Romare Bearden and Herbert Gentry, both GIs, first met in postwar Paris at the Dome Cafe in 1951.  Bearden, then 40, and Gentry, then 32, had yet to make their names in art, but they began a lifelong friendship, one that brought out the best in each of them. 

Bearden's odyssey had taken him from his birthplace in Charlotte (Mecklenburg County), North Carolina, to Harlem, back to Charlotte, Lutherville, Maryland, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where he visited with grandparents); then to school in Pittsburgh; Boston; and New York (NYU School of Education -- to satisfy his mother -- then the Art Students League).  Then, in Paris, Bearden studied philosophy under Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne (where he barely attended classes -- instead, Romy and Herb walked everywhere in Paris, to all the museums, the cafes, the cathedrals).

Gentry's odyssey mirrored Bearden's.  It had taken him from his birthplace in Pittsburgh, to Harlem, to graduation at eighteen from New York's George Washington High School (with evening art classes as a teenager), to NYU's School of Commerce -- to satisfy his mother -- to school in Paris at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts (which felt stiff), L'Academie de la Grande Chaumiere (which, workshop-like, felt much freer and was therefore much more to his liking), and L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Considering their paths in life before they met, their friendship was no accident.

   Romare Bearden
Photo by Frank Stewart

Bearden was born in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, N.C.  Though he left Mecklenburg early in life, in memory and in art, Bearden always returned.  The exhibition's Mecklenburg Autumn-Morning Ritual (oil on paper, 30 x 40": 1983), Mecklenburg Evening: Heavy Freight (collage with acrylic, 7 ½ x 11 5/8": 1982), and Wednesday Evening (watercolor/collage 14 x 11": 1986) are ample testimony to the prevalence of ritual in Bearden's work.  Having spent his elementary school years in Harlem, Romare was twice sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Carrie, who ran a boarding house, mostly for steel-mill workers, in Lawrenceville, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, a 1978 collage (13 ¾ x 18 1/8") from Profile, Part I: The Twenties (Pittsburgh Memories) is signature, classic Bearden.

Herbert Gentry

Interestingly, Herb Gentry was born in Pittsburgh.  Both men lived in mid-1930s Harlem, the only children of mothers who profoundly influenced their lives.  Herb Gentry's mother, Teresa, was a dancer, one of the few black Ziegfield showgirls.  Through her, Gentry met a large group of musicians (including Ellington and Basie), entertainers (including Paul Robeson), and artists.  In particular, he developed an early love of painting.  Gentry often spoke of the two sides of growing up as a single child: on one hand, you always knew you were truly special and were therefore destined to become creative; on the other, you had to become self-reliant, learning how to protect yourself, quickly.

Through his mother, Bessye, whose apartment was just opposite the back stage entrance to the Lafayette Theater, Bearden grew up in a household he described as "like a revolving door" with family friends like Fats Waller, Andy Razaf, Duke Ellington, and Paul Robeson.  Bessye, the society editor for the Chicago Defender, was a political force in Harlem and an intensely social person.  Once, when Romare came home to find his mother alone in the house in bed, crying, he asked what was the matter, was she sick? "No," she replied, "I'm by myself!"

Gentry, having fought in North Africa and Europe, first arrived in Paris as part of the army of liberation. And the City of Light, in its turn, liberated him.  "The women were beautiful and the people were kind," Gentry remembered, "You felt free -- free to express yourself."

Gentry decided he wanted to return to Paris, and two years later, became part of the first wave of Americans studying there under the G.I. Bill.  He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (which he found "stiff"), and the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where Gentry eventually taught painting and sculpture while he was still a student.  In late 1948, Gentry opened Chez Honey, or the Club Galerie, in Monparnasse, with his first wife Honey Johnson, an American painter and singer with Rex Stuart's band.  It was an exhibition space by day and a jazz club by night.

If, in the 1930s, Bearden had studied by day at NYU and with George Grosz at the Art Students League, he spent many a night at the Savoy Ballroom listening to Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald, or at the Lafayette, Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise, or Barron's.  None of this was lost on him. It emerged throughout his work of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in photomontage, collage, oils on paper, and watercolor in such work as Last Chorus and Out (watercolor/collage 21 ½ x 28 ½": 1987) and Solo (oil on paper 30 x 41": 1987), an eloquent jazz statement of a horn player in flight.

Gentry's monoprint, Green One (22 x 30": 1977) resonates richly in relation to the improvisatory spirit in the work of both men.  It began its artistic life as a result of Bearden's introducing Gentry to the master printmaker Bob Blackburn at Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop.  As he had shown in Of the Blues: Second Chorus (1976), Bearden was coming to exploit the improvisational possibilities of collage and other mediums by uniting a freer, increasingly more open approach to his art with his subject matter, blues improvisation.  Bearden had begun to brush benzine directly onto a plastic plate to "pick out" the color, which was then allowed to splatter and disperse on the paper.  The more volatile the mixture, the more quickly the plate dried. (See the oils on paper, You Be My Woman (22 x 30": 1975) and Solo (1987).

Herb was excited by the printmaking process, especially its speed.  But for him, that's where the fun really started.  This is where Gentry, exploiting the very process of reversal in printmaking itself, would begin working with the print's inversion of the subconscious image with which he had begun.  Much like Bearden, Gentry had a time relinquishing the work.  Notwithstanding the lightning quick set of the plate, Herb would then apply a thin brush (look at the delicate red and yellow outlines in Green One) until he was satisfied.  Thus a work on paper signed "Gentry" could have taken days, weeks, sometimes years.

