Although feminism was not a part of Bearden’s lexicon, he implicitly understood that this new/old image of his had to reside in the most appropriate personage: a figure recognizable as being the fitting vessel and vehicle for these changes to the standard racial script. And like Ralph Ellison’s largely silent, but all seeing/all knowing, apocryphal black folk critic, Bearden’s catalyst would also have to be an agency-filled representative of olde. That such an entity would ultimately be a woman meant that she was drawn from Bearden’s deep, deep memory reservoir of the women he knew or had known and considered elemental, powerful, and transforming in his life. His great grandmother Rosa, grandmother Cattie, mother Bessye, and his wife Nanette were all certainly forces of nature with which to contend, but the woman whom he repeatedly spoke of as his personal fomenter to rethinking his art was Ida, a prostitute-turn-cleaning-lady that Bearden met in 1940. After being rebuffed by Bearden following her suggestion that he paint her, Ida’s retort (which Bearden paraphrased in subsequent interviews) is telling. “‘I know what I look like,’ she said. ‘But when you can look and find what’s beautiful in me, then you’re going to be able to do something on that paper of yours.’ That always sort of stuck with me,” Bearden acknowledged. Placing this statement with Bearden’s Conjur Woman imagery drops Bearden’s (and Ida’s) words in a bubbling cauldron of ideas and possibilities: rethinking commonplace (and often racist) Western notions of beauty, the juxtaposition of desire and representation, revelations and self-discoveries as advanced from the social margins, and returning to one’s originary (female) roots as a way out of the artistic routine and into a new, cultural rebirth, among other thoughts. It is precisely the Conjur Woman’s corporeal detachment from the conventional male gaze (whose alternative was deftly articulated to Bearden by Ida) that empowers her and shifts her visual allure to the natural world and, on the cultural front, to the African diasporic principles of art-as-healing, art-as-metamorphosis, and art-as-spiritual-renewal. And Bearden’s methods for introducing this figure in his art – by distilling Cubist and Dadaist fracture through the deconstructive aesthetics of jazz composition and African American folk collage/assemblage – matched this new/old female subject perfectly.
Conjuring Bearden. With Margaret Ellen Di Giulio, Alicia Garcia, Victoria Trout, & Christine Wang. Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2006.
