dles . hll Bearden Images illus- and Authorial Control n Frederick Douglass's Val.- and Gates, passim.trated her e are r eproduced courtesy of the Estate of rat~zleof 1845, in D. Fisher and R. Stepto, eds., 3 Gates, 40.Romare Bearden. Afro-Amrr icnn L~tera ture : he Keronst~uct lon f lns t rur- 4 Baker (as n n, 2) , 25-36, 58-69.

tzon New York, 1979, 178-91; H. A. Baker, Ir.,



Romare Bearden, Three Folk Musicians 1967. Private collec-tion (from Schwartzman, 1 19)

arts and skill and express the race spirit and background aswell as the individual skill and temperament of the a r t i ~ t . ~

Praising African art for its racial authenticity, historicalsignificance, and formal rigor, Locke claimed that the appro-priation of African-derived abstraction would allow blackartists to enter into and revise discourses of modernism inthe fine arts and to challenge existing representations ofblack identity in the realm of popular culture. Uncle Tomand Sambo have passed on, Locke proclaimed in theintroduction to the 1925 anthology The New Negro. Later inthe same essay, Locke emphasized his belief that thesestereotypes were being superannuated through the creationof new aesthetic forms and modes of interpretation: Ourgreatest rehabilitation may possibly come from [overtlypolitical] channels, but for the present, more immediatehope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of theNegro in terms of his artistic endowments and culturalcontributions, past and prospective. '

Locke often conceptualized the race spirit and its refor-

5. A. Locke, The American Negro as Artist,American Magazine of Art xxrrr Sept. 1931, 211,214.6. A. Locke, The New Negro, in The New Negro:An Interpretation 1925), repr. New York, 1968, 5.Locke's definition of the New Negro fir st reached awide audience when he guest-edited a spec ial issueof the liberal monthly Survey Graphic (Mar. 1925)entitled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro. Afteraccepting an offer from Boni and Boni, Locke andhis colleagues enlarged and expanded the HarlemNumber into the anthology cited in this note.7. Locke (as inn. 6), 15.8. See, e.g., A. Locke, Contemporary Negro Art exh.cat., Baltimore Museum ofArt, 1939.9. The validation of the Southern black experienceremained problematic, however. In works such asRichard Wright's autobiography Black Boy 1945),the South and its inhabitants are precisely whatthwart Wright's efforts at self-development. Even inJacob Lawrence's Migration series, the South is

constructed both as a locus of enduring creative

mative power in quasi-essentialist terms, but he could alsoview the problems of African American identity formationfrom the perspective of Pragmatism. Indeed, Locke alwaysinsisted that racial consciousness and aesthetic values mustbe reencoded at each historical moment, responding to andrevising received stereotypes. It is not surprising then, thatdespite his personal preference for th e African style, Locke

also praised the self-conscious use of African American folktradi tions as an effective way of revaluing racial id en tit^ ^ Hislegacy to second-generation artists of the Harlem Renais-sance was not a mand ate for imitating African art, but r athera model for using extant artistic forms to reinterpret the pastin order to represent, and thereby revalue, contemporaryracial identity.

In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers such as WilliamH. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, and Zora Neale Hurstoncontinued the tradition of using art to revise images of theblack past and present. Rather than looking back to Africa,however, these artists concerned themselves with the moreimmediate past of Southern black experience, finding in

still-remembered rituals of work, religion, music, and story-telling a rich, artistically powerful tradition that confrontedstereotypes of African American identity more directly thanLocke's Afri~anism.~

Romare Bearden chose to distance himself from th e ar t ofthe Harlem Renaissance.l0 Nonetheless, Bearden's matureart, which often draws on memories a nd myths of the South,resonates with the aesthetic and political issues raised byAfrican American artists an d critics in the 1920s and 1930s.His work thus participates in the continuous tradition ofrepresenting and re-presenting African American identity soeloquently described by Ralph Ellison and addressed on amore theoretical plane in recent literary scholarship.

Three Folk Musicians of 1967 (Fig. 1), for instance, seems toconflate the artist's early childhood memories of Charlotte,North Carolina, with later memories of Harlem and Pitts-burgh in the 1930s. Rather than emphasizing the specificityof individual memory, however, Three Folk Musicians func-tions as a metaphor for a more general presentation of oneaspect of African American culture that, like Bearden him-self, had its roots in the rural South (s ignified by th e overalls

significance and as a place from which AfricanAmericans had to escape.10. The extent to which the painters of the HarlemRenaissance may have influenced Bearden is adelicate matter. While Bearden always acknowl-edged th e communal spirit of the Harlem Renais-sance as a vital, creative force, he also tried todistance himself from the artists of the period,claiming that their work was trite and derivativeand that their patronage by white collectors and theHarmon Foundation encouraged paternalistic atti-tudes. See R. Bearden, The Negro Artist andModern Art, Opportunity xrr Dec. 1934, 371-72.Scholars have not much questioned Bearden's self-proclaimed rejection of the Harlem Renaissance;most investigations have focused on the artist'sautobiography and ties to canonical modernismrather than on his position within an AfricanAmerican visual tradition. See, e.g., M S. Camp-bell, Romare Bearden: A Creative Mythology,Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1982; Memory andMetaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1 9 4 6 1 9 8 7exh. cat., Studio Museum in Harlem, New York,

1991; and Schwartzman, passim. P A Rogers,Re-enchanting Blackness: The Photo-Documen-

tary Image and the Collage of Romare Bearden,unpublished talk, delivered Apr. 2, 1993, Univer-

sity of Delaware, has moved away from these tradi-tional methods and argues, as I do, that Bearden'scollages challenge photo-documentary stereo-types. Although we reach similar conclusions, wehave framed our investigations differently. Rogersdoes not consider Bearden's photostat enlarge-ments, focusing exclusively on the collage originals.His argument is based primarily on close formalanalysis and on poststructuralist interpretations ofBakhtin. I have taken a social-historical appro ach,considering Projections in its contemporary con-text and as an embodiment of Bearden's owninterpretation of contemporary semiotic theory.11 . Th e Studio Museum's 1991 Bearden retrospec-tive posited tha t the artist's autobiographical memo-ries functioned as a metaphor for universal experi-ence. This assessment is a fair, if reductive,interpretation of Bearden's stated intentions and ,



A R T A N D R - \ C E I N R O M A R E H E A R I IE N S P R O J E C T I O N S 413

worn by the figure on the right as well as by the title's qualities existed (ultimately they answered in the negative-designation folk ) and persisted, in somewhat modified and thus distanced themsel\~es rom the radical separatism ofform, in the industrial North. In representing black South- the burgeoning Black Aesthetic Mo\~ement);lVf ulturallyern culture as a legitimate folk tradition and point of origin constructed black difference could or should be expressedfor contemporary black creative practices, Bearden links his artistically; and how cultural difference intersected withown work to such African American precursors as William H. mains tream art and culture.16Johnso n, Horace Pippin, and Jacob Lawrence.12 As par t of this general investigation, Spiral began to plan

