A magic moment can come when you look at a really good piece of art. The work itself becomes a kind of transmission device and what you have before you is not just colors and shapes but the artist himself.

It happened when I stood before "Madeleine Jones' Wonderful Garden," a collage painting by Romare Bearden in the Mint Museum Uptown's uplifting exhibit honoring the most accomplished artist Charlotte has produced.

A woman holding a child stands in a doorway. Before her blooms a sumptuous garden, a riot of plants and flowers including a tiger lily like those Bearden's great-grandmother grew in the yard of the house on South Graham Street where he was born on Sept. 2, 1911.

From a pink sun in the upper right corner I could feel the heat. From the greenery came a cool breeze. More than that, I felt Bearden's presence: his tactile sense, his daring in picture making, his love of memory, imagination and making art. Goose bumps flashing up my arms, I mouthed the response such art demands: "Wow."

"Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections" is a major retrospective, including 99 works spread over 50 years gathered from collectors and museums all over the country and from the Mint's own holdings. It offers a never-before-examined take on this African-American master: his love of and engagement with the region of his birth.

There's more in Charlotte's centennial celebration; for instance, three excellent shows at the Gantt Center complementing the Mint show.

These and other events are a welcome homecoming for an artist who liked to say he left Charlotte only physically, that his imagination roosted here.

A breakthrough

Presented roughly chronologically and beautifully installed, the Mint show opens with paintings from the 1940s, an instructive beginning.

Done in the Social Realist style of the 1930s when artists were concerned with social issues, these works reveal the seeds of what Bearden is best known for, his collage paintings.

"Cotton Workers" is evidence of his interest in everyday African-American lives. So too "Untitled (Harvesting Tobacco)," a depiction of a woman holding green tobacco leaves.

These early paintings also show techniques from Cubism and other modernist movements that Bearden employed in his collages: the flatness of the picture plane, blocks of color that create space and distortions in scale.

After years of study and exploration, Bearden made a breakthrough in the early '60s when he discovered collage, pasting on board snips clipped from magazines and adding bits of colored paper and his own painting. "Train Whistle Blues No. 1" brims with a newfound power and lyricism as the artist grabs hold of his medium.

Bearden left Charlotte with his family at about age 4, although he made return visits into his teens. What he saw early on stayed with him, especially the trains that chugged across the city.

They appear repeatedly, symbols of movement particularly for African-Americans who climbed aboard them to leave the South. Other bits of symbolism, from the Bible and classical times, fill his work.

As curator Carla Hanzal pointed out to me, the table in "Fish Fry" includes not just fish (a Christian symbol), but the bread and wine of Communion, something the artist, baptized at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, which stood near Bank of America Stadium, well knew.

The women in his art

Photographs of the Bearden family in the galleries reveal another aspect of the artist: He was an adored only child fussed over by his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

Little wonder, then, that women appear as central to the African-American experience: women as protectors, earth goddesses, "conjur" (his spelling) women and messengers.

Bearden also had a sensuous side.

In "Evening off Shelby Road," he depicts an older woman sitting in a chair while a younger woman bathes in a washtub. He loved reimagining the Bible story of Susanna, the young woman taking her bath nude and spied on by the elders.

Bearden knew the artist was a voyeur. And that he could make the viewer one, too.

To see the sensuous side given free rein, go to Jerald Melberg Gallery. Among several reclining nudes in "An Artist Remembers His Birthplace" is "Mecklenburg County: The Daybreak Express," with a rushing train in the background matched in the foreground by a horizontal nude.

A ferocious need

The artist who made such works was easygoing. Frank Stewart's black and white photographs at the Gantt Center offer an intimate look at Bearden - his warm smile, the weight fluctuations of a big man always dieting, the wide array of hats he used to shelter his bald head. He's pictured working in his studio, with his wife, Nanette, and with friends such as jazz great Dizzy Gillespie and fellow artist Jacob Lawrence.

Beneath his gentle exterior burned a ferocious need to find new ways to express his vision. Besides choosing works on Bearden's affection for the South, curator Hanzal looked to examine the wide range of techniques he used.

His way with collage evolved. He moved from clipping magazines to combining these and paper strips with his own painting. To enliven the surface, he began to draw, blot watercolor, add snips of cloth - even glitter.

As shown in "Conversation Piece," a depiction of two female figures in a room, he would not only add, but subtract - using sandpaper to soften color and contours to get the effect he wanted.

"New Orleans Joys: Storyville," a sporting house interior made with oil on paper, shows his fluid hand and wrist with a brush.

"Paper Trail," works on paper at the Gantt Center, broadens the view of Bearden on technique and subject matter. He had a home in the Caribbean, and the watercolors he did there are lush with reds, oranges and blues, the colors bleeding into each other.

Bearden's work seems spontaneous, the collages in particular. But always underneath is a strong sense of structure by an artist who loved mathematics and rigorous thinking.

This foundation permitted flights of fancy. In "Farmhouse Interior" at the Mint, Bearden had no problem including both the sun and the stars. His art is always grounded in the particular - a bucket, a broom, a guitar, a hat. As packed full as they are with imagery, his collages have an admirable clarity.

Universal vision

It is a truism that all art is autobiographical. That has been traditionally less true in the visual arts, something Bearden helped to change.

"Beyond Bearden" at the Gantt Center features artists influenced by the master, and they - Benny Andrews, Camille Billops, Radcliffe Bailey - extend his use of personal narrative. Michael Cummings' collage quilt "Cotton Picking Time, Mecklenburg County," with familiar motifs such as birds and trains, is an homage.

Bearden's tales in "Southern Recollections" give us a wider and deeper view of the South, nothing less than a fulfillment of his oft-stated ambition to depict in art the lives of African-Americans as he knew them.

Bearden, who died in New York in 1988 of a stroke, was born into a segregated city. Likely his college-educated parents found Charlotte limiting, so they left, boarding the outbound train with little Romy in hand. But Bearden was not an aggrieved artist.

Like any great artist, he sought the universal. "I try to find what is in me that is common to, or touches other men - this is harder to do and realize," he says in a quote at the Gantt Center.

So whoever you are, this art will grab you, tell you something you need to know, compel a reaction by making you - the viewer - a collaborator in the artist's ecstatic vision.

What we have here is nothing more than life itself.

How wonderful.

How grand.