Outchorus

Jazz is a frequent subject of Romare Bearden’s prints and collages. In 1920, when Bearden was eleven, his family relocated to New York from North Carolina at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. He became immersed in the movement through his parents’ friendships with musicians, artists, and writers, including Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes. Bearden also looked to Dutch painters—Pieter Bruegel, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, and others—because of their sensitive depictions of the middle and lower classes. As Bearden put it, “I am a man concerned with truth, not flattery, who shares a dual culture that is unwilling to deny the Harlem where I grew up or the Haarlem of the Dutch masters...” Outchorus marries these divergent influences, depicting one of the unifying tentpoles of culture in a medium intended for wide distribution. To make this print, Bearden created hand-colored underlays on Mylar, achieving washes of color by experimenting freely as one might in live jazz. A shaded, or “continuous tone” photographic print was then superimposed on top, adding a matrix of dots.