Indeed, in hrpe Folk Musicians Bearden seems to have an exhibition.17 Bearden suggested that the group membersdefined his artistic identity in exclusively black terms, empha- create a collaborative collage, a project that never material-sizing the difference and distinction-in short, the pres- ized. The idea of working from fragmented images culledence-of black creativity. In 1966, Bearden explained why, from magazines and Bearden's vast store of art-historicalafter some fifteen years of experimenting with pure abstrac- reproductions did, however, result in the series ofworks thattion, he had recently returned to representing scenes of became Projections, first exhibited at Cordier and Ekstromblack life, saying, I use subject matter to bring something to Gallery in October 1964 and subsequently at the Corcoranit as a Negro-another sensibility-give it an identity. 13 Yet Gallery of Art. This was the first time since the 1940s thatif the subject matter of hree Folk Musiczans allows Bearden to Bearden had exhibited works devoted to African Americandefine himself as an individual and as a member of the black themes: folk music and jazz, magic and religion, urban andcollectivity, the work also alludes thematically a nd composi- rural work and recrea tion.I8 The se themes, as well as thetionally to Picasso's hree Muszcians of 192 1. Thu s, ust at the works' freque nt allusions to the art-historical canon , wouldmoment that Bearden finds his identity as an African become the mainstay of Bearden's production until his dea thAmerican, he willfully complicates it by locating himself and in 1987. Prompted by specific social-historical condi tionshis work in the chain of tradition that is at once deformatively and constructed as part of a continuously evolving semioticAfrican American and masterfully ar t historical. system, Projections constituted an exemplary moment of

hree Folk Muszczans embodies the complex aesthetic and African American identity formation .racial identifications that Bearden had worked out earlier in As originally installed, the series consisted of twenty-onethe decad e. Bearden had always been interested in establish- images; Bearden composed each image from photograph icing a link bebveen his own art and the great masterworks of fragments that he unified through the manipulation ofthe past, but the Civil Rights Movement pro mpted him to pictorial space and structure , borrowing and adapt ing ele-rethin k the relationship in terms of race. Inspired by the ments from well-known masterpieces. Thematically, eachracially conscious interpretive community that existed in image represents a scene of black life, including ritualHarlem in the twenties and thirties, Bearde n began , in the narratives of the rural South , Bearden's memories of Harlemearly 1960s, to work with other African American artists to and Pittsburgh in the 1930s, and the contemporary urban

create a similar community in which they could discuss, scene. At the level of conten t, the exhibition formed a visualdispu te, define, and display what the artists called the analogue to the use of folklore and dialect in literature,image of the Negro. I4 presenting black vernacular culture as a ritualistic, and thus

Spiral, a group organized by Bearden and thirteen other continuous, creative presence.Igblack artists in 1963, was the clearest example of this Cordie r and Ekstrom chose to exhibit each image as aendeavor. Th e members first met in Bearden's studio on small-scale original montage painting and as enlargedCanal Street to discuss what their role as artists should be in photostat re p r o d u c t i ~ n s . ~ ~ he title of the show, Projec-the Civil Rights Movement. Their discussions expanded to tions, thus referred to the mechanical process used for theaddress such questions as whether or not essential racial enlargements and alluded to the scale relationship between

from the curators' point of view, redresses Bearden's mare Bearclen and Albert Murray in Conrersa- 18. It is worth noting that when the exhibition ofmargin alr~at ronn the history of .knerican moclern- tron, ed. J. Breen, Callaloo xrr, Summer 1989, Projections opened, Bearden was a social case-ism. See M. S. Campbe ll, History and the Art of 438-42. worker for the city of New York; eviclently, theRomare Bearden, in 1V e7 no ~nd Metapt207 (as in n. 15. Th e Black Aesthetic was codified in Thr Black critical and commercial success initiated by thelo ), 3-17. .Iesthetrc ed. A Gayle, Jr ., New York, 197 1. For a show enabled him to give up that job in 1966 and12. Th e t-elationship between Johnson's and useful critique of the movement's essentialism, see devote hirnself to art full time.Bearden's work is noted by Richard J . Powell, in H. L. Gates, Jr ., Preface to Blackness: Text and 19. See Gates, who has a rgued convincingly thatHon~econ~zng.heArt and L,fr of W?ll?a7nH . Johnson Prete xt,'' In Fisher and Ste pto (as in n. 2 , 57-68, black vernacular discourse constitutes a form ofexh . cat., National Museum ofAmerican Art, M'ash- 16 Th e members of Spiral included: Bearden, expression that is at once private (that is, unavail-ington, D.(;., 1991, 227. Charles Aston , Felrath Hlnes, Norman Lewis, ill- able to hegemonic discourse) and shared (fully13. In J . Slegel, Il'hy Spira l? Artne?ia LXV, Sept. vin Hollingsworth, Merton Simpson, Earl Miller, meaningful within the black community). .4s the1966, 51. William Majors, Keggie Gammon, Hale IVoodruff, ultimate sign of difference (xix) and thu s of

14. In 1969, for example, Bearden moderated a Perr); Ferguson, Calvin Douglass, James Yeargens, ident ity, vernacula r discour se is defin ed by Gates as

symposlurn sponsored by the Metropolitan Mu- and Emma Amos. See Siegel (as in n. 13), 48-5lff, signifyln' -a kind of verbal play in which pre ex-

seum of Art In which he an d Jacob Lawrence for the most complete account of Spiral's activities isting codes are invoked in order to be revised. The

recalled the Harlern of the 1930s, ernphasrzing not and the group's histop, as well as for lengthy vernacular, Gates says, functions as a metap hor

only creatn e activity, but also the publlc exhibrtions quotations frorn the author's intewiews with the for formal revision, or intertextuality (xxi). Th e

sponsored by Arthur Schomberg, the Harlem .kt- group. imperatrve for formal revision is, for Gates, found

ists' Gulld, and others. See the A4~t~opolr tnn 17. Planned fo r the spring of 1964, Sprral's first In written ~nterpretations, but I have taken the M ~ L S P ~ LT ~of Art B u l l e t ~ n ~ V I I ,Jan . 1969, 245-61. See also ex hi bit ~o nwas initially organized aro und the theme lrberty of applying aspects of his argument to

Bearden's remarks in Siegel (as in n. 13), 49-31, Mississippi, 1964, but the group later rejected Bearden's visual productron.

