Romare Bearden

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Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an African-American artist and author of a history of his people's art.

He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from NYU in 1935. He began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South.

Later, he worked to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front.

He returned to Paris in 1950 and studied Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne. Bearden's early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community.

After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s.

New York Times described Bearden as "the nation's foremost collagist" in his 1988 obituary.

Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the civil rights movement. Bearden was the author or coauthor of several books.

He also was a songwriter, known as co-writer of the jazz classic "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine, a former high school classmate at Peabody High School, and Dizzy Gillespie.

He had long supported young, emerging artists and he and his wife established the Bearden Foundation to continue this work, as well as to support young scholars.

In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Early life and education

Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bearden's family moved with him to New York City when he was a toddler, as part of the Great Migration. After enrolling in P.S. 5 in 1917, on 141 Street and Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, Bearden attended P.S. 139, followed by DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1927 he moved to East Liberty, Pittsburgh, with his grandparents, and then returned to New York City. The Bearden household soon became a meeting place for major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. His father, Howard Bearden, was a pianist. Romare's mother, Bessye Bearden, played an active role with the New York City Board of Education, and also served as founder and president of the Colored Women's Democratic League. She was also a New York correspondent for The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Bearden had Cherokee, Italian, and African ancestry. The Washington Post described him as "African American." Bearden's fair skin allowed him to cross boundaries that many other black people were restricted from.

In 1929, he graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh. He enrolled in Lincoln University, the nation's second oldest historically black college, founded in 1854. He later transferred to Boston University where he served as art director for Beanpot, Boston University's student humor magazine. Bearden continued his studies at New York University (NYU), where he started to focus more on his art and less on athletics, and became a lead cartoonist and art editor for The Medley, the monthly journal of the secretive Eucleian Society at NYU. Bearden studied art, education, science, and mathematics, graduating with a degree in science and education in 1935.

He continued his artistic study under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. During this period Bearden supported himself by working as a political cartoonist for African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, where he published a weekly cartoon from 1935 until 1937.

Early works

His early works suggest the importance of African Americans' unity and cooperation. For instance, The Visitation implies the importance of collaboration of black communities by depicting intimacy between two black women who are holding hands. Bearden's vernacular realism represented in the work makes The Visitation noteworthy; he describes two figures in The Visitation somewhat realistically but does not fully follow pure realism, and distorts and exaggerates some parts of their bodies to "convey an experiential feeling or subjective disposition." Bearden said, "the Negro artists [...] must not be content with merely recording a scene as a machine. He must enter wholeheartedly into the situation he wishes to convey."

In 1942, Bearden produced Factory Workers (gouache on casein on brown kraft paper mounted on board), which was commissioned by Forbes magazine to accompany an article titled The Negro's War. The article "examined the social and financial costs of racial discrimination during wartime and advocated for full integration of the American workplace." Factory Workers and its companion piece Folk Musicians serve as prime examples of the influence that Mexican muralists played in Bearden's early work.

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Semi-professional baseball career

Bearden played baseball in bare lots in his neighborhood as a child. He loved sports, throwing discus for his high school track team, and trying to play football. Since his mother became the Chicago Defender's New York editor, he did some writing for the paper, including some articles about baseball. However, when Bearden migrated from Lincoln University to Boston University (1931-2) he was the start of the school football team (1931-2) and then began pitching, first for the freshman team and later for the school's varsity baseball team. He was given a certificate of merit for his pitching at BU, which he adored in subsequent homes throughout his life.

He competed for the Boston Tigers, a semi-professional, all Black team headquartered in Roxbury, Massachusetts, while attending Boston University. During the BU baseball off-season, he tended to play with them, and he had the opportunity to play with both legendary Negro League and white baseball teams. For example, he pitched against Satchel Paige while playing for the Pittsburgh Crawfords for a summer and appeared in exhibition games against teams including the House of David and the Kansas City Monarchs. When Mickey Cochrane of the Philadelphia Athletics brought a group of teammates to play against BU, the Bearden gave up just one hit—impressive Athletics owner Connie Mack. Bearden was a member of the Athletics fifteen years before Jackie Robinson became the first Black player to play in major league baseball. According to various reports, Mack thought Bearden was white or told Bearden that he would have to pass for white. Bearden decided not to play for the Athletics World Series in 1929 and 1930, and 1931, the American League pennant, if you like, and decided not to keep his identity and did not want to avoid playing for the Athletics. After two summers with the Boston Tigers, Bearden rethink the dedication he was giving to baseball and instead concentrated on his art.

Career as an artist

Bearden grew as an artist by investigating his personal life. His early paintings were often depicting scenes in the American South, and his style was heavily inspired by Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Bearden began working with the New York City Department of Social Services' Harlem office in 1935. Bearden began his career as an artist by serving as a case worker, later on to supplement his income. Bearden was a member of the United States Army from 1942 to 1945, many in Europe, during World War II.

