The Prevalence of Ritual in an Age of Change: Romare Bearden

Abstract One could ask for no more compelling example of the paradox of continuity and change in American culture than that presented by the career of Romare Bearden.3 His “Two Women in a Landscape” (1941; see figure 2) is regarded by most art historians as a work derivative of the end of American social realist and regionalist painting, of an artist not yet aware of the dramatic changes coming to American art and society during and after World War II. Like a swing trumpeter not yet aware of the musical changes being wrought by Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker at Minton’s, the mythic home of modernist jazz, one might see Bearden as backward, unable to commit to either the social program of the realists or the disruptions of the avant-garde. His “Blue Lady” (1955; see figure 3) might extend the tale. Despite the emerging dominance of a Jackson Pollock-Mark Rothko axis in the world of American art, this misguided artist flirts with narrative, the barely visible shape of the woman on the canvas further evidence of an artist unable to dispense with an outmoded humanism.