and in the more recent inte~view, To Hear iln- thrs idea as too obviously political. Th e exhibition 20. The copi es were rssued In a limited run of sixother 1-anguage: .l\lvln Ailey, James Baldwin, Ro- catalogue can be found in the Bearden Papers. each and Mere thus not intended for mass distribu-tion.





artist responds to this symbolic potential and real loss withdesire-to repossess and then reintegrate the discrete, andtherefore incomprehensible, artifacts into a complete andfully unified signifying system. Thus, through the process ofcreation, the artist recognizes the destructive power ofhistory, and that historical consciousness prompts him toassert his freedom as a creator . As Malraux argue d in TheVoices ofsi len ce, The history of art is one long record ofsuccessive emancipations, since while history aims merely a ttransposing destiny on to the plane of consciousness, arttransmutes it into freedom. 30

For Malraux, freedom comes not from a ret urn to a primalmoment of originality; that for him is an impossibility. Hisartist is born into a world of images whose origin is asunimaginable as its end. Bearden and Holty's use, in ThePaznter's Mind, of art-historical examples as the path tounder stand ing the universal significance of artistic form andattaining an individual but legible style reiterated Malraux'sbelief. They criticized the Abstract Expressionists for theirautochthonous strivings, for denying, rather than activelyconfronting, what Malraux would describe as history or thecultural totality. In a rare moment of irony, Bearden andHolty observed, Many of the Abstract Expressionists at-temp ted to break all ties with the past and , like the he ro of E.M. Forster's novel, Houiard's End, they wished to come uponart as the revivalist seeks to discover C h r i ~ t . ~ ~

For Bearden, as for Malraux, the artist necessarily con-fronts history, first imitating and then mastering it. Each newcreation is part of a series; the new work acknowledges thepast even as it asserts its own difference. Artistic stylerenounces its connection to a unique object or individualpoin t of view to become a form ofwriting, a chain of signifiers

in which each signifier possesses meaning thro ugh its relation-ship to already existing signifiers. Only by opera ting withina semiotic system-by tro pin g the styles of the past--can theartist hope to make a place for himself within the tradition.Style, then, signifies both difference from the past anddistinction within a continuous aesthetic tradit ion: Stylesare signujicatzons, they impose a mean,ing on visual experience

replacing the unchar ted scheme of things by the co her-ence they enforce on all they 'represent' (emphasis in theoriginal).34

Signification through style, Malraux was careful to pointout, is not pred eter mine d: The series' existence does not inthe least prejudge t he way in which the achievements making

up the life of the contemporary art around us will bearranged. While style always exists a prio ri, the artist's use

of it varies according to individual or social needs. One cansee already how the fluidity of this system encouragedBearden to revise existing images a nd stereotypes.

In Malraux's terms, the freedom promised by each cre-ative act depends on the will to transform the present, butthis will is necessarily bounded by a certain futility. Futile,because the artist is aware that just as he has mastered andthus possessed the masters, he opens up his own work forrepossession and reinterpretation in the future. To useEllison's terms, the artist challenges tradition but must stillremain bound to it, losing his identity even as he finds it.Indeed, the re is a fatalistic sense of loss in much of Malrauxthat links him to Walter Benjamin in his allegorical mode.?'Bearden, however, responded more to Malraux's utopianprogressivism: rather than emphasizing the loss of pastmeanings, the artist should celebrate t he liberating possibili-ties of present and future moments of creative interpreta-tion. Part 1 of Th e Voices of Silence, The Imaginary Museum,most clearly exemplifies this aspect of Malraux's aesthetics,but it reemerges throughout l ater portions of the text:

But though all craftsmanship is linked up with a past,creative art is given its direction by th e futur e, andilluminated for us by what that future brings to it; itslife-story is the life-story of its forward-looking works.Thu s we shall see these works impartin g its [sic] signifi-cance to the new world that is in the making anddestroying for its benefit the world of the past.38

The medium of photographic reproduction, Malrauxclaimed, could facilitate the modern artist's confrontationwith destiny and his assertion of freedom. In his 1936

speech, Malraux rehearsed the idea that would form thebasis for the Musee Imaginair e:

Need I stress the im portance of the ph oto in the history ofthe plastic arts? . Need I stress, as W. Benjamin hasdone, the transformation that occurs in the nature ofartistic emotion when it moves from the contemplation ofthe unique object to a casual or violent s urre nder before aspectacle that can be renewed an unlimited number oftimes.

Significantly, Malraux did not simply claim that photo-graphic reproduction could bring art to the masses for

passive consumption. Rather, he argued that it would makethe cultural heritage available for active reinterpretation by

its admirers and its detractors saw it as an art of 1001-3. For a discussion of the structuralist notion supplementary interpretation an d representation,children . Children 's drawings have a calligra- of meaninglldentity through difference in Afiican to recover lost truth. Allegory both originates fromphy, not style; whereas the masks of savage races, American culture, see R . Ellison, Change the Jok e and gives expression to nostalgic desire and thuswhich illustrate a precise conception of the world, and Slip the Yoke, Partzsan Rpuzez~',Spring 1958, acknowledges that essential knowledge and truthdefinitely have one 562, 565). in Ellison (as in n. , 61-73. can never be possessed in the world of temporal32. Bearden an d Holty, 10. 34. Malraux, 1953, 324. experie nce. See Benjamin, i2llegory and Trau-

In The Orzgzn of German Tragzr Dm ma ,trans.see J . Darzins, Malraux and the Destruction of 36. Ibid. J . Osborne, London, 1977, 159-235. See also his33. For an ana lys~ s f Malraux's notion of t'crzture, 35. Malraux, 1936, 32. ~ r s p z ~ l ,

Aesthetics, Yak Frenrh Studzes, XVIII ITinter 1957, 37. Malraux's idea that the past as such is irrecover-Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illumzna-

107-1 3. The influence of structural~st inguisticson able , since it 1s necessarily available only as discreteIrons, trans. H. Zohn, New York, 1968, 253-64.

