Romare Bearden (1911-88) was born in Mecklenburg County, N.C., but he came of age in Harlem. His life, like his art – a mixture of Southern mysticism and urban congestion, high and low culture, establishment and avant-garde – is a quintessential American collage, a collage that puts black culture at the forefront of Modernist art and aims to reclaim for African-Americans the African art that inspired Modernism.

In New York Bearden and his parents were at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, a circle that included Fats Waller, Duke Elllington, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois, and Ralph Ellison. Bearden studied at Boston University, New York University, and with George Grosz at the Art Student’s League. Throughout his life he was recognized as an artistic voice for black Americans. Honored with numerous doctorates and commissions, in 1987 he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts.

Currently a citywide Homecoming Celebration – including numerous gallery and museum shows (a retrospective at the Whitney and ancillary shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the Met), jazz concerts, symposiums, and dance performances – is being held in his honor. The Whitney show includes a biographical film, narrated by Morgan Freeman and Danny Glover. Lincoln Center is hosting “Jazz: The Big Picture.” Featuring Winton Marsalis, it shows how jazz and art come together in the works of Bearden and Pollock. Toni Morrison is the keynote speaker at a Columbia University symposium “Romare Bearden’s World.”

It must be asked: Is Bearden worth all this fuss? Certainly his work is better and deserves more attention than that of a one-note collage artist such as Kara Walker, who has been given a platform because her subject, even though she exploits it, is that of slavery. But the space for the exhibition of art to large audiences, even in New York, is limited; every venue given over to an artist is one taken away from someone else. Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000), one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, has never been given a solo show in an American museum, and no New York museum has any of her works in their collections. Her spectacular retrospective, currently at the Scandinavia House. should be at the Whitney or at MoMA.

Bearden’s early work – abstractions, copies of Old Master religious scenes, attempts at Cubist figuration, and Social Realist interiors – are too derivatibe for him to have made his mark. The Constructivist-inspired collages, which he began in the 1960s, put him on the map. In them, Bearden can occasionally evoke the syncopated rhythm of the city in a section of a collage, as in “The Street” or “Departure from Planet Earth” (both 1975). With scissors he can distill the shape and movement of a sailboat on water or a bird in flight, as in “Berkeley – The City and Its People” (1973). Some of his landscapes from the 1980s, particularly “Mecklenburg Autumn: October – Toward Paw’s Creek” (1983), “In a Green Shade (Hommage [sic] to Marvell)” (1984), and “Summer” (Maudell Sleet’s July Garden)” (1985), verge on being lush and lyrical. But Bearden treated picture making primarily as an assemblage of recognizable images rather than of forms. His collages, chaotic and frenetic, are comprised of small and large moves that never really add up to a coherent structure.

Collage – as Matisse, Schwitters, Picasso, Braque, the Russian Contructivists, and Joseph Cornell, some of its best practitioners, understood – is essentially drawing with scissors. Bearden could not draw very well. An illustrator rather than a poet, he never fully embraced collage as a transformational media, one in which ephemera relinquishes, as it retains, its origins in detritus, and becomes something magical and entirely new.

Bearden’s illustrative, compartmentalized images – fragmented mixtures of magazine photos, flat and modeled color, fabric, and Old Master paintings – are punctuated with black hands and faces. The collages merge boogie-woogie-filled brothels, religious and mythical stories, migrant farmers, jazz and folk musicians, African art, and Harlem streets into kaleidoscopic pictures about being black in America.

But Bearden, inspired equally by improvisational jazz music (essentially an abstract medium) and the desire to tell the stories of his life in narrative form, never successively merged the two into a coherent form. Bearden’s collages may be about boogie-woogie music but never in his work do we feel boogie-woogie’s intertwining of upper and lower registers or its quickening rhythm. For that we have to go to a Dutch artist, Mondrian.

Bearden’s work speaks to a specific community of people who feel what he feels and who have experienced what he has experienced, because it references them and their lives in ways that no visual American art has done before or since. Never before has a single artist’s oeuvre illustrated so many African-American faces. The singularity of Bearden’s art, like that of Jacob Lawrence’s, is inextricably linked to his being black and portraying the lives of contemporary black Americans and culture. What Bearden’s work does not do, even when his subject is Homer’s Odyssey or the Annunciation, is to live up to the grandiose claims being made for it, especially the claims that it is a truly original art and that it achieves universal appeal.

Man of the Hour

Several museums and galleries in the city are holding Romare Bearden exhibitions to coincide with the large retrospective currently at the Whitney. More exhibitions, events for children, and even dance and music performances can be found at www.beardenfoundation.org. “The Art of Romare Bearden” at the Whitney Museum of American Art until January 9, 2005 (945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, 212-570-3600). “Romare Bearden at the Met” until March 6 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).

Works from the museum’s collection.

“Romare Bearden: Major Collages and Works on Paper” at ACA Galleries until December 11 (529 W. 20th Street, 212-206-8080). “Romare Bearden: The Last Years, Photographs by Frank Stewart” at June Kelly Gallery until November 9 (591 Broadway, 212-226-1660). Photographs of Bearden working and with family. “Visions of and by Romare Bearden”at Peg Alston Fine Arts Inc. until October 31 (407 Central Park West, 212-663-8333). Collages by Bearden and photographs of the artist.