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All That Jazz


Tenor Sermon, from the "Jazz has shown me the ways of achieving artistic structures that are personal to me; but it also provides me continuing finger-snapping, head-shaking enjoyment of this unique, wonderful music."–Romare Bearden

Head out to Penn Valley Park in Kansas City for the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival from July 19th to 21st! Romare Bearden's work Tenor Sermon from "The Jazz Series" highlights the festivities.

Bearden improvised within his paintings, similar to the way jazz musicians improvise with sound. In one critic's opinion, "There are visual intervals and pauses, or silences, the former created by the various rectangular segments within a painting. White, sometimes gray, shapes create a place for the eye to rest before engaging again in the visual syncopation.… A visual rhythm is achieved not only by the use of collage segments, but by the placement of figures and objects, causing the eye to leap-frog across the picture plane and the mind to perceive movement forward and backward in space."

Source: Patton, Sharon F. Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940–1987. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Oxford University Press, 1991).

Pictured: Romare Bearden, 1912–1988, Tenor Sermon, from the "Jazz Series", 1979, color lithograph on paper, 24 3/4 x 34 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. Eugene Ivan Schuster.