Ben Haggard

A few weeks ago I found myself spending the morning at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I had gone specifically to see a Lucien Freud exhibit, but on my way I was lucky to encounter a rare exhibition of The Block, a mural-sized series of collages by Romare Bearden. The collage captures a specific block in Harlem, and the vibrant interior and exterior lives of the people there.

Since then I’ve done a little reading about Bearden. His parents were prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance and he grew up surrounded by artists, musicians and intellectuals. He studied under German Expressionist George Grosz and his work is characterized by a struggle to integrate 20th century investigations into non-representational abstraction, and the concreteness of African-American lived experience. Arguably Bearden’s late collages represent his greatest achievement as a visual artist.

I was struck by how powerfully Bearden’s abstractions render spirit. I woke up the next day and realized that I had encountered a modern expression of the Romanesque vision. Like the Romanesque sculptors, Bearden depicts a whole universe, made intelligible and coherent by a pervasive spiritual immanence. In both cases, the abstractions simplify and simultaneously reveal the distinctiveness of people, places, and situations. There is a narrative dimension, and an encyclopedic one. The universal and the particular reflect one another. The sacred and the profane are entangled, complementary, un-alienated.

What surprises me most about this insight is that I don’t experience Bearden’s work as having been influenced by Romanesque art. It’s more like seeing a deep current resurface. Bearden’s collages are Romanesque art.

My friend Craig DeForest recently told me about a little research project he did a few years ago, when The Gates was happening in Central Park in New York. He noticed that none of the articles that were appearing in the mainstream press said anything about what the work meant. So he resolved to find out, and found a first rate biography in the library. He excerpted key passages from the book and compiled them into several very interesting pages. To read his article, please click on the following link: http://www.benhaggardstudio.com/?page_id=794

This Friday, July 15, I’ll be exhibiting the FACES SANTA FE project for the first time in the plaza outside my studio at Second Street Studios in Santa Fe. The project is a work-in-progress. I’ve completed approximately 90 of the 300-400 paintings I’m aiming for, but it’s definitely enough to get a clear idea of how it works as an installation.

Joining me are fellow artists Martha Iwaski, who will be showing abstract landscapes from northern New Mexico, and Cloacas, a local Santa Fe folk/Americana band.

For more information, please visit http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=200912219956082.

Here are some new landscapes from a recent trip to Baden Baden, Germany.

Access to information about the Faces Berlin project can now be found at http://www.manfred-carpentier.de/galerie/archiv_20110211.html

A current catalog of images from the Faces Santa Fe project can be found on Facebook at “Faces Santa Fe.” Click on the “photos” section on the left hand side of the page to open up a menu of galleries.