Romare Bearden’s Rarely Seen Abstract Side

Critic’s Notebook Although famous for figurative works, the American modernist had a little-known foray into abstract painting that included some of his best work. An unfamiliar side of the work of the great American modernist Romare Bearden is the subject of an exceptional exhibition on view (by appointment) and online at DC Moore Gallery: the improvisational abstract paintings he made from 1958 to around 1962. Bearden (1911-88) is best known for his indelible figurative collage depictions of African-American life in all its quotidian richness, strength and struggle. These efforts, arguably his greatest, even took some artistic revenge.

Made of fragments of cutup magazine images, their angular figures and faces in particular pushed Cubism back toward its primary source, African sculpture. Bearden developed his new collages in the early 1960s and unveiled them at the New York gallery Cordier & Ekstrom in solo shows in 1964 and 1967. They were almost instantly acclaimed. They were both formally innovative and fraught with the signal event of their era: the civil rights movement.

These magnificent collages preoccupied Bearden for the rest of his life and have tended to overshadow the rest of his multifaceted career. This point is made by a single Bearden work: the powerful but little-known “The Visitation” (1941), acquired in 2014 by the Museum of Modern Art, and currently on view. (MoMA also has a gorgeous abstract Bearden, “The Silent Valley of the Sunrise,” from 1959, acquired in 1960 but not on view. ) “The Visitation” — a gouache that has the sturdy presence of an oil painting — portrays Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, as black women of undeniable gravitas.

Its distinctive blend of social realism, biblical storytelling, Renaissance monumentality and African art reflects Bearden’s broad erudition and sophistication. Bearden’s far more obscure abstractions at DC Moore have tended to be given short shrift in his biographies and retrospectives. The 19 canvases here formed the bulk of an overdue museum survey, “Romare Bearden Abstraction” organized in late 2017 at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Harrison, N. Y.

, by its director, Tracy Fitzpatrick. These paintings should startle. They are elegant, gritty works, alive with spontaneous splashes, pours and rivulets of paint, and they effortlessly claim a place in the history of American postwar abstraction, stain painting division. With their complex textures and elemental suggestions of water and rock, weathering and randomness, they bring a deeper emotional resonance to Color Field painting.