Looking at a picture of artist Bearden (1911 - 1988) is a bit shocking because his image imitates the genial Polish-ness of my father. It's difficult to reconcile the image of a chubby white-looking man with the concept of a major black artist who catapulted the innovation of black American representation. And yet, play it as it lies. Bearden's work is the viscerally modernist incarnation of black cliche. In
Mother and Child we're served the Madonna and the Mammy as one in a primitive-cum-modern technique that reverberates with both the historical and the modern of Western art reconfigured as black contemporaneity.
