On Romare Bearden

Kevin Brown at Salmagundi:

What is it you see, asks Rachael Z. DeLue, in Romare Bearden’s artwork? Why is it you just can’t stop looking? How is it they remain, decades after his death, sources of what Wallace Stevens calls “imperishable bliss”?

A fitting complement to Schmidt-Campbell’s An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden (2018), Robert G. O’Meally’s Romare Bearden Reader gathers nearly three dozen previously uncollected pieces, eight of them artist’s statements, book chapters, essays, journal entries, art reviews and speeches by Bearden himself dating from the mid-1930s to 1993. As a source of information about and insight into Bearden’s various periods, styles and media, The Romare Bearden Reader builds on foundations laid by Henri Ghent and Calvin Tomkins.

more here.