Malraux is not surprising, given his apprenticeship fragmen ts, is practically identi cal to Benjam in's 38. Malraux, 1953, 146.at age eighteen to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and

notion of allegory, an expresslve mode prompted39. Malraux, 1936, 33-34.

h ~ s horough understanding of M'olfflin. For aninclslve description of this connection , see Krauss,

by historical consciousness that strives, through



416 A R T B U L L E T I N S E P T E M B E R 1994 V O L U M E L X X V I N U M B E R 3

Bearden, The Prevalence of Ritual: The Baptism 1964. Washington, D.C. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, SmithsonianInstitution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 photo: Lee Stalsworth)

3 Francisco Zurbarhn, The VzrginasProtectress of the Ca rthusian s ca. 1625.Seville, Museo Provincial de BellasArtes photo: Museo Provincial)



an entire group of people, and he contrasted this form ofradical revision with the essential, irreducible, and unzjary-ing (emphasis in the original) nature of fascist id e o l o g i e ~ . ~ ~By liberating th e work from a unique existence in time an dspace, photographic reproduction also frees the work of artfrom a fixed meaning, challenging the stasis of totalitarian-ism, bearin g knowledge, and works of art, to ever greaternumbers of men to preserve or create anew, not stable,particularist values, but dialectical humanist values. 41

The Voices of Silence reiterated the importance of photo-graphic reproduction. Malraux explained that photographycan fulfill the desire to possess and comprehend the art ofthe past by imposing on it a specious unity. Cameraangles, adjusted lighting, an d, especially, distortions in scalewould eliminate hierarchies and impose stylistic affinities.This, of course, was the main purpose of the MusCe Imagi-naire-the construction of a comprehensive, egalit arian,and infinitely variable combination of artistic reproductionswhose relationships to one anoth er were based o n admittedlycontrived stylistic unities. In the MusCe Imaginaire, Malrauxnoted, each object loses its specific qualities: In ou r museum

picture, fresco, miniature and stained-glass window seemof one and the same family. For all alike have becomecolor plates. 43 Here Malraux's deb t to Benjamin's TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is~ l e a r . ~ q i k e enjamin, Malraux regarded the photographicreproduction as a dehistoricized fragment to be inserted intonew situations. When all works have become color plates,Malraux insisted, contemporary artists would gain the powerto interp ret the history of art , revising their notion ofwhat itis that makes the ma ~te rp iec e. ~

Mechanical reproduction, according to Benjamin, had

obliterated the aura of the work of art and this, he main-tained , would result in a new, socially productive function forart . Art loses its autonomous significance and the loss of thiscultic status results in a direct engagement with socialcontingencies. Although Malraux also believed that the workof art renounced its autonomy through the process ofmechanical reproduction, he nevertheless attempted to rein-sert the photographic fragments into a fully meaningfulsignifjing system. Indeed, he developed the MusCe Imagi-naire in o rde r to recuperate universal artistic meaning fromthe vagaries of the historical moment and the ravages oftemporal experience. Th e photog raphs of all the world's artthat comprise the ho ldings of the Musee impose, as Malraux

acknowledged, a specious unity ; but the constructed unitywould nevertheless disclose the essence of artistic style assomething separate from time, place, and social circum-stance. Thus, even though the individual object re nounced

.\RT A N D R A C E I N RO114KE BE.\KDEh'S PKOIECTIONS 417

its specific existence, its inclusion in the Muske Imaginaireguaranteed that it was par t of a signifying system that owednothing to oth er, nonaesthetic systems. As Rosalind Krausshas noted , For Malraux, photography simply transferredthe exper ience of aura from the elitist spaces of the19th-century museum to the more widely accessible

pages of the art book. 46One could criticize Malraux's MusCe as hopelessly idealis-

tic and ahistorical, his humanism another version of themythologized family of man throug h ar t.4 7 One might alsotake issue, as Georges Duthuit did, with Malraux's constantrecourse to imperialist rhetoric: possession, mastery,

confrontation, and surrender occur throug hout his writ-ings. I have chosen not to do this, however, and instead tofocus on Malraux's belief in art as a semiotic system that isconstantly revising the images of the past in order to givemeaning to the present. It was this reading of Malraux thatRomare Bearden took as his own, and it provided him with apowerful means of representing African American identity.

In Projections Bearden willfully appr opr iat ed works by oldmasters, taking possession of their compositions an d revisingthem as pictorial spaces for African American creative activ-ity. Although the reunification of eph emera into a self-contained, integrated whole refers generally to the collagetechniques of such modernists as Braque, Picasso, andSchwitters, Bearden also alluded to a number of specific

master works that he had studied primarily as photo -graphic reproductions. In Prevalence of Ritual: The Baptzsm(Fig. 2 ) he densely arranged figures are built up of magazinefragments as well as photographically reproduced bits ofAfrican masks, Oceanic sculpture, and perhaps Byzantine

icons. The pictorial organization and the treatment ofdrapery ar e derived from Zurb aran, and while Bearden didnot identify a specific source, the shallow space and overlap-ping of forms in a work like The Vzrgzn as Protectress of theCarthuszans (Fig. 3 come to mind. Here Bearden not onlytook possession of the ritual objects of other times and placesin order to invest them with a new, specifically AfricanAmerican significance, he also appropriated from a priorrepresentat ion the very space in which the baptism occurs.

Evenzng, 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue(Fig. 4) counters its owntemporal and spatial specificity throu gh a compositional andthematic allusion to VelBzquez's The Luncheon (Fig. 5).j0

Although Bearden did not mention CCzanne as a source forEvenzng, 9:10 ,he owned a reproduction of the MetropolitanMuseum's Card Players (Fig. 6 , an d his 1982 collage CardPlayers explicitly borrows from and revises CCzanne. In

40. Ibid., 35. aspects of t he original that ar e unattainable to the subsequently exp ande d Into a three-volume text,41. Ibid., 36. naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is Le MusPe znzmagznable,see Krauss, 100.5.42. Malraux, 1953, 36. For a critique of Malraux's adjustable and chooses its angle at will"(220). 49. Bearden, 15. T he explanation of Zurbarhn'sfaith in the unifying power of photographic repro- 45. Malraux, 1953, 17. influence is confined to formal concerns: the robesduction, see D. Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins," 46. Krauss, 1002. in The Baptzsm"function as area s of pacivity[szr] . .

in The Anti-Aesthetzr: Essays on Post-Mode7.n Culture, 47. For a critique of this myth, see R. Barthes, "The in the counterpoint of occupied and empty areas.ed. H. Foster, Port Townsend, Wash., 1983,43-56. Great Family of Man," inMythologze.<,trans. A. Zurburan [.<ir],n some of his great figural composi-43. Malraux, 1953, 44. Lavers, New York, 1990, 100-1 02; andJ . Clifford, tions, employed flatly modeled drapery for the

44. See W. Benjamin, "Th e \Vork of Art in the Age "Histories of theTribal and Modern,"Art zn Amenca, same purpose."

of Mechanical Reproduction," in Ill7~mznatzons(as LXXIII, 50. D. Ashton, "Romare Bearden: Projections,"pr. 1985, 164-77ff.

in n. 37), 21 7-51. In t h ~ sssay he notes, as Malraux 48. For a summary of Duthu~t'scriticism, which exh. cat., Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery, New York,would do larer that 5ame year, that "in photogra- began with a review ofThe I'OZCP.~ 1964, in Quadrum, XV II 1964, 109. Ashton madeof Szlencr and wasphy, process reproduction can bring out those the connection to Velazquez but did not cite a

specific work.



