So much twentieth- and twenty-first- century art has been shaped by the example of jazz music that we could call the long twentieth the jazz century, as one comprehensive international art exhibition has done. And in the dialogue between jazz and art, Romare Bearden may be the most influential artist: the dean of jazz painters. Bearden literally wrote jazz music, and for decades his art routinely depicted figures in the characteristic stances of jazz musicians, some of them specifically identifiable players and singers in well-known jazz spaces.
––Robert O’Meally

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Romare Bearden: Paris Blues/Jazz and Other Works, bringing to light the series known as Paris Blues, or Jazz, created in 1981. Exhibited here in a rare opportunity to view the series of 19 collages, Romare Bearden’s Paris Blues/Jazz makes a major statement on the relationships between visual art, jazz music, and urban spaces. In these works, Bearden translates the patterns and rhythms of jazz into visual compositions, the medium of collage paralleling its improvisational and collaborative nature.

The Paris Blues/Jazz series moves through Paris, New Orleans, and Harlem, mapping jazz onto city spaces. Depicting iconic jazz singers, musicians, and clubs, Bearden also looks to the city streets and infrastructure, as well as its inhabitants, that were vital sources of jazz music. These collages, which author Robert O’Meally calls “expressions of unruly Black cosmopolitanism,” celebrate spaces where Black people and Black culture could assert artistic and political freedom. Bearden lays claim to an array of sites and figures in his tour of jazz–– a staircase in Paris, a New Orleans brothel, a New York skyline, and, of course, the Harlem clubs where jazz was played.

The geography mapped out by Bearden, in the Paris Blues/Jazz series and elsewhere, suggests an alternate way of thinking about movement, a navigation of identity across borders. In Bearden’s work, influence moves in all directions, embracing multiplicity, quotation, blank space, and assemblage. In drawing out these relationships between cities, jazz, and visual art, he shows us that they are in fact inseparable, as O’Meally writes, Bearden is “seeking not merely to paint about jazz but to paint jazz.”

History of the Paris Blues/Jazz Series

In 1950, Romare Bearden moved to Paris for seven months, studying at La Sorbonne on the GI Bill and socializing with the many other artists, writers, and intellectuals who flocked to the city in the postwar years. The vivid stories he recounted of artistic and social freedoms (relative to the US) inspired his friend in New York, the photographer Sam Shaw, to adapt these experiences into a film. The basis for the screenplay was the 1957 novel Paris Blues written by Harold Flender, a friend of Shaw’s, which told the story of a jazz musician in Paris rather than a painter.

The movie Shaw envisioned about a Black artist living freely in Paris proved to be too radical for Hollywood, and what eventually was released in 1961, with Shaw hanging on as a producer, was a watered-down version of the original script. Paris Blues, starring Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Diahann Carroll, follows two jazz musicians falling into whirlwind romances, set to a dynamic score by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.