This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Working in a modernist style, Romare Bearden, as a Black American, tried to express on canvas and collage the complexities and uniqueness of being a minority in American society. Many of his themes dealt with music. Another strong presence in many of Bearden's works is trains. Bearden felt that there was a commonality, or link between trains and their symbolic tie to life; he saw trains as communicating life's fluctuations and constant change. He also saw this in jazz, so in many of his works the viewer will see images of both trains and jazz.
Bearden's use of color was also unique. He was strongly affected by a trip he made to the Caribbean. Because he lived in such urban, "dirty" cities as New York, Bearden was overwhelmed by the rich, vivid, "clean" colors of the tropics. He soaked in these colors, and used them in his works to try and bring a little of that experience to his viewers back home in the city. Through all of Bearden's wide oeuvre, and all of his motivations for painting in a certain style, it all comes back to the same quote: "My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexities the life I know." Bearden succeeded in revealing those complexities, made possible by his knowledge of his own life experiences.
Bearden was highly praised critically, but this high praise was never matched by a high price for his work. Bearden never considered himself a black artist, either, although many wanted to pigeonhole him as such.
His tone was affectionate and celebratory, and subjects include many aspects of American life from that in New York City to Southern voodoo women that recalled experiences in his youth in rural North Carolina. During the 1960s he turned to collages dealing with the daily life of black people.
He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and spent his youth in Harlem of New York City, where his father was very active in the New York arts scene. Bearden remembered having artists and musicians in the family home all the time, a presence that carried over into his own adult lifestyle. When he began to live on his own, it was his apartment that became the gathering place for artists and musicians. Bearden became a huge jazz and blues fanatic through this lifelong exposure, and he constantly incorporated his love of music into his art.
In 1935, he graduated from New York University with a degree in mathematics, and the following year he studied with George Grosz at the Art Students League. Although he studied philosophy and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris, Bearden never had a formal education in art making, but this did not stop him from following his heart and pursuing something that he truly loved to do. From 1938, he was intermittently employed as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Service and also was a song writer with several published works.
Early in Bearden's art career he met Stuart Davis, another successful painter of the time. Davis was also strongly influenced by jazz, and he showed Bearden how to visualize relationships between painting and jazz, which may not initially seem to share many similarities.
Bearden, through associations with other artists such as Davis as well as his own self-study, developed a strong link between the two disciplines. For example, jazz and painting can be "hot" or "cool." Both require great order and integrity. Both have improvisation as a key ingredient in the creative process. In his painting, Bearden sought connections. And as in many great jazz works, Bearden refused to "close" his painting--he left the painting open to interpretation and manipulation by the viewer.
In 1974, he did a huge commissioned mural for Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, but it was rejected because it had bared female breasts and because it had Black American images but nothing that reflected the local Latino population. The mural sat in a warehouse until personnel of Bellevue Hospital rescued and installed it, with its final location being the hospital chapel.
Artist Statement:
It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda . . [but] the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Bruegel. My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexities the life I know.
Romare Bearden made this statement in response to why his art works are usually of the same themes of jazz and music.
Prepared by David Barrett, Museum Studies Graduate Intern, and Edited by Karen Janovy, Curator of Education, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, January 1998.
| |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following was compiled and written by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911 and spent his childhood summers in Mecklenberg County, North Carolina. He moved with his family to Harlem as a child. and spent his adolescence in Pittsburgh. He graduated from New York University with a degree in math. His mother, Bessye, was the New York editor of The Chicago Defender and played host to such people as W.E.D. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes.
Romare was an accomplished jazz musician. He wrote a song that was recorded by Billy Eckstine. He traveled to Paris as a young man to study the modernists. When he returned he took a job as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Human Resources which he held until the late !960s. Bearden was also a brilliant writer. If he had elected to write rather than paint, he would have left a legacy in writing as important and universal as the legacy he left us in paintings and collages.
Bearden enjoyed his only formal art training under George Grosz at the Art Students' League. In the early 1960s he abandoned abstract painting and began constructing collages, with ingeniously incongruous figure fragments, blazing reds and subtle grays, surgeon's scissor cuts. He worked in a studio above the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. His collages were primarily of black city life; his compositions were vibrant with energy, depicting the multiple facets of street life. Bearden worked indefatigably to secure equal recognition for black artists. Many felt that he did not quite make it to the top of the art world because he was black, albeit a heavy-set light-skinned black. When Rearden returned from his year in Paris he moved from Harlem to Canal Street and married dancer Nanette Rohan. He died in 1988.
Sources include:
Shown in State University of New York at Albany and the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Time Magazine, October 27, 1967
Peter Plagens in Newsweek, April 29, 1991
ARTnews, October 1986
ARTnews, February 1992
ARTnews, Summer, 1988.
|
Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, A-D):
|  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.
In the late 1960s Bearden tended to treat his human subjects as monumental, iconic, and magnificent, no matter what their social standing. Posed frontally or in profile, in the foreground, they often possess the formality of figures in ancient Egyptian or Greek art, or in Mexican murals or quattrocento Italian painting. In the 1970s, landscape motifs became more prominent in Bearden’s work. Beginning in 1973, Bearden began spending part of each year at a second home on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, where his wife, Nanette, had family roots.
Quite early in his career, Bearden developed ties with downtown galleries and artists, including fellow jazz lover Stuart Davis. He regularly showed his work in New York and elsewhere beginning in 1939, including at a series of sell-out shows at Cordier & Ekstrom , New York, in the 1960s and 70s. By the time of his death in 1988, he had achieved critical success and paved the way for future African-American artists through his involvement with the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Cinque Gallery.