Of the two works by Gentry dating from 1977-79 that are on exhibition here, Green One has even more significance for the Gentry/Bearden friendship than On the Way (22 x 30”: 1979).  It recalls their walks though the Oriental Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when they came upon a sculpture they named “The Green Bird.”  For Romare, it was an epiphany – he told Herb that the experience reminded him of the first time he felt like himself again when he returned to his art in the mid-1950s. Herb even did a work (whereabouts unknown) named The Green Bird.  In retrospect, the two friends’ experience with “The Green Bird” was symbolic of an intersection in their artistic journeys, a reflection of their spiritual affinity.

I in Others (30 x 22": 1987), an acrylic on paper, is painted in washed-out acrylic, used almost as watercolor. A favorite of Gentry's, this work uses thin green brushstrokes as defining lines.  A male-female pair of large figures encloses another set of smaller male-female figures.  There is no attempt here to set the four against a spatial background; the meaning of the piece comes out of an interplay of brushstrokes and lines (and what does Gentry mean by I in others?), and in fact, the bodies may be inseparable, aspects of one another.

Bearden called Gentry’s paintings “direct, energetic, fanciful, a sensitive man’s response to the world about him, and to that inner world of resonances and emotions distilled through the mind’s eye.”  Indeed, Herb had said, “I believe in the influence of the subconscious.  If I didn’t, the work would be much more static.”  Ultimately, Bearden saw in Gentry’s work “a reverence for art, and a wonderful capacity for resolving the forms and colors in his paintings that achieve an articulated balance in which the tension of the psychological elements are counterpoised into an overall order.”

Romare, Herb said, "was like my brother."  He felt that Romare, childless, nevertheless had a strong paternal instinct.  He could have added that Bearden had a strong maternal instinct as well. Romare was always supportive, encouraging Herb, bringing out the best in his art.  And only Herb Gentry could picture Romare, like a special child, sitting there in his knickers saying "Yes mama."

Three or four days after Bearden died in 1988, Herb and his wife Mary Ann Rose were in a terrible auto accident on an icy road in Sweden.  Herb was sitting in the front passenger seat, listening to jazz and reading some of Romare's letters to him when the impact of the crash threw him to the back of the car.  Romare seemed to be saying "You don't have to come now, Herbie."  He didn't, not for fourteen more years.  Then, last year, the two friends were rejoined.

Myron Schwartzman, New York City, 2005

Prof. Schwartzman wishes to thank Mary Anne Rose, The Romare Bearden Foundation, and Judith Young-Mallin for their generous assistance.

Myron Schwartzman, author of Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, is Professor of English at Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Romare Bearden on Herbert Gentry

Several years ago, Gentry agreed to go with me to a small upstate community college where I was to meet with a class in the creative arts.  The professor arranged an informal luncheon so the students could listen and ask questions in a more relaxed atmosphere.  After I did my best with questions addressed to me, I asked Herbert if he might not give a few comments of his own.  Gentry soon had the students enthralled with some of his personal experiences and, also, in the way he explained how art could be related to ones personal and subjective attitudes.

The reason, I’m sure, that I remember this visit was not only the impressive way that Gentry related to the students, but how much of what he said was an outcome of the very way he approaches his canvases.  Indeed, the viewers will find that Gentry’s paintings are direct, energetic, fanciful, and are a sensitive man’s response to the world about him and to that inner world of resonances and emotions distilled through the mind’s eye.

Gentry has always moved with a distinct freedom in his life and in his art.  After World War II, when I was a student in Paris, Gentry opened a café-art gallery on the Left Bank where he not only displayed the works of young artists, but his café was one of the first places where American jazz musicians performed after the long hiatus of the war years.  It also should be made known that Gentry was among those American painters in Paris, who beginning in the early 1950’s, helped introduce the American concept of gesture, free invention, and the vivid dissonances of color, to the European sensibilities.  The style was then know in Paris as “the school of the pacific” and in this country, of course, as “abstract expressionism”.

These were exciting years for Gentry.  His works were shown in galleries in France, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.  But despite his acceptance in Europe, Gentry constantly returned to this country, and interestingly to the street where he was reared, only a few blocks from this museum.  During the past decade, Gentry arranges to spend half a year in Europe and other months in New York.  One thinks of Henry O. Tanner and some of the great jazz musicians who lived continuously in Europe , where they were received and respected as artists, but Gentry has told me on many occasions that he would find something missing in himself and in his art, should he not return to his roots.  There is a distinct American energy and rhythm which, Gentry says, reinforces him both as an artist and as a person.

And there is a feeling of released energy and rhythmical flow in the cursive brushing of Gentry’s paintings.  He has reduced his approach to a system of flat values, with overlapping planes of color.  He thinks of color objectively, to represent a mood, or a feeling.  In other words, his method is conceptual rather than realistic.  One senses in the chromatic emotionalism, and in the biomorphic forms of the figures that often appear in Gentry’s paintings, the strong pull of the unconscious.  Yet there is a reverence for art, and a wonderful capacity for resolving the forms and colors in his paintings that achieve an articulated balance in which the tension of the psychological elements are counterpoised into an overall order, so that we can only say:  This is “Gentry’s world.”

Romare Bearden, 1982

Forward for the exhibition catalogue “An Ocean Apart" from the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City