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The large mural, Berkeley—the City and Its People, which for more than 30 years has graced the City Council chamber, can now be seen in the fine Romare Bearden retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

The show opened last October at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the first solo exhibition featuring an African-American artist in the gallery’s 62-year history. In addition, the New York Times devoted an editorial to this show. Only Vermeer has been given such prominence in recent memory. 

Bearden’s work fully justifies this attention. It is unique, powerful and evocative. It deals with memory and life as he experienced it: his childhood in North Carolina; his youth in New York during the Harlem Renaissance when men like W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and Duke Ellington were guests at his parents’ house.  

The syncopation of jazz is a major element characterizing his collages and Photostats from early on to his 1985 album cover for Winton Marsalis’ Mood, a tune which, in turn, was inspired by Bearden’s collages. In addition to jazz, Romare Bearden was inspired by a multiple of forms in art from African sculpture to Vermeer, Rembrandt and Matisse—from Dada collages, social realist paintings—from Greek mythology to Zen. Above all, his style is part of the Modernist tradition of Cubist collage, which he made his own. 

In 1945 when he returned from army service in World War II, Bearden went back to his job as a social worker in New York. There, he was witness to the lives of the impoverished, who remained a recurrent theme in his work. The strength of his collages lies in the fusion of the social content and modernist form. 

After studying with George Grosz at the Art Students League, Bearden worked in the prevailing Abstract Expressionist mode from 1955 to 1962. This period is something this carefully curated ex-hibition seems to pass over. At any rate, it was when he em-braced collage as his proper medium that Bearden did his finest work. A student of Zen precepts, his approach was intuitive, but he abandoned Abstract Ex-pressionist gesture painting as too visceral for his purpose. He found his strength in an organic merging of pasted cut-outs with overpainting. 

In the late 1960s, Bearden created deeply moving collages which addressed the life of African Americans in his native Mecklinburg County, North Carolina (Charlotte). They depict cotton pickers, people talking, trains passing and the rituals of baptism, burials and conjur women. Ralph Ellison called them “abiding rituals and ceremonies of affirmations.” Bearden did not portray specific individuals, but created figures that appear like archetypes of the world in which he was born. In a 1979 interview he pointed out that Mecklinburg County was, for him, what Dublin was for James Joyce: the place of the artist’s roots. 

In 1963 Bearden was instrumental in starting the “Spiral” black artists group which facilitated the meeting of black artists. The group initially was active in supporting the civil rights movement; it later turned its attention to the debate over definitions of the black aesthetic.  

Bearden began exhibiting and selling his work in prestigious galleries around the Spiral group time, and in 1971 the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored him with a solo show, called Prevalence of Ritual. The show was booked (by this author) for the Berkeley Art Museum, which led to Bearden’s commission for the City Hall mural. Bearden spent more than a week in Berkeley, meeting with its citizens, drawing and photographing what he saw, absorbing much of the city’s life. Returning to his studio in New York, he produced a truly outstanding work of public art. It may well be the largest collage in existence. More than that, it is a grand image of Berkeley, the Bay and above all, its people with four profile heads in different colors on the bottom of the picture. Many people may not be aware that Berkeley’s logo is derived from this mural.  

Still in remarkably good condition, the mural was taken to the National Gallery, where it occupied the place of honor. In San Francisco in a rather crowded installation, it can be seen until May 16. The mural will travel from there to Dallas, to the Whitney Museum in New York, and then to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where the traveling show concludes in April 2005. After that, the Bearden City Hall mural will return home to Berkeley.