What is it?
I’m trying really to remember
The clock has stopped
Now I can never know
Where the edge of my world can be
If I could only enter that old calendar
That opens to an old, old July
And learn what unknowing things know ¹

Readers of The New Yorker were privy to an epic treat at the tail end of November 1977. Sixteen pages of the weekly magazine were devoted to the life of sixty-six year old Romare Bearden. Inspired by the artist’s 1975 Of the Blues exhibit of collage paintings, writer Calvin Tomkins had studied the art and interviewed its creator to craft a thick profile piece on Bearden titled Putting Something Over Something Else, a salute to Bearden’s own description of the art of painting.² Structured around five places in time-- Pittsburgh in the 1920s, Harlem in the 30s and 40s, Paris not long after WWII, New York in the 1950s, and Canal Street in the 60s--and composed of rich vignettes, Tomkins’s essay mapped key people, places, and events that had made Bearden Bearden.
--Dr. Lisa Gail Collins