Piecing Together Romare Bearden’s Life
The best part of the new documentary about the famed artist is watching people interact with his work.
A new documentary about Romare Bearden embraces a collage-like sensibility, fitting well with the artist’s most influential work. Romare Bearden: A Life in Collage, soon to screen at DOC NYC, eschews the familiar structure of a linear biography, jumping around to find thematic rhymes through different periods of Bearden’s life.
Early on, for instance, the film alludes to Bearden’s family’s participation in the Great Migration, but rather than dwell on his biography, it turns to the recurring motif of trains in his work.
The film benefits from generous access to recordings of Bearden himself, who speaks with remarkable elegance about his memories, artistic process, and influences. Shaped by living in the South, Harlem, and Pittsburgh, his studies at the Sorbonne, and his time in the military and semiprofessional baseball during the first half of the 20th century, Bearden synthesized them into an oeuvre now seen as emblematic of the broader Black experience of the era.
