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Born: 1911
Died: 1988
Summary of Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden, a renowned American artist, has produced a brilliant piece honouring the black American experience he has embedded in American modernism (mostly white). After working as a painter for many decades, Bearden discovered his own voice in the politically turbulent 1960s, making collages of cut and torn images in popular magazines and then gathered them back together in aesthetically stunning comments about African-American living. The artist’s topic included Harlem’s urban environment, railroads, migrants, spiritual “conjure” ladies, South rural artists, jazz and blues, African-American religion and spirituality. Late in his life, the artist created The Romare Bearden Foundation to support outstanding art students in their study and training. Bearden is regarded as a valued 20th-century artist.
Although inspired by modernist figures such as Henri Matisse, Bearden’s collages also stem from Afro-American slave art such as quilts and patchworks and the need to produce artwork from all available materials. This use of daily materials helped bridge the gap between the fine and popular arts, which allowed a larger variety of cultures and people to take part in the production of arts.
Through his picture collection of such magazines as Look and Life and black publications as Ebony and Jet, Bearden has incorporated into his collages the African-American experience, its rich visual and music output, and current racial struggles and victories.
In the modernist lexicon, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso introduced collage. Bearden identified a way of incorporating much of his life experience as an African American, ranging from rural south to metropolitan north and Paris, into his art.
Childhood
Romare Howard Bearden was born into a college-educated and reasonably prosperous middle class African-American family in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was not usual at this time, particularly in the deep south. Bearden was born at his grandfather’s home as a single kid. His father played the piano and his father and grandparents also produced paintings and sketches. In Charlotte and in Pittsburgh, Bearden’s grandparents were proprietors of property. Despite the prosperity of the family, all-out Southern bigotry sets limitations on their lives and businesses. With the introduction of the Jim Crows Laws (1893, Plessey vs Ferguson), the Beardens and other African-American families had been doomed to racial secondary social position through racial segregation. The Beardens and hundreds of thousands of African Americans also moved to the metropolitan north to leave rural south behind for racial equality and better financial and educational possibilities. For numerous African-American artists, most of them the painter Jacob Lawrence, the Great Migration, as this enormous migration of people had been termed.
From 1914, the Bearden family built their new house in New York City. Howard, the father of the artist, served as a sanitary inspector for the New York Department of Health and was an excellent pianist, both of whom inspired Romare’s long-term love of music. Bearden’s mother, Bessye, was a social and political activist as well as a New York reporter for the African-American regional journal Chicago Defender, and also the first Negro Women’s Democratic Association Chairman. The Bearden home was established in Harlem as a gathering point for artists, intellectuals and Harlem Renaissance political activists. The poet Countee Cullen, the musician Duke Ellington (who was also a relative) and the actor and political activist Paul Robeson were all frequent guests to the house. As a youngster, he spent the summer in Pittsburgh, Pennylvania, with his mother’s grandmother, running a boarding house servicing steel mill employees, many of whom were African/American migrants from the working class from the South. Around the kitchen table, which was then formed in his collages, Bearden listened to their tales.
Early Life
In the 1920s, the Bearden family moved to Pittsburgh from Manhattan. After graduating from high school, Bearden was not so interested in painting, instead he spent some time in Boston in semi-professional baseball in the Negro Leagues. Bearden’s interest in art, in especially in cartooning, began while a college student in Pennsylvania at the leading Lincoln University, the first historically black college and university in Pennsylvania (HBUC, founded in 1854). He wanted originally to be a cartoonist. The young artist moved to the University of Boston where he was the director of the campus humour magazine. Bearden later got more involved in his creative studies at New York University and was the main cartoonist and art editor for the college student magazine; he graduated in 1935. Bearden studied mathematics at Columbia University in New York. Bearden studied for a short time at the Arts Students League under the German refugee George Grosz between 1936 and 1937, mostly an autodidact artist, whose teaching techniques included intense study of the old masters. In the Weimer period, before Grosz sought refuge from the Nazis in the US, he produced scathing social criticism. The younger artist then praised Grosz for “realise the artistic possibilities of the American Negro subject matter.” The focus of Bearden was on Cubism, Futurism, Post-Impressionism, and Surrealism. He showed early figurative paintings at the Harlem YMCA and Harlema Art Workshop while studying at the Arts Students League.
