Peter Malone reviews Romare Bearden: Abstraction recently on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase.

Malone writes: “Because Bearden’s career appears, even in the limited scope of this exhibition, a steady and consistent affair that holds to narrative and figurative concerns over many decades, it follows that any formal innovation he experimented with was always underscored by this broader vision. The key to understanding his abstraction, then, is to see it as an anomaly, yet executed with a consistent enthusiasm for the visual world and for social experience.”