The paintings of Romare Bearden (1914-1988) represent a

The paintings of Romare Bearden (1914-1988) represent a double truimph. At the same time that Bearden's work reflects a lifelong commitment to perfecting the innovative painting techniques he pioneered, it also reveals an artist engaged in a search for ways to explore the varieties of African-American experience.

By presenting secne, character and atmosphere using a unique layered and fragmented style that combines elements of painting with elements of collage, Bearden suggested some of the ways in which commonplace subjects could be forced to undergo a metamorphosis when filtered through the techniques available to the resourceful artist. Bearden knew that regardless of individual painters' personal histories, tastes, or points of view, they must pay their craft the respect of approaching through an acute awareness of the resources and limitations of the form to which they have dedicated their creative energies.

But how did Bearden, so passionately dedicated to solving the more advanced problems of his painting technique, also succeed so well at portraying the realities of African-American life? During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Bearden painted scenes of hardships of the period; the work was powerful, the scenes grim and brooding. Through his depiction of the unemployed in New York's Harlem he was able to move beyond the usual "protest painting" of the period to reveal instances of individual human suffering. His human figures, placed in abstract yet mysteriously familiar urban settings, managed to express the complex social reality lying beyond the borders of the canvas without compromising their integrity as elements in an artistic composition. Another important element of Bearden's compositions was his use of muted colors, such as dark blues and purples, to suggest moods of melancholy or despair. While functioning as part of the overall design, these colors also served as symbols of the psychological efects of debilitating social processes.

During the same period, he also painted happier scenes - depictions of religous ceremony, musical performance, and family life - and instilled them with the same vividness that he applied to his scenes of suffering. Bearden sought in his work to reveal in all its fullness a world long hidden by the cliches of sociology and rendered cloudy by the simplifications of journalism and documentary photography. Where any number of painters have tried to project the "prose" of Harlem, bearden concentrated on releasing its poetry - its family rituals and its ceremonies of affirmation and celebration. His work insists that we truly see the African-American experience in depth, using the fresh light of his creative vision. Through an act of artistic will, he created strange visual harmonies out of the mosaic of the African-American experience, and in doing so reflected the multiple rhythms, textures, and mysteries of life.




Here is the question:

According to the passage, human figures in Bearden's paintings do all the following EXCEPT:

a) serve as particular examples of human hardship
b) suggest circumstances outside the explicit subject of the paintings
c) function as aspects of an artistic composition
d) symbolize emotions or psychological states
e) inhabit abstract but recogniable physical settings.

Do you guys go off of memory based on what you read in the passage? Or do you verify every AC to ensure that its referred to in the passage? What if information about "human figures" is "dispersed" across the entire passage? Say about 75% of the passage talks about it.

How do you tackle these type of questions?[/b]