In this series of prints, the artist creates a bridge between classical mythology and African American culture.  The subjects, he argues, are timeless and point to the universality of the human condition.  It is the story of a traveler’s search for a way home.  Bearden approached this theme of The Odyssey in various mediums in the 1970s.  In Homer’s tale, Odysseus is no longer seeking victory in battle but a reunion with family and a homecoming.  Bearden relates the story to a historical timeline in African American history: the Middle Passage in the 17th-18th centuries, the survival of slavery until Emancipation at the end of the Civil War, the Great Migration, the struggles of Jim Crow, and finally, restoration from exile to a place of dignity.  

Bearden followed up his first Homeric series, The Iliad (1948), with a series of collages exhibited at Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York’s Upper East Side in 1977.  This series was known as the Odysseus series.  The exhibition met such tremendous success that he then made watercolors and prints of the subject.

Bearden visually addressed the series of ill-fated events that challenged Odysseus and his crew along their journey.  These included a combination of direct confrontations and seductions.  There were 6 screenprints produced in this series:  The Burning of Troy, Circe Turns a Companion of Odysseus into Swine, Cattle of the Sun God, Siren’s Song, Odysseus Leaves Nausicaa, and Home to Ithaca.  The series of collages and watercolors he initially produced in this series included other titles (and events), such as Realm of Shades, Scylla and Charybdis, The Sea Nymph, Poseidon, and others.

In The Burning of Troy, the artist approaches several themes:  war is hell, but as he once told the author Robert G. O’Meally, "In the midst of death, life goes on.”   The mythological Trojan War, pitting the Trojans against the Greeks for 10 years, ends with Odysseus’s employment of the Trojan horse and the burning of the city.  Executed in the late 1970s, after years of riot and rebellion and African Americans struggling in American cities for civil rights, the country found itself grappling with issues unresolved since the Civil War.  Odysseus rises from the ashes to tell the tale, his very survival symbolizing victory. Odysseus was characterized as a trickster, and his unorthodox strategies led to his success.  Similarly, African American slaves relied on cunning and wit rather than direct confrontation to win “battles” with the people enslaving them.

Odysseus' return to Ithaca, where he would reclaim his rightful position as king, met with many obstacles.  One of these was their arrival on the island of Circe, ruled by a witch-goddess of the same name.  Circe drugs Odysseus’ men, turning them into swine, but Odysseus himself was given an antidote by Hermes, which made him resistant to the spell.  

Bearden’s Circe loosely parallels the “conjur woman” of the rural Black southern communities.  An important component of the conjur woman’s repertoire of tricks and spells were love potions, and Circe was using her potions to seduce Odysseus.  Hermes advised Odysseus not to scorn Circe, but respect her advances with sincerity and she would in turn, free he and his men.  In time, this happened, and Odysseus and his men left Circe.

REF: Alexander, Andrew. Review of Romare Bearden captures universality at heart of Odyssey, at Carlos Museum, Review of Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey Arts ATL, https://www.artsatl.org/review-61/ Accessed 8 Feb. 2024.