Romare Bearden: Collages of African American Life

In the late 20th century, Romare Bearden's colorful collages, featuring fractured images of figures in a swirl of colorful, frenetic energy, came to be viewed as a poetic distillation of the African American experience. As a black American Bearden lived through a time of wrenching change, and the art for which he is best known today was profoundly influenced by the social forces at play during the mid-20th century and by his response to them.

Bearden was a founding member of Spiral, a group of progressive black artists in New York City. In the early 1960s, the consortium sought ways to explore the role of the artist in relation to the cultural and social events then under way and to contribute directly to the rising call for civil rights. One of Bearden's ideas was that Spiral should create a large collaborative project, speaking in one unified voice. To that end he brought together a collection of images cut from magazines and other sources, many highlighting African Americans and the civil rights struggle, for use in a monumental collage. As a collaborative project, the idea ultimately went nowhere, but Bearden began using the images himself. From this root developed the style and methods that would define his artistic vocabulary for the rest of his life.

Collage had a long history in 20th-century Western art before Bearden first experimented with it. The late cutouts of Henri Matisse, for example, were among the most popular and influential works of the post-World War II school of Paris. Papier collé, the technique of using paper elements that are cut and pasted to create forms, had earlier been a very important technique for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their development of synthetic cubism. Bearden knew the work of these masters well, and indeed, much of his work makes good use of the essential tools of synthetic cubism. Another notable influence on Bearden's development was the German American artist George Grosz, Bearden's teacher at the Art Students League of New York in the 1930s. Grosz's work is notable for its vivid figurative imagery and stark social commentary, both of which were present in Bearden's early collages.

Although Bearden had become a respected figure on the American art scene by the 1960s, his trajectory as an artist followed a path very similar to that of many of his contemporaries, both black and white. Respect and prosperity were not necessarily intertwined, and by necessity he continued to work a day job at New York's Department of Social Services until 1969. His first significant works, produced in the 1930s, fit easily within the definition of social realism, as he depicted the plight of (mostly black) urban workers during the difficult times of the Great Depression. He spent the war years in military service and then, under benefits of the GI Bill of Rights, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. His first postwar paintings deal mostly with literary or religious themes, whether scenes from the life of Christ, Homer's Iliad, or the works of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Stylistically, Bearden's use of broad, flat color areas in the paintings of the 1940s seems to foreshadow his later collages, but essentially these works show a talented, maturing artist internalizing the accumulated lessons of Western painting. Returning to New York City from Paris, Bearden found an art world dominated by abstract expressionism, and his works turned toward a gentle and sensuous form of lyrical abstraction. In fact his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s owe a distinct debt to the St. Petersburg-born painter Nicolas de Staël, whose work Bearden admired.

All of these influences, coupled with Bearden's own reaction to the civil rights struggle, inspired him to revive his idea for the collaborative project. Collage became his primary medium, and Bearden began to reassert himself as a figurative and, more importantly, African American artist who was concerned with social realities. As his work became widely exhibited and reproduced, he received broader public recognition.

Bearden's first important series of collaged images were exhibited at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York City in 1964 and then in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery in 1965. This first group, known as Projections, included photostatic enlargements of relatively small collage works. The subject matter was drawn from autobiographical sources--memories of the rural south, of time spent in Pittsburgh's Hill District, and from his life in urban Harlem. The small original collages contained some color, but they were enlarged in black and white, tuning them to a plaintive note. The fractured images, featuring distorted faces, African masks, and prominent eyes, harbored a compacted energy that could scarcely be contained within the pictures' borders. In their day, at the height of the civil rights struggle, they were recognized as timely and powerful images reflective of both the tensions and aspirations emanating from the soul of black America. Thus it was through his collages that Bearden established himself as one of the leading visionaries of the African American consciousness in a rapidly changing world.

In later years exuberant color infused his collages, which became more upbeat as he explored musical themes, jazz in particular, and other topics important to African American culture. By the time of his death in 1988, Bearden was widely recognized as the most important African American artist of his time. In 2003 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized the largest retrospective exhibition of Bearden's work to date. After closing in the nation's capital in January 2004, the show traveled to San Francisco, Dallas, New York City, and Atlanta.

Interesting Facts About Puppets and Puppetry

Puppets and rich traditions of puppetry have been a facet of world cultural expression in an astonishing number of variations. Puppets can be as simple as a sock drawn over the hand and painted with a face, or as complicated as the moving dragons, operated simultaneously by many puppeteers, used in street processions in China. Their purposes can be as diverse as ritual celebration, children's play, slapstick comedy, or high art.

Although their origins are lost in history, elaborate puppets have been preserved in India and China going back some 4,000 years. Early performance themes included religious subjects and mythology, and in many cases inanimate puppets instead of actors were used for dramatic narratives because of a prohibition on humans engaging in dramatic personification. Thus, early styles of puppetry have influenced many later performance traditions, making stylized marionette-like movements a feature of classical Chinese opera, Burmese dance, and other later theatrical arts. In Japan, Bunraku, utilizing an elaborate form of rod puppet with multiple operators, gained immense popularity in the 18th century, temporarily displacing the traditional No and Kabuki theater as the most popular entertainment forms. Human actors only regained their predominance by adopting certain styles and forms of their puppet competitors.

One of the most developed forms of narrative puppetry is the wayang kulit tradition of Java and other Indonesian islands. Performances are regularly presented on holidays, religious festivals, and ceremonial occasions such as weddings and circumcisions. By tradition performances begin in the evening and continue until dawn, featuring intricate shadow puppets that represent highly stylized human and animal forms, with backlighting to cast the puppets' images onto a translucent screen. At their finest, wayang kulit puppets are extraordinary works of art made of elaborately painted and gilded buffalo hide. Small village productions, while no less traditional, often feature simpler puppets made from cardboard and other, more humble materials.

