Spiraling Out From Abstraction.
How Spiral's founding helped Romare Bearden out of his Abstract Expressionism.
In the final chapter of Hans Hofmann’s heroic career,1 one work stands out. As much as any figure, Hofmann shepherded a rising generation of young painters towards Abstract Expressionism, and in his last years he produced a valedictory batch of transcendent canvases—defiantly abstract, geometric, painterly, and colorful. But at the end of 1963, he broke with the genre he had helped to define for a somber black canvas with two tombstone-like rectangles. While rectangles are everywhere in Hofmann’s late period, they seldom read as anything but fields of color; in this painting, it’s hard not to see them as humanoid, maybe coffin-like, and tumbling into a void. If the composition itself didn’t say it loud enough, the inscription in the lower left corner whispers the subject:
To J.F.K. - A Thousand Roots Did Die With Thee
It’s a moving contemplation of loss—the rectangles seem to both tumble and succumb to the inky blackness, but also stand against the void. Its frank legibility is so out of character for Hofmann, who by then had banished any literal interpretation from his work for many years. It’s a stark reminder that artists are of a time and circumstance, no matter how timeless and otherworldly they appear.
II. Romare Bearden, Abstract Expressionist.
Romare Bearden was grappling with his time and place. A Black artist born in the South, by the end of the 1950s, Bearden was following the Hofmann recipe. He showed with Hofmann’s dealer, Sam Kootz, through the 1950s. He moved from Harlem to a loft on Canal Street. He banished legible subject matter from his oil paintings, which had were growing larger; Bearden’s paintings of the moment even bear a certain resemblance to Hofmann in line and composition.
By 1960, he was staining canvas with ultra-thin veils of paint:
“Applying thinned pigment to unsized canvas—what is now commonly referred to as stain painting—was a technique also employed by several other artists during this period, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. Both Louis and Noland were working mainly in Washington, D.C., where Bearden maintained strong ties [through his exhibitions at Barnett-Aden Gallery2].”
“These large paintings,” wrote Brian O’Doherty of The New York Times when they were exhibited in 1960, “suggest that Mr. Bearden, like Empedocles, divides nature into the primary elements . . . He paints thinly, so thinly that at times the substance of the paint seems to have evaporated, leaving behind ectoplasmic stains scored and etched and veined with lines or dotted with evaporated bubbles . . .” O’Doherty went on in glowing, geological terms. Their monolithic quality was on public view at Daniel Cordier & Michel Warren Inc.; privately, Bearden’s stained canvases could be viewed from the Carlisle Hotel suite of president-elect John F. Kennedy, which Bearden had been asked to decorate.
Bearden never studied with Hans Hofmann, but they were imbibing from the same zeitgeist—until they weren’t. In 1962, the Cordier & Warren partnership dissolved, leaving Bearden with a period between galleries, and between exhibitions. In 1963, Kennedy was pushing civil rights and Dr. King was planning his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington for the end of the summer. On July 5th, Bearden invited fellow artists Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and Norman Lewis downtown to plan their travel together to the speech. They ended up founding an artist’s collective: Spiral.
III. Spiral.
The artists had all worked in abstraction and social realism, but when they gathered on Bayard Street that afternoon, Bearden’s primary focus was on collective action. Abstract Expressionism was a solitary medium—an act of “intrasubjectivity,” in Sam Kootz’s terminology.3 Bearden abandoned it in favor of something inter-subjective—collaborative. The idea was to travel together, bear witness together, exhibit together—even work together:
“I thought that if we had photographs we could each paste some down . . . I cut out some trees and I cut out some figures, and I said, maybe you could make a landscape and I could paste some of the figures on it and let’s see what we can do.”4
Collage could be the expressive medium of collective action, Bearden postulated. “They didn’t seem to be too interested in it,” he later lamented, but “I worked on one or two alone just to try to get the idea myself to show the other artists.” That may not have caught on with Lewis, Woodruff, and Alston, but it made all the difference to Bearden. He threw himself into collage, and with collage came the return of subject matter—and that subject matter was anything but abstract.
“I did the new work out of a response and need to redefine the image of man in the term of the Negro experience I know best. I felt that the Negro was becoming too much of an abstraction, rather than the reality that art can give a subject. James Baldwin and other intellectuals were defining the Negro sociologically, but not artistically. What I’ve attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.”5
Bearden’s days as an Abstract Expressionist were over—and had been since 1960. Collage didn’t work well on canvas—Bearden tried many different techniques before abandoning the hope of bonding paper to fabric—and since the source material was printed matter, the scale of his work shrunk dramatically from 1960 to 1963. It allowed him to move beyond the abstraction and bring a vibrant visual reality of his own life to the public imagination. Spiral would only exhibit together once. He continued to paint—he often referred to his collages as paintings—but he was a collagist for the rest of his long career.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Read all about that last chapter here.
More about the fascinating history of Barnett-Aden in our story on Alma Thomas, here.
Kootz in 1949: “The intrasubjective artist invents from personal experience, creates from an internal world rather than an external one.”
As quoted by Tracy Fitzpatrick, Romare Bearden: Abstraction, 2017, p. 31.
Romare Bearden, ArtNews, October, 1964, as quoted by Fitzpatrick (2017), p. 36.