4 8 A RT B U L L E T I N S E P T E M B E R 9 9 4 V O L U M E L X X V I N U M B E R 3

4 Bearden, Evening 9:1O 46 Lenox Avenue 1964. Davidson, N.C ., Davidson College Art Gallery photo: Davidson College)

5 Die go VelAzquez, The Luncheon ca. 1617-18. St. Petersburg, 6 Beard en in his studio, 19 40s from Schwartz-Th e Hermitage from J . L6pez-Rey, Veldzquez New York, 1968, man, 129)pl. 13)



A R T A N D R A CE I N R O M A R E B E A R D E N ' S P R O J E C T I O N S 419

Evening, 9:1 the bulk and volume of the right-hand figure,the ambiguously placed chair on the left, indeed the circulararrangement of the figures' hands, and their status as cardplayers suggest that Ctzanne was a likely source for thisimage as well.

The borrowings and revisions continue: Woman in aHarlem Courtyard (Fig. 7 refers to Pieter de Hooch's A

Courtyard in Delft at Evening: A Woman Spinning (Fig. 8 .j1The frontality and iconic gesture in Conjur Woman (Fig. 9)repea t the format of countless Byzantine Madonnas. Preva-lence of Ritual: Conjur Wom an as a n Angel (Fig. 10) reworksconventional Renaissance Annunciations and, as Beardennoted, Pieter Bruegel the Elder provided th e general inspira-tion for th e crowded street scene in The Dove (Fig. 1 l ) . j2

These works resonate with the history of ar t, but the echo isnot a simple repetition. It is a reworking of that history inorder to discover that its spaces and structures are remark-ably similar to the spaces and structures that belong toAfrican American life and ritual. For Bearden, Projectionsembodied Malraux's humanist notion of form as a timelessuniversal element capable of establishing affinities and revis-ing the cultural heritage. The borrowings and revisionssubvert hegemonic claims to formal values, even as they payhomage to the art-historical past. s Bearden explained, Iwant to show that the myth and ritual of Negro life providethe same formal elements that appear in other art, such asDutch painting by Pieter de H o o ~ h . ~ ~

It is worth noting that the allusions in Projections thatseemed most obvious to contemporary critics, as well as thosemost often mentioned by Bearden, were the references tofamous genre paintings. The connection was well establishedby 1970, when a headline writer for the New York TimescalledBearden the Brueghel [sic] of Harlem. Bearden himselfexplained the analogy:

It is not my aim to paint about t he Negro in America interms of propaganda that has caused me to paint thelife of my people as I know it-as passionately anddispassionately as Brueghel painted the life of the Flemishpeople of his day. One can draw many social analogiesfrom the great works of Brueghel-as I have no doubt onecan draw from mine-my inten tion, however, is to revealthrough pictorial complexities the richness of a life Iknow. j4

In reworking prior pictures' formal structures and genrethemes, Projections participates in a straightforward way inMalraux's aesthetic of art throu gh art. Yet in ProjectionsBearden transgressed the boundaries of the MusCe Imagi-naire by introducing images from the nonartistic realm ofpopular culture, particularly documentary journalism. Theblack-and-white photostat reproductions resemble news-

5 1 Childs (as in n. 26). 54, reproduces both im-ages, with the de Hooch titled The Spinner and theHousemaid.52. Bearden, 18. Bearden consistently uses theidiosyncratic spelling crmjur in his titles.53. Quoted in G. Glueck, A Brueghel fromHarlem, New York Times,Feb. 22, 1970, 29.54. Bearden. 18.

7 Bearden, Woman n a Harlem Courtyard, 964 (from M . B.Washington, The r t of Romare Bearden, N e w York, 1972, pl.

8 Pieter de Hooch, Courtyard in Delft at Evening:A WomanSpinning, ca. 1658. London, Royal Collection (photo: RoyalCollection Enterprises Ltd.)



420 A R T B U L L E T I N S E P T E M B E R 1994 V O L U M E L XX V I N U M B E R 3

9 Bearden, Conjur Woman, 1964. Birmingham, Mich., Collec- 10 Bearden, Prevalence of Ritual: Co njur Wom an as an Angel,tion Sheldon Ross (photo: Sheldon Ross Gallery) 1964. New York, Collection Merton D. Simpson (photo: Ken

Cohen, courtesy Merton D. Simpson Gallery)

print and documentary photography, an affinity enhancedby the reproductions' effacement of the materiality andfacture of the original montage paintings. Of course, theoriginals are themselves composed of fragmented photo-graphic reproductions; but upon close scrutiny, they bear theevidence of the artist's process of cutting and oining. In thisway they refer to their own coming into being, an eventwhose apparent uniqueness is enhanced by the dual indexi-cality of the facture: the traces refer both to the montageitself and to Bearden's presence at the moment of its making.Mechanical reproduction, however, erases the aura of theoriginals, allowing each copy to function more in the mode ofan iconic, documentary re pr e~ en ta ti on .~ ~ urthermore, be-

cause many of the original fragments came from contem-porary magazines, it is reasonable to suppose that Beardensaw Projections as participating in a dialogue with imagesfrom popular culture.

Bearden attempted to underplay the topical, politicalsignificance of Projections, but they were received as a

pointed response to contemporary events, namely the CivilRights Movement. Dore Ashton's catalogue essay noted thatthese images arrived at a particular moment in Americanhistory and cannot be seen-at least not for the moment-asdivided from the crisis. j6 Critics reiterated her interpreta-tion and emphasized the works' realistic presence. The NewYork Herald Tribune, for example, described the images as

startling and having the shock and impact of a swiftcinematic passage. 57 Th e New York Timesnoted that Projec-tions attained degrees of actuality that straightforwardimages could never achieve. This is knockout work of its kind

propagandist in the best sense. j8The idea that Projections revised received, mass-media

images was taken u p by Ralph Ellison in his catalogue essayto the 1968 exhibition Paintings and Projections by RomareBearden, held at the Art Gallery of the State University ofNew York at Albany. That show included some of the sameimages as the 1964 show, as well as new, but formally similar,montages and photostat enlargements. In his essay Ellison

55. For a discussion of the icon, index, and symbol, tactile quality of the montage paintings and the early avant-garde artists in the Soviet Union, but Isee C S. Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of marks of cutting and joining that appear along the have found his argument useful in my reading ofSigns, in The Philosophy of Charles Peirce: Selected edges of montage elements are indexes both of Bearden's photostat enlargements.Writings, ed. J . Buchler, New York, 1978, 98-1 19. material qualities of the works themselves and of 56. Ashton (as in n. SO), 100.When I refer to the indexical quality of Bearden's the artist's process of creation. See B. Buchloh, 57, New YorkHerald T~bune, ct, 1964, Beardenmontage paintings, I am following Peirce's defini- From Faktura to Factography, October, xxx Fall Papers,tion of the index as that order of sign that produces 1984, 83-1 19, for a discussion of the transforma-

meaning not thr ough resemblance or conventional tion of indexical images into iconic documents.58 New York Times Oct' lo Bearden Papers'

notation, but through a physical trace. Thus, the Buchloh is concerned with this shif t in the work of



