An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden

Abstract

This is a special book by a gifted and experienced art historian, educator, and college administrator about a gifted artist, writer, tunesmith, and social worker. Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president of Spelman College, first met Romare Bearden via his work in 1973 at the Studio Museum of Harlem, where she became executive director four years later. Their relationship lasted until his death in 1988. This major study, in fact, continues the partnership to the present. An American Odyssey is then nothing less than a double story, of Bearden, of course, but also of the ways historians tell that story. I thought I knew something about Bearden's life and work. But it turns out, in the light of Campbell's study, that I only knew some moments of his lifelong pursuit, his odyssey, to find a way to understand African American life and art in the context of American life and art. And just as those contexts changed so vividly during the fifty years of Bearden's protean life so too did his reaction to and representation of them. He had as many artistic lives as some of his musical contemporaries—Miles Davis and Bob Dylan to name two.