Romare Bearden

• Born: September 2, 1911
• Birthplace: Charlotte, North Carolina
• Died: March 12, 1988
• Place of death: New York, New York

Artist

One of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century, Bearden was best known for his colorful and complex collages depicting African American culture. He produced more than two thousand works and also was a gifted writer, book and magazine illustrator, set designer, and songwriter.

Areas of achievement: Art and photography; Civil rights

Early Life

On September 2, 1911, Fred Romare Howard Bearden(ROH-mah-ree BEER-dehn) was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was the only child of Richard Howard Bearden, a health department inspector, and his wife, Bessye Johnson, a journalist and political activist. Although both parents were middle-class college graduates, they became part of the Great Migration, in which more than four million African Americans left the South. In 1914, the family moved to New York City, and in 1917 Bearden enrolled in a Harlem public school.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Harlem Renaissance helped establish a new cultural identity for the black community. The young Bearden was at the center of this intellectual, literary, and artistic creativity. The Bearden home hosted meetings of artists and intellectuals, including writer Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas, and musicians Duke Ellington and Thomas “Fats” Waller. Bearden’s mother, the founder and president of the the Colored Women’s Democratic League, was the first black woman to serve on New York City’s Board of Education and an editor for The Chicago Defender, a regional African American newspaper.

In 1925, Bearden entered DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1927, he went to live with his grandparents in Pittsburgh and entered Peabody High School. Bearden won design awards for posters about World War I and the Pittsburgh clean-up campaign.

In 1929, Bearden enrolled in Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, but transferred the next year to Boston University, where he studied art. In 1932, he transferred to New York University, where he was the art director of The Medley, a school journal. He studied art, drew political cartoons, and received a bachelor of science degree in 1935.

Life’s Work

After college, Bearden became a full-time caseworker with the New York City Department of Social Services. In his free time, he painted. For several years, he studied with the German artist George Grosz in night classes at the Art Students League. From 1935 to 1937, he drew editorial cartoons for The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper.

In May, 1940, Bearden had his first solo exhibition at Studio 306, an informal collective of writers, visual artists, musicians, and dancers. By 1942, Bearden had developed what became his lifelong focus on balancing traditional representation with abstraction, especially cubism, rooted in African art. He served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, and during that time, his works were shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

In 1945, Bearden had his first New York exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased He Is Arisen. Literary, religious, and mythological themes were central in his work during the 1940’s, and he was influenced by the work of French religious painter Georges Rouault. In 1946, he returned to social work but continued to exhibit extensively, often with abstract expressionists such as Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell.

In 1950, Bearden traveled to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. He met many European artists, including Pablo Picasso. However, as he searched for a new artistic direction, he gave up painting and became a songwriter. From 1951 to 1954, Bearden wrote more than twenty songs, including the jazz classic “Sea Breeze” recorded by Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Eckstine.

Bearden married dancer Nanette Rohan in 1954. He began painting again by copying Western artists, such as Henri Matisse, Rembrandt, and Picasso. He also studied Chinese landscape painting and Zen Buddhism. His book The Painter’s Mind (1969), cowritten with Carl Holty, conveyed his broad knowledge of art theory and history.

In the early 1960’s, Bearden, inspired by assemblage art and Matisse’s cutouts, began to create collages, combining paint, graphite, ink, and layers of paper. In 1964, Bearden introduced his Projection series: small collages and photomontages that had been enlarged to cinematic and mural scale by the photostatic process.

Bearden developed a public aesthetic during the social turbulence of the 1960’s. He became active in the Civil Rights movement and helped establish the activist artists’ group Spiral in 1963. A leader in the new movement to establish alternative exhibition spaces outside mainstream art, Bearden helped found the Studio Museum in Harlem, Cinque Gallery, and the Storefront Museum.

By the late 1960’s, Bearden was considered the foremost collage artist in the United States. His trademark collages of colored papers and photographs blended narrative and abstraction. Bearden used rhythmic lines, spontaneity, and rich textures to express personal memories and the archetypal themes of music, ritual, and family. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, he exhibited extensively and received numerous awards, including seven honorary doctorates, election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972, and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. A John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1970 funded A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (1993), cowritten with Harry Henderson.

After battling bone cancer for more than a year, Bearden died on March 12, 1988. Posthumous retrospective exhibitions were organized in 1991 by the Studio Museum in Harlem and in 2003 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 1990, the Romare Bearden Foundation was created to preserve his legacy and to support emerging African American scholars and artists. Bearden’s collage Family (1988) was used for posters promoting the 2000 Census. In 2003, his children’s book, Li’l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, and Claire Hatfield’s Me and Uncle Romie: A Story Inspired by the Life and Art of Romare Bearden were published.

Significance

Bearden was one of the most original, significant, and prolific artists of the twentieth century. Although his celebrated collages explored African American themes, they also expressed universal values and diverse artistic traditions. He was a respected social activist, historian, musician, political cartoonist, and writer. Bearden was active in minority and arts advocacy groups. He had a major impact on generations of artists and writers, such as playwright August Wilson, whose Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988) and The Piano Lesson (1990) were directly influenced by Bearden.

Bibliography

Bearden, Romare, et al. Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem and Oxford University Press, 1991. Catalog for a retrospective traveling exhibition (1991-1993). Includes essays, bibliography, index, and twenty-four pages of color plates.

Bearden, Romare, and Mary Lee Corlett. From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden. Petaluma, Calif.: Pomegranate, 2009. Catalog for a traveling exhibition (2009-2012) sponsored by the Romare Bearden Foundation. Includes essays, bibliography, index, and more than seventy-five color plates.

Bearden, Romare, and Carl Holty. The Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting. New York: Crown, 1969. Bearden discusses painting techniques, composition, spatial relationships, and perspective. Illustrated. Index.

Fine, Ruth E. The Art of Romare Bearden. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003. An oversize volume published for a traveling retrospective exhibition that began in September 2003. Includes essays, biography, bibliography, index, and black-and-white and color illustrations.

Price, Sally. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Exploration of Bearden’s three Caribbean series of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Illustrated, bibliography.