11 Bearden, The Dove, 1964. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Blanchette Rockefeller Fund (photo: Museum of Modern Art)

emphasized the visual poetry of Bearden's works, which healso interpreted as social correctives: He has sought here toreveal a world long hidden by the cliches of sociology andrendered cloudy by the disto rtions of newsprint elevi-sion and much documentary photography. 59

The 1960s saw a revival of interest in documentaryphotography, which, in America, had developed in thecontext of turn-of-the-century progressivism. Its uses as anavant-garde form and an instrument in promoting socialreform gained new momentum in the 1930s, when FarmServices Administration (FSA) photographers' interpreta-tions of devastated farms and downtrodden workers estab-lished conventions of documentary photography that are stillwith us. As many scholars have pointed out, such photogra-phy often denies its subjects an identity that transcends theirrepresentation as abject victims.60 For Ellison, as for Bearden,good intentions did not compensate for photographs thatreduced black life to a sociological phenomenon. WhenEllison contrasted Bearden's works with documentary photo-

graphs, he was no doubt reacting to the genre's tendency todepict black life-and black identity-as pitiable, withoutcultural value or creative traditions and thus desperately inneed of reform.

A study of five popular middlebrow magazines-Ebony,Life, Look, Newsweek, an d Time-from January 1960 to June1964 has provided a context from which to assess exactlyhow Projections revised conventional documentary represen-tations of African American identity. Generally, all of thesemagazines supported the Civil Rights Movement and charac-terized black identity as different from that of middle-classwhite America only in terms of economic and social opportu-nities. Th is difference was, however, crucial. The difficulty ofattaining middle-class status-symbolized in photographsand textual descriptions of well-hnded schools or, morefrequently, home ownership and its attendan t hrnishings-was a recurrent theme in all of the periodicals underconsideration. Perhaps to counter the perception that Afi-i-can Americans had not yet achieved a recognizable social

59. R. Ellison, Romare Bearden: Paintings andProjections, exh. cat., Art Gallery of SUNY Al

bany, 1968, in Crisis, LXXVII Mar. 1970, 84.60. See W. Stott, Documentary Expression and ThirtiesAmerica, Nay York, 1973, for a thorough history ofNew Deal documentary and the assumptions onwhich it was based. M. Rosler, In, Around andAfterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),1982, in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of

Photography, ed. R. Bolton, Cambridge, Mass., 1989,303-42, offers a now-standard critique of the genreas an instrument of hegemonic ideology. For ananalysis of the intersection of documentary photo g-raphy and aesthetic discourse, see A. Solomon-Godeau, Who is Speaking Thus? Some Questionsabout Documentary Photography, in Photographyat the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institu:tions, and Practices, Media and Society, IV Minne-

apolis, 1991, 169-83; and A. Trachtenberg, Read-ing Ameiican Photographs: Images as History omMatthew Brady to Walker Evans, New York, 1989,passim. For a consideration of the representationof African Americans in documentary photogra-phy, see N . Natanson, The Black Image in the NewDeal: The Politics of FSA Photography, Knoxville,Tenn., 1992.



422 R T B U L L E T I N S E P T E M B E R 1994 V O L U M E L X X VI N U M B E R 3

2 Bearden, Mysteries 1964. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Ellen Kelleran Gardner Fund (photo: courtesy Museum of Fine Arts,Boston)

identity, Ebony featured numerous articles with photographsof wealthy and middle-class blacks in up-to-date homes,proudly displaying manicured lawns and stylish livingrooms.'jl

In the January 14, 1964, photo-essay New Neighbors,Look constructs an assimilationist identity which utterlydenies black difference. The opening pho tograph shows twosuburban home owners, one white, the o ther black, with theirchildren. In the background ar e trim houses, shrubbery, and

a bicycle. Th e theme develops in subsequent photographs ofa black man doing yard work and home repairs and ofwomen planning integrated children's birthday parties.'j2One particularly telling caption beneath a black man namedDr. Mason states, He and all his neighbors are proud oftheir property. 'j3

What is striking about these ostensibly positive depictionsof black life is that they deny the possibility of a black identitythat is both different and comprehensible. T he moment tha tblack difference is introduced, absence and illegibility re-place presence and meaning. The July 29 1963, issue ofNewsweek which was devoted to defining African Americanidentity, explicitly documents this shift. The issue's cover

depicts a close-up photograph of an unidentified black mangazing up and beyond the viewer. Th e bold-face type reads

THE NEGRO IN AMERICA, and, in smaller print, Thefirst definitive national survey-who he is, what he wants,what h e fears, what he hates, how he lives, how he votes, whyhe is fight ing. and why now? Th e series of articles insidesupport the Civil Rights Movement, but finally, as in all of themagazines included in this study, one is left with theimpression that until Congress enacts decisive legislationand African Americans acquire a bigger share in the plenty

dishwashers and clothes driers as well as human rights,

the Negro in America will not possess-as he has histori-cally not possessed-a recognizable identity.'j4

One reporter, for example, noted that the black Americancommunity exists in a world as remote and as unfamiliar tomost white Americans as the far side of the moon-the darkside. 'j5 Th e purpose of the articles was, apparently, to makethat world familiar, but the reporter went on to definecurrent African American identity in terms of absence.Following a series of articles outlining unemployment, pov-erty, limited educational opportunities, and their deleteriouseffects on the black family, one reporter concluded, MostNegroes say they simply want what they now lack. 'j6

A passage from the same article described a typical black

house in th e rural South in terms that Projections may havesought to reinterpret: Negroes still live in old unpainted



A R T A N D R A C E I N R O M A R E B E A R D E N S P R O J E ( ; T I O N S 423

shacks with collards in the garden, petunias in a coffee can Th e treatment of the figures in Mysteries further counters

a dime store picture of Christ or a n almanac ad for Sweet the tendency to read blackness as absence or abjection.