Bearden’s work is included in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (1991). In 2003 the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., organized a major retrospective of Bearden’s work that subsequently traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
1. Romare Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo 2 (January 1969), quoted in Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, “Romare Bearden: Modern Classicist,” Romare Bearden: The Human Condition (New York: ACA Galleries, 1991), n. p.
|
Biography from Rogallery.com:
|  Romare Bearden, painter and collage maker, filled his works with the symbols and myths of the American black experience.
Bearden
was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1914. Soon after his
birth, his family moved to New York City's Harlem. During the
mid-1930s, when Bearden was a student of George Grosz at the Art
Students League, he founded the "306 Group" for black artists living in
Harlem.
Romare Bearden was honored during his lifetime and
posthumously with numerous prestigious awards, publications and
exhibitions. Along with representation in the important public
and private collections, he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts
and honored with a groundbreaking retrospective exhibition at the
National Gallery of Art.
A master collagist, Bearden is celebrated today as a preeminent, highly
prolific artist of exceptional and multifaceted talents and
interests. He was a jazz aficionado, and author of scholarly
books, a song writer/lyricist as well an arts activist, and an engaged
humanist. Bearden incorporated into his art work a rich montage
of influences from American, African, Asian, and European art and
culture, and took inspiration from memories and experiences of the
rural South, the urban North and the Caribbean.
After he served
in the army during World War II, Bearden's work appeared in several
well-publicized shows. During the 1940s, he combined African
symbols, such as masks and "conjur women" with stylized realism.
In 1950, he went to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne. In Paris
he met James Baldwin, Constantin Brancusi and George Braque, all of
whom influenced his work. He returned to New York City in 1954.
After
his stay in Paris, Bearden's work became more abstract. He used
oil paint almost as if it were watercolor, layering washes of
indistinct shape over thickened bars of woven colors. Shapes seem
to float on the surface, in part because of their softened, muted tones.
Bearden
was profoundly influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
During this period, he used collage to express the rhythms of black
music. Symbolic masks and faces float in interiors and landscapes.
In 1963, Bearden began work on the Prevalence of Ritual series. Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings
(1973, North Carolina National Bank Corporation), a collage of cut and
torn paper with polymer paint, is typical of the way he mingled
abstract shapes and landscapes to evoke his memories of the customs and
ceremonies of the black south.
Throughout his career, Bearden
promoted opportunities for black artists. He has served as art
director of the Harlem Cultural Council, and helped organize the Cinque
Gallery. In 1969, he wrote The Painter's Mind with Carl Holty.
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2003
The Art of Romare Bearden, retrospective exhibition organized by the
National Gallery of Art Washington, DC. Traveled to the Dallas
Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum in
New York, and the High Museum in Atlanta.
1991 Memory and
Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden retrospective exhibition organized
by the Studio Museum of Harlem. Traveled to the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago, Wight Gallery, Los Angeles, The High Museum, the
Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the National Museum of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
1971
Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual, one of Bearden's first
retrospectives opened at the Museum of Modern Art, NY in 1971.
A
Graphic Odyssey, an exhibition of his prints traveled for over 6 years
to museums all over the U.S. His work is included in many
mportant public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Mint Museum, the Detroit Institue of
the Arts, and the Dallas Museum of Art. |
Biography from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery:
|  Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and studied at Boston University, New York University (B.A. 1935), the Art Students League (1936-37), and Columbia University. During the 1930s, Bearden was involved with 306, an art school and workshop in Harlem where his cousin by marriage, Charles Alston, was a leading instructor.
From 1942-1945, Bearden served in the United States Army, and in 1950, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris, where he studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne and met, among others, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Miró.
He was a founding member of Spiral group (1963) and a co-founder with Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow of the Cinque Gallery, a non-profit organization that showed the work of minority artists (1969). Bearden’s early work belongs to the school of social realism, but after his return from Europe his images became more abstract.
In the early 1960s, Bearden began to make collages. For Bearden the collages were "an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience." By integrating new and old materials, Bearden created complex scenes that were often inspired by the African-American experience, mythology and religion.
Bearden’s work has been celebrated in numerous museum exhibitions across the United States, and in 1990 the Romare Bearden Foundation was established to preserve the legacy of the artist. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC organized a retrospective for 2003. |
Biography from Jerald Melberg Gallery:
| Born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, Romare Bearden, by the time of his death in 1988, had achieved a stature known by few artists during their lifetimes. He was, and still is, considered America’s greatest collagist and was thus honored by receiving the National Medal of Arts in 1987 from then President Reagan.
The artist’s works are in the permanent collections of most every major American Museum including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrospectives of Bearden’s art have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the Mint Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Council for Creative Projects.
Throughout his life, Bearden depicted many rituals and social customs of twentieth century rural Black America. The images of spiritual ceremonies, baptisms and burial, industrial hardships, musical arrangements and daily life have become the themes that critics and collectors most frequently associate with his work. Visually and emotionally stimulating, Romare Bearden’s collages and prints are beautiful to behold and fantastic to contemplate. |
Biography from The State Museum of Pennsylvania:
| Studied at New York University; Art Students League, N.Y.; Columbia University (Mathematics); Sorbonne, Paris (Philosophy and Art History). Artist in Residence, Spelman College (1968). Lectured in Afro-American Art at Williams College. Artist in Residence at University of Delaware (1970).
|
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|