Romare Bearden

Best known for the vibrant collages he began making in the 1960s, Romare Bearden also created paintings, prints and photographs in the course of a prolific and inventive career. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, to middle-class African-American parents; during the Great Migration his family resettled in New York. Although Bearden lived in North Carolina only briefly as a child, he spent summers there with his extended family. African-American life both in urban settings and in the rural South offered him a rich source of subject matter. The Bearden family took an active role in the Harlem Renaissance, and their circle of friends included Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

In 1935 Bearden completed a degree at New York University, where he took many art courses. Already an accomplished cartoonist and illustrator, Bearden immediately began further study with former Dadaist George Grosz at the Art Students League. Later, after serving at domestic posts during World War Two, Bearden traveled to Paris with assistance of the G.I. Bill to study art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. Although he began his artistic career as a social realist, his time in Europe steered his work in a more abstract and improvisational direction. During this period, Bearden engaged in intense study of the art historical tradition, assimilating themes and, at times, compositional structures of past works.

From the late 1930s to 1967 Bearden held intermittent employment as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Services. His job gave him glimpses of the struggles of people, particularly New York Gypsies, to keep their culture alive amid the pressures of urban life. By the same token, Bearden was keenly aware that the rural, African-American culture of the South was disappearing, and he felt a strong pull toward documenting it in his work. With regard to this subject matter, Bearden wrote in 1969, “It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in terms of propaganda . . . [but] the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel. My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexity the life I know.” (1)

For Bearden, the medium of collage, which he adopted in the early 1960s, provided the means to this end. Each piece brings together a vast array of materials, patterns, and colors, synthesizing all into an elegant whole. Bearden’s intellectual frame of reference is similarly broad and encompasses everything from popular culture, to religion, to classical myth. In both design and spirit, his work celebrates the diversity of the human community. Bearden used the phrase “prevalence of ritual” to describe his view of continuity across generations and cultures, in which truths specific to the African-American experience find expression in their connection to universal themes and imagery.