Railroad Mills Snuff tacked on the wall" (my e mp ha ~i s) .~ ' These figures dominate their space: their hands form aNot only does this passage emphasize the lack of modern continuous barri er across the lower part of the composition;

home furnishings, it also constructs a typical house, and by their imposing faces meet the viewer's gaze and preve nt theextension its occupants, as existing in a historical time that is outsider from entering their house and assessing its con-different from the real time of the disinterested repor ter and tents. Th e large-scale faces and even larger eyes engage thereader. T he anthropologist Johannes Fabian has character- viewer in a form of direct address that is nothing short ofized this sort of temporal distancing as "allochronic dis- confrontational. Indee d, one of the most striking aspects ofcourse"; following Fabian, one might say that the Newsweek all of Projections is Bearden's emphasis on faces, especiallyreporter's manipulation of temporality denies his subjects eyes. Often, as in the far left figure in Mysterzes, the eyes arethe opportunity to exist as subjects in his time and space. Thus cut from images of a larger scale than those used for the restobjectified, the occupants of the "old, unpainted" shack of the face, resulting in an exchange of gazes that challengesbecome available to the rep orte r's impoverishing interpreta - the expec ted relationship between viewer an d viewed." Intion of their social identity.68 Mysterzes, this strategic use of direct confrontation combines

This ournalistic account of Southe rn black life cont ributed with the technique of monta ge to revise the prior image ofto a well-known stereotype and might profitably be com- the anachronistic unpainted shack and replace its rhetoric ofpared with the image from Projections called Mysteries (Fig. absence and objectification with an assertion of presence and12), which gives Bearden's interpretat ion of the unpai nted a dema nd for recognition.shack. At first glance, the image bears a rema rkab le similarity Bearden's use of direct address links Projections to strate-to the Newsweek description: newspapers patch the corru- gies employed by his friend and sometime adversary Jame sgated walls of a dwelling sup por ted by rough wooden beams; Baldwin. I have in mind h ere a series of quotations thatone of the newspapers (above and to the left of the center accompanied a photo-essay in L f e , May 24, 1963, in whichfigure) includes an advertisement for chewing tobacco. Baldwin's highly personalized mode of addre ss not onlyfamily group sits aroun d a table, and in the background, just challenges contemporary conceptions of black identity, butabove the head of the cente r figure, hangs a "dimestore encourages his audience to reth ink the historical invisibilitypic ture" of J e ~ u s . ~ " of African Americans as well.72 Th e feat ure begins with

The title of the work, Mysteries, confronts the received Baldwin announcing to the read er: "I've been here 350 yearsbelief that black life and culture are unknowable and ulti- but you've never seen me."73mately unrepresentabl e except as absence. Bearden counters Th e strategy of direct address, Baldwin asserts, forcesthis belief in a variety of ways. First, if the photostat recognition and thus redefinition on the pa rt of both spea kerenlargement refers to the ostensibly transparent, seamless an d listener, viewer and viewed. By invoking the first an dquality of documentary photography, the original montage second person, Baldwin urges the readers of Llfe to renouncepainting possesses tactile qualities (cuts and joins, as well as passivity and to par ticipate in the nonobjectifying, dialogicalthe various surface textures: glossy magazine pages, fabric, relationships enacted on the magazine's pages. The person-newsprint, and so forth) that the viewer must interpret in alized call to action is directed at blacks as well as whites: "Asterms of physicality, presence. Even in the more iconic soon as we are discontent with what you've told us is ourphotostat, the montage technique and the related disjunc- 'place,' Baldwin states, "we destroy your myth of the happytions in scale force the viewer to participate self-consciously nigger, the noble savage, the shiftless, watermelon-eatingin the production of meaning, to reassemble the various darkie 74

part s of the work into a unified image.'O Two photographs of Baldwin at a Manhattan party (Figs.

61 . See. for example, "America's 100 Richest Ne- 1930s, when FSA photograp hers doc umente d the 73. "At a Cruclal Time a Neg ro Talks Tough, " Lq'e,groes," Ebony, xvrr, May 196 2, 130-34; "How to life of sharec roppe rs; a sta nda rd in the FSA repe r- L N , May 24, 1963,81.Meet Negroes," Ebony, XVII,Aug. 1962, 86-87; W.

M. Young. Jr., "The Role of the Middle-ClassNegro," an d L. Bennett, Jr., "The Negro Woman,"Ebony, x1.111, Sep t. 1963, 64-71, 8 6 9 4 ; "Bachelorsfor 1964," Ebony, xrx, Jun e 1964,210-18.

toire was the newspaper-patched shanty, photo-gra phe d both with and without its inhabitants.70. S. Eisenstein, "Word a nd Image, " The FrlmSensr, ed . J. Leyda, New York, 19 42, 3-65, argue sthat m ont age is a crucial ele men t of realistic film, in

74. Ibid. Obviously, the soc ~al ffect of direct ad-

dress depends on preexisting relationships ofpower. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and IdeologicalState Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investiga-tion)," in Lenrn und Phrlosophy and Other Essays,

62. "New Ne ~ghbors ," ook, X X ~ I I I ,Ja n. 14, 1964, part because it involves the o n s i o u s part~cipation trans. B . Brewster, Kew York, 1971, 127-86, ar-38-41. of the real-life viewer, who reunifies the disjunct gues that when representatives of hegemonic dis-63. Ibid., 40. parts of montage Into a visual representation of a course invoke the second person it serves to con-

64. "The Negro in America," ~ V ~ u l s w ~ e k ,XII, ,July29, 1963, 16.65. Ibid., 15.66. Ibid., 2 1

67. Ibid., 16.68. See J. Fabian, T ~ m end the Other: How.4nthropol-ogi Makes Itc Object, New Tork , 1983, passim.69. W'hile a detailed consideration of the history ofphoto-documentary is beyond the scope of thisessay, it is worth noting that the New s w ~e kdescrip-

tion of the rural Southern dwelling and Bearden's&i?.~t~rzesartlclpate In a tradition that dates to the

conceptually meaningful whole. See also Trachten-berg (as in n . 60), 258-76, who applies Eisenstein'sanalysis to the work of Walker Evans.7 1 For an analysis of similarly confrontationaldev~ces n the collaborative work of Walker Evansand .Ja mes .&gee, see M. Olin, 'It Is Not Going toBe Easy to Look into Them Eyes': Privilege ofPercept~ on n Let V c 1Vou1 Prazce Famous Mpn ," .ArtHzsto~?,XIV, Mar. 199 1, 92-1 15.72. For other , earlier examples, see the essaysgathered In J. Baldw~n, Notes of u ~Vatzue Son,

Boston, 1955.

struct a subject always already bound tolby ~deolo g);:"Ideology 'acts' or 'functions' In such a way that it'recruits' subjects among the individuals o r'transforms' the individuals into subjects . by thatvery precise ope ration which I have called znterpella-tton or hailing, and whlch can be imaglned alongthe llnes of the most commonplace 'Hey, youthere '" (174). Baldwin and Bearden, however,invert this notion of interpellation, assuming theactive role in direct address in order to assertpresence and thereby revlse hegemonic construc-tions of black identity.



