Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Romare Bearden moved with his parents to Harlem as a child. After graduating with a degree in mathematics from New York University, Bearden enrolled in the Art Students League, where he studied with the German artist George Grosz. Bearden’s colleagues included William Baziotes, Stuart Davis, Carl Holty, Jacob Lawrence (see no. 13), Norman Lewis (see no. 14), and Hale Woodruff, among others. In 1963 Bearden cofounded Spiral, a group convened “to examine the plight of the Black American artist” in response to labor leader A. Phillip Randolph’s call for wide cultural participation, including that of visual artists, in the Civil Rights movement. 24 Already established as a painter, Bearden created his first collages for Spiral’s inaugural show by juxtaposing enlarged photographic fragments to convey scenes of African American life. As the writer Ralph Ellison put it, Bearden’s collages convey the “sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and Surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history.” 25

The Return of Odysseus is part of a series based on Homer’s epic, a subject to which the artist, long interested in myth, was particularly attracted. Here Bearden drew from multiple sources, mixing art-historical references from widely separated cultures to suggest the universality of the story. The collage’s composition is based on Renaissance painter Pintoricchio’s last surviving fresco, The Return of Ulysses (c. 1508/1509; London, National Gallery), but is transformed by Bearden’s manipulations. By the time of his Odysseus collages, Bearden had moved away from using photographic reproductions. Instead, he worked with colored paper in a mode suggesting Henri Matisse’s late paper cutouts. Bearden also reconceived Pintoricchio’s Caucasian figures as black ones, basing their heads on the sculptural traditions of the African kingdom of Benin. As Bearden put it, “I do not burden myself with the need for complete abstraction or absolute formal purity but I do want my language to be strict and classical, in the manner of the great Benin heads. . . .” 26 The artist’s quotation of various styles extends the medium of collage, which fuses disparate materials into a whole. (MF)