Put Me in the Sky1

" I thought that I was going to be a doctor, and I majored in science and later in mathematics. But when I got out of college, I decided to study art, " divulged Romare Bearden in a 1968 oral history interview. In New York, " I went to study with George Grosz at the Art Students League. " The German-born artist guided Bearden's understanding of draftsmanship and classical technique, introducing him to Ingres, Hogarth, Holbein, and Dürer and urging him to " really observe. " " I was born in Charlotte, North Carolina …. I grew up mostly in New York and some time in Pittsburgh, where I would go to see my grandmother, " Bearden said about his peripatetic childhood. But he added on another occasion, " I never left Charlotte except physically. " His family, part of the Great Migration north to escape racial segregation, became prominent in their new community, sharing in the intellectual, artistic, and political mainstream of the 1920s and '30s cultural movement, Harlem Renaissance. " When I fi nished studying with Grosz, I drew at home and I got a job as a political cartoonist. " But painting was what he wanted to do, so he got a studio in New York, same building as Jacob Lawrence and other artists, writers, and musicians, who became his friends. " I began at that time to do my Southern themes, the people that I'd seen as a young boy when I'd sometimes visit North Carolina …. " This promising career was interrupted by World War II, when he joined the army. " After the war, I began to arrive at some kind of personal identifi cation. " Like many in his circle, he traveled to France, " Paris was just like a thing of dreams to me. " But despite his fascination with the city and the people he met, among them Georges Braque and Constantin Brâncuşi, he did not paint at all there. Back in New York, he gradually overcame his desire to return to Paris and started to paint again, experimenting with color " not as decoration " but as " form, as space, " with " fl at painting, shallow space, Byzan-tine stylization, and African design. " " I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he …