424 A R T B U LL E T I N S E P T E M B E R 1994 V O L U M E L X X V l N U M B E R 3

13 James Baldwin at a Manhattan party, 1963 (from Lqe LIV,May 24 1963, 83,O Steve Schapiro)

13, 14 visually reiterate his rhetorical use of the first andsecond person. In the first photograph (the original layoutplaced Fig. 13 directly above Fig. 14 , Baldwin points at awhite addressee, while in the other the roles are nearlyreversed and an African American points at Baldwin. Thefigures in the first photo, actors Rip Torn and GeraldinePage, would have been well known to con temporary readers,and it is interesting to see how Baldwin, probably lessfamiliar to the audience of Lqe, upstages the actors andforces them-and us-to engage in a dialogue that he hasinitiated. Although Baldwin is outnumbered two to one, hislunging arm allows him to occupy practically the entirecomposition. Proximity enhances the sense of his physicalpresence: Baldwin's hand appears to rest on Torn's shoul-der , and his index finger barely misses the tip of Page's nose.

Th e other photograph relies on a similarly demonstrative,even accusatory, gesture. This time, however, it is Baldwinwho is at the receiving end. Th e small-print caption for thisimage states that Baldwin "is told by a Negro girl: 'You're notmy spokesman, James Baldwin ' 75 The sequence of photo-graphs implies that Baldwin's goal is not necessarily toreplace a received definition of African American identitywith one of his own making, but ;ather to init iate a dialoguein which stereotypes will be questioned and racial identitysubjected to redefinition from a variety of perspectives.

The urgency of Baldwin's demand for a redefinition ofblack identity seems to exist without significant editorialinterference. The text is almost entirely from Baldwin; the

photographs strengthen, rather than destabilize, his words.The photo-essay effaces the multivalency of Baldwin's moreliterary writings and functions as straightforward propa-ganda. At least in this context, Baldwin's confrontationalstrategies redefine black identity in political, rather thanaesthetic, terms. The appearance of artless directness heldno charms for Romare Bearden , however, for whom signify-ing identity always involved broader, more complex framesof reference.

14 James Baldwin at a Manhattan party, 1963 (from Life, LIV

May 24 1 9 6 3 , 8 3 , QSteve Schapiro)

Although Bearden uses direct address throughout Projec-tions, he also counters it by incorporating iconic images likeMystem esinto a la rger context of ritual narrative . As par t of aseries that includes street scenes evoking both real life andliterary descrip tions of signifying, as well as themes of magic,religion, and music, Mysteries becomes part of a rich, cultur-ally productive world that must be seen as intertextual.

Th e intertextuali ty of Projections is, of course, multiple,signifying continuity a nd tradi tion in African Americanculture an d signifying on received images and revising them.The Funeral (Fig. 15), for example, refers to other images inthe series: the visitor to the 1964 exhibition might first haveconnected it to scenes of religious or ritual transformationsuch as The aptism and the various conjure women. Next,because of similarities of form and technique, the viewer

would have established a connection between those imagesand the more temporally specific images such as Evening,9:lO Th e totalizing effect of these relationships was not loston contemporary observers. As a critic for the WashingtonStar noted, "From picture to pictu re a whole world ispresented."76

Th e world presented is not, however, a self-contained one.The timeless, ritual quality of The Funeral notwithstanding,it, like all of the images in Projections, also functioned as ageneral reinterpretation of contemporary documentary pho-tography and reportage. In fact, The Funeral may go beyonda general revision and attempt to reinterpret a specific

received image. Th e only image in Projections to employ amarkedly vertical format, The Funeral bears a striking formaland thematic resemblance to a photograph of mournersoutside the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church (Fig. 16 that wasreproduced to accompany Newsweek scover story on Sep tem-ber 30, 1963, "Bombing in Birmingham."

Th e original photograph, by Associated Press, has beencropp ed and reproduced as a skinny vertical, a format thatBearden also employs in The Funeral: both images lead the

75. At a Crucial Tim e a Negr o Talks Tou gh, (asin n. 73), 83

76. F. Geitlein, Confrontation at Corcoran, Wmh

ington Star, Oct. 3, 1965. Worth noting is theheadline writer's serendipitous selection o f a Mal-rauxian noun.



A R T A N D R A C E I N R O M A R E B E A R D E N S P R O J E C T I O N S 4 5

15 Bearden, The Funeral, 1964 (from Washington, pl. 13) 16 A Phantasmagoria of Grief, Sixth AvenueBaptist Church, Birmingham, Ala., September 18,1963 (photo: APIWide World Photos)





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Signifying Identity: Art and Race in Romare Bearden's ProjectionsLee Stephens GlazerThe Art Bulletin , Vol. 76, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 411-426.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3079%28199409%2976%3A3%3C411%3ASIAARI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

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[Footnotes]

29 The Taming of HistoryGeoffrey H. HartmanYale French Studies , No. 18, Passion and the Intellect, Or: Andre Malraux. (1957), pp. 114-128.

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0078%281957%290%3A18%3C114%3ATTOH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

30 The Taming of HistoryGeoffrey H. HartmanYale French Studies , No. 18, Passion and the Intellect, Or: Andre Malraux. (1957), pp. 114-128.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0078%281957%290%3A18%3C114%3ATTOH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

31 The Taming of HistoryGeoffrey H. HartmanYale French Studies , No. 18, Passion and the Intellect, Or: Andre Malraux. (1957), pp. 114-128.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0078%281957%290%3A18%3C114%3ATTOH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

33 Malraux and the Destruction of AestheticsJohn DarzinsYale French Studies , No. 18, Passion and the Intellect, Or: Andre Malraux. (1957), pp. 107-113.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0078%281957%290%3A18%3C107%3AMATDOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

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35 Malraux and the Destruction of Aesthetics

John DarzinsYale French Studies , No. 18, Passion and the Intellect, Or: Andre Malraux. (1957), pp. 107-113.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0078%281957%290%3A18%3C107%3AMATDOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V























42 Malraux and the Destruction of Aesthetics

John DarzinsYale French Studies , No. 18, Passion and the Intellect, Or: Andre Malraux. (1957), pp. 107-113.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0044-0078%281957%290%3A18%3C107%3AMATDOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V



55 From Faktura to FactographyBenjamin H. D. BuchlohOctober , Vol. 30. (Autumn, 1984), pp. 82-119.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28198423%2930%3C82%3AFFTF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

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Rectangular Structure in My Montage PaintingsRomare Bearden Leonardo , Vol. 2, No. 1. (Jan., 1969), pp. 11-19.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094X%28196901%292%3A1%3C11%3ARSIMMP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W



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