Bearden began serving in the army and joined the Samuel Kootz Gallery, a commercial gallery in New York that specialized in avant-garde art. "An expressionistic, linear, semi-abstract style" was his painting at the time. He returned to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy with Gaston Bachelard and art history at the Sorbonne, under the G.I's auspices. Bill is the federal version of the Bill. Bearden toured Europe, seeing Picasso and other artists.

He began making major improvements in his art, creating abstract interpretations of what he identifies as human, specifically scenes from Passion of Jesus. He had evolved from Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York Times, to what became known as his stylistic approach, which was part of avant-garde American art's postwar goals. His works were on display at the Samuel M. Kootz gallery until it was decided that they were not abstract enough.

During Bearden's triumph in the gallery, he created Golgotha, a painting from his series of the Passion of Jesus (see Figure 1). Golgotha is a simplified representation of the Crucifixion. The viewer is led to the middle of the picture first, where Bearden has rendered Christ's body. Body parts are turned into abstract geometric shapes, but the body parts are also too realistic to be abstract; this work has a hint of early Cubism. The body is in a central position and is sharply contrasting with the highlighted crowds. The crowds of people are on both left and right, and are encapsulated in massive spheres of bright purple and indigo. The painting's background is portrayed in lighter jewel tones smears of linear black ink. Bearden used these colors and comparisons not only for their time but also for their meanings.

Bearden wanted to investigate the crowds' emotions and behavior around the Crucifixion. In an attempt to convey universal human values and reactions, he worked really hard to "depict myths." Christ's life, death, and resurrection, according to Bearden, were the greatest representations of man's humanism, due in part to the belief that he was passed on through other males. It's why Bearden first focuses on Christ's body to represent the myth's belief, then parades the crowd to show how the message is spread to men.

Bearden was focusing on the spiritual goal. He wanted to demonstrate humanism and thought that could not be seen by the eye, but "must not be digested by the brain." This is in accordance with his years, during which other well-known artists produced abstract representations of historical events, including Robert Motherwell's commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, Jackson Pollock's investigation into Northwest Coast Indian art, Mark Rothko's and Barnett Newman's interpretations of Biblical stories, etc. After feeling he didn't see it during the war, Bearden portrayed humanity through abstract expressionism. Bearden's work was less abstract than those other artists, and Sam Kootz' gallery stopped showing him.

Bearden stepped back to music, co-writing "Sea Breeze," which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie. It's also considered a jazz masterpiece.

Bearden married Nanette Rohan, a 27-year-old dancer from Staten Island, New York, in 1954, at the age of 42. She later became a writer and critic. The couple later established the Bearden Foundation to support young artists.

Bearden's work in the late 1950s became more abstract. To get muted, obscure effects, he used layers of oil paint. Bearden began studying with a Chinese calligraph, who credited with his introduction to new techniques of space and composition that he didn't use in painting in 1956. He spent considerable time researching famous European paintings that he admired, including those of Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Rembrandt. In 1960, he began showing again. On the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, he and his wife established a second home around this time. Bearden joined the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York City in 1961, which would be his representative for the remainder of his career.

Bearden, a founding member of The Spiral in Harlem, began "for the purpose of investigating the Negro artist's role in the present civil rights movement" and "as a discussion group to address common aesthetic problems." On July 5, 1963, Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Norman Lewis, James Yeargans, Felrath Hines, Richard Mayhew, and William Pritchard attended the first meeting. Woodruff was responsible for creating the organization The Spiral, implying that the Archimedean spiral rises as a symbol of change. Merton Simpson, Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon, Alvin Hollingsworth, Calvin Douglas, William Majors, and Earl Miller were among the group's members over the years. The group tended to be from Abstract Expressionists to social protest painters.

Bearden's collage career began in 1963 or 1964. He first combined images cut from magazines and colored paper, which he would later alter with the use of sandpaper, bleach, graphite, or paint. Bearden enlarged these collages by the photostat process. Bearden was invited to do a solo exhibition at the Corbett and Ekstrom Gallery in Washington, D.C., building on the momentum from a good show of his photostat pieces at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in 1964. His public image was raised as a result. Bearden's collage skills evolved over the years, and in later pieces he'll use blown-up photostat photographic images, silk-screens, colored paper, and billboard pieces to make large collages on canvas and fiberboard.

The Museum of Modern Art in Berkeley, California, held a retrospective exhibition of Bearden's work in 1971, which followed the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California. Bearden was hired by the City of Berkeley to design a mural for the City Council chambers. The sixteen-foot-wide mural, which included many visual elements of the city in collage style, was installed in late 1973 and received glowing feedback. In 2003, it was taken down and loaned to the National Gallery of Art Bearden, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Following that tour, it has been in storage while the City Hall building awaiting a seismic retrofit, and the city council has been meeting elsewhere. A portion of the mural inspired the city's new logo.

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Awards

• American Academy of Arts and Letters Painting Award, 1966
• National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1966
• Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1970
• Ford Foundation Fellowship, 1973
• Medal of the State of North Carolina, 1976
• Frederick Douglas Medal, New York Urban League, 1978
• James Weldon Johnson Award, Atlanta Chapter of NAACP, 1978