ROMARE BEARDEN
A Black Odyssey, (116 pages) with an essay by Robert G. O'Meally, $45

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Romare Bearden¹s brilliant collages of Homer¹s Odyssey, first exhibited in 1977 and now brought together in the exhibition and catalogue Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, may strike even the most avid Bearden-lovers as an odd departure from his best-known work: the edgy urban and jazz scenes that Albert Murray has called ³the visual equivalent of the blues.² Why would this great chronicler of black life in America, this Ellington of twentieth-century painters, suddenly turn from contemporary Harlem to classical Homer? This magnificently illustrated book shows that Bearden saw Harlem in Homer¹s Odyssey, and Odysseus in Harlem. Behind the faces of Homer¹s Greek characters ‹in the figures of Odysseus, Penelope, Poseidon, Nausicaa‹Bearden detected a blues-like heroism that would enable the black American¹s ongoing search for home. This is the pressing quest which‹considering his scores of interiors and exteriors, country and city life, and depictions of family love‹is the central theme of all Bearden¹s art. Here then is a great twentieth century artist¹s bold search for home through the world according to Homer‹here is Bearden¹s Black Odyssey. The text by Robert G. O'Meally examines all these collages and their sometimes startling reformulations of the Homeric original.