The Javanese puppeteer, known as the dalang, must be an accomplished entertainer as well as a dedicated artist performing a ceremonial function. Although the traditional plays are not scripted and can vary from performance to performance, the stories themselves are descended from the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; both the characters and the plotlines are thus already well known to the audience.

Puppetry has at times ascended to the level of high art in Europe as well--Franz Josef Haydn's 1773 opera Philemon and Baucis, for example, was originally written for the puppet theater--but it has more often been a staple of popular and children's entertainment. In the English-speaking world, the dominant player in traditional puppet theater is Punch (or Mr. Punch), who finds his roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte character Pulcinella. The first recorded mention of the character in England was by the noted diarist Samuel Pepys, who described a 1662 performance in London. Punch is traditionally a racy and irreverent rascal with a big red nose and a potbelly. Despite his acid sense of humor and the traditional story in which he kills his wife, Judy, and outwits the hangman, he remains a popular hero, the underdog who always outfoxes the authorities. Our word slapstick is derived from a noisemaking device of the early Punch and Judy shows.

Puppets in all their forms are still with us and retain their popularity, including the amiable and educational Muppets of television's Sesame Street, the ventriloquists' dummies who always seem smarter than their sidekicks and masters, and older, more classical forms of puppetry, such as the Japanese Bunraku, which in 1985 found a new home with the opening of the National Bunraku Theater in Osaka.

Interesting Facts About Oscar Peterson

Combining an unmatched technical ability at the piano with a remarkable feel for the instrument, Oscar Peterson rose from a humble childhood in Montreal, Canada, to become one of the world's most famous and highly respected jazz musicians. Described as "the maharaja of the piano" by Duke Ellington, Peterson's career spans the development of jazz from the origin of the genre to its emergence as a modern art form.

Born into a musical family, Oscar Peterson was the fourth of five children who were all taught music from an early age by their father, a railway porter who moved to Canada from the West Indies. Peterson studied both trumpet and piano until a bout with tuberculosis at age six forced him to spend more than a year in the hospital and left him unable to continue playing the trumpet. Instead, he devoted himself to his piano studies with a ferocity that would come to characterize his playing, often practicing more than 12 hours a day. Of Peterson's several teachers, the most influential was Hungarian concert pianist Paul de Marky, who helped his young student develop a formidable technique. Despite his classical training, however, Peterson was captivated by jazz and would often slip downstairs after everyone was asleep to listen quietly to Duke Ellington and Count Basie on the radio. When his father played a record by Art Tatum, whose astounding technical ability Peterson would be one of the few to match, Peterson could not believe that only one person was making all that sound and asked his father, "Who are those guys?"

At age 14 Peterson's sister, who had been one of his first piano teachers, entered him in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) amateur piano competition, which he won and which lead to regular performances on CBC radio shows. In an early interview Peterson described his developing style as more swing than jazz and said he preferred the more "organized" format of that music. His playing, like Tatum's, was characterized by a strong left hand pounding out the rhythm on the bass notes with the right hand carrying the melody. When he later combined this method with the influence of bebop, his distinctive style--one to which he would remain faithful throughout his career--was born.

In the mid-1940s Peterson began playing as the featured soloist with the formerly all-white Johnny Holmes Orchestra and started his recording career on the RCA Victor label, mostly in the trio format (piano, bass, and either drums or guitar) that would become his trademark. A 1947 Montreal performance of Peterson's trio that was broadcast live on the radio was heard by the American jazz impresario Norman Granz, who was in a taxi on his way to the airport. Granz immediately turned around and went to the club, which marked the beginning of a relationship that would introduce Peterson's music to the world.

Granz, who would later found the influential Verve record label, was the producer of a musical series called Jazz at the Philharmonic. He brought Peterson with him to New York City to appear as a surprise guest at one of the concerts held at Carnegie Hall, where Peterson played a duet with the bassist Ray Brown. That performance launched Peterson's career in the United States and began a musical relationship with Brown that would span more than 40 years and 240 albums. Peterson became the touring pianist for Jazz at the Philharmonic, traveling the globe with the group in what became a kind of concert jam band for some of jazz's top names, until 1952. Much of the group's work was recorded for Granz's Verve label.

Peterson made many other recordings for the label, first as a duo with Brown and later in various trio formats. The best known of these, which lasted from 1953 to 1958, featured Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis and were celebrated for their complex arrangements and the musical competition among the three men. Peterson, whose popularity was at its apex, was voted best pianist by readers of Down Beat magazine for five straight years beginning in 1950. When Ellis left the trio, his eventual replacement was drummer Ed Thigpen, who played with Peterson and Brown until 1965. Peterson, along with Brown and several others, opened a school of contemporary music in Toronto, Canada, in 1960, beginning a lifelong commitment to teaching that continued until his death, despite the failure of the school just three years later. In the late 1960s Peterson made several solo recordings and tours, giving his listeners an unhindered opportunity to appreciate his ability with and feel for the instrument.

Peterson continued to tour and record as a solo artist and with various trios and groups from the 1970s through the early 1990s, developing his own compositions during this time as well. In 1990 the famous trio with Brown and Ellis reunited to tour and record several albums. While performing at New York City's Blue Note jazz club in 1993, Peterson noticed that he was having trouble playing notes with his left hand. Although he went on to complete the performance, he learned later that he had suffered a stroke. Depressed over losing much of the use of his left hand, Peterson did not perform again for nearly two years. With the support of his family and musical peers, however, he completed an intensive physical therapy program and eventually returned to the stage, his technique diminished, but his playing undeniably that of a jazz legend. Oscar Peterson died on Dec. 23, 2007, at the age of 82.