African American Abstraction

In Mary Schmidt Campbell’s biography on Romare Bearden, An American Odyssey, she offers a clue about the stakes of the debate on African American abstraction art through a masterful use of what could have seemed like a small anecdote. In 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy worked out of a suite in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City adorned with an abstract painting on the wall by Bearden, Golden Dawn. ¹ It was the only painting by a contemporary artist from New York City hanging, a pride of place for which Bearden’s then-gallerist and dealer Arne Ekstrom had long labored. This was the start of momentum that powered the rest of Bearden’s career when he would move from abstraction to a modulated figuration. Yet in Campbell’s scholarship on the intersection of art and politics that shaped Bearden’s world, she notes that his name was omitted from the official list of those at the Samuel Kootz gallery which represented Bearden during the prior period. “Kootz, interviewed years later for the Archives of American Art, lists all of the artists who exhibited in his gallery during the 1940s—except Romare Bearden,” Campbell notes. ² It seems like a small omission, but it emblematizes a larger pattern. Writing about African American abstraction requires addressing a paradox: the artists that have been pivotal for the history of modernist abstraction can be elided from it. For decades, it had been difficult to even see the work of African American abstract artists in mainstream histories and exhibitions. Yet it is not possible to fully understand the history of the field of late modernism (or African American art at large) without considering the history of black abstraction.