Bearden in Paris

In 1950, Romare Bearden moved to Paris for seven months, studying at La Sorbonne on the GI Bill and socializing with the many other artists, writers, and intellectuals who flocked to the city in the postwar years. The vivid stories he recounted of artistic and social freedoms (relative to the US) inspired his friend in New York, the photographer Sam Shaw, to adapt these experiences into a film. The basis for the screenplay was the 1957 novel Paris Blues written by Harold Flender, a friend of Shaw’s, which told the story of a jazz musician in Paris rather than a painter.

An Unfinished Collaboration

Twenty years later, the Paris Blues project was reignited by Romare Bearden, Sam Shaw, and the writer Albert Murray, who had been in Paris with Bearden in 1950. They planned to tell a story not of romantic trysts in Paris but a joyous tour of jazz, with protagonists Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. They would create an oversized book of Bearden’s collages to be published in France, with photographs by Shaw, many of which were taken during the shooting of the 1961 movie, and captions by Murray. The unfinished project became a tale of three cities rather than one, moving beyond Paris through New Orleans and Harlem to map a geography of jazz that roams across borders.