Bearden also made a living as a political cartoonist for many African-American newspapers, notably W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Crisis. Bearden was the originator of the Harlem Artists Guild in the 1930s, a leading organisation in the field of social and advocacy for black artists, and was involved with Charles Alston and Augusta Savage in the artists’ collective 306. Because his family was reasonably healthy financially, as opposed to most of his contemporaries, Bearden did not qualify for government art patronage programmes under the Works Progress Administration. His studies were halted when he was sent to the United States Armed Services where he served in the 372nd Infantry Regiment, an ethnically segregated regiment, from 1942 until 1945. After his return to America, the artist worked for the Department of Social Services in New York City as a case worker. He continued in this role until, in 1969, he and his wife, Nanette Rohan, were alone supported by his artwork. He was the organiser of the Chamber Dance Company in New York.
Mid Life
Bearden began his career in 1940 with a well-received solo show of his paintings in Harlem. Five years later, a single person show was held at the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington DC, which was quite appreciative of the painting. These early shows were marked by his military task tour. The artist began painting with oils and aquarelles after the military. He shifted his focus to religious issues, which attested in part to the significance of the Black Church in American society. The artist showed his series The Passion of Christ (1945), which also included several abstract expressionists at The Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York City. Both a critical and a commercial triumph was Bearden’s show. The Museum of Modern Art acquired He is Arisen (1945) from the Passion of Christ (1945), the artist’s first bearden piece and the first acquisition from the museum. Bearden was one of just four African American painters in the middle of Manhattan Blue-chip galleries in 1947, and Lawrence was another. By the next year, Bearden was one of the American Modernists most discussed and had shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art many times.
In the 1950s, disillusioned with American culture owing to the overwhelming racism of the nation, Bearden returned for two years to Paris with money from G.I. Bill to study art history and philosophy in the Sorbonne. He has been a partner and friend of major Modernists like as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Constantin Brâncu ltd. The artist quickly became a prominent character in the black, expatriate society of Paris and in the Negritude movement. Bearden also established significant relationships with major thinkers such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
The artist gave up painting and dedicated himself to creating music when he first returned to New York. Like his buddy Stuart Davis, Bearden knew and loved jazz and wrote a number of jazz stories. He co-wrote the popular song “Sea Breeze,” sung by Dizzy Gillespie. Some others believe Bearden might have had a nervous breakdown at the moment. He travelled back into painting and health by studying and imitating the works of the Old Masters as well as contemporary artists like Matisse and Picasso. Nevertheless, since in the mid-1950s he didn’t live up to the shifting styles and trends, the Kootz Gallery abandoned Bearden because his work had not been abstractive enough to current standards. Bearden rented a studio in 1954 above the famous Apollo Theater where he created abstract paintings that were strongly inspired by Chinese art. Bearden moved his studio to central New York in the 1950s, where Harlem was still important for his life and work.
In 1962, along with Charles Alston and Norman Lewis, Bearden formed Spiral Group, a group of African American artists who investigated how artists might contribute to Bearden’s Greenwich Village Studio’s continuing Freedom Movement. As a collective, they participated in the March for jobs and freedom in Washington (1963). Bearden proposed that Spiral artists cooperate with a large-format collage on a collaborative piece. When the artists refused this offer, Bearden started to follow the concept alone. With 1963 Bearden discovered his own voice in Projections, a series that included both reportage and pop art, with a move to collage and photomontage. The screenings included scenes from Pittsburgh and Harlem but mainly Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was born. Bearden would continue collage for the rest of his career. Bearden frequently produced photos and copies of his collages, which undermined the concept of the original, a fundamental element of modernism and fine art.
Late Life
In the late 1960s, Bearden and colleagues established the Cinque Gallery in New York in part to oppose the notorious show Harlem on My Mind, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1969), which did not include black artists. The five only African-American painters featured. Bearden also served as a founding member of the Harlem Studio Museum.
For the artist, the 1970s were a prolific and happy time. He spent a good lot of time with his wife on St. Martin’s Caribbean island, where Nanette’s family resided; they constructed an island hideaway there in 1973. Through his art, the Caribbean influences and imagery were reinforced at that time as he studied intensively the traditions and spirituality imported from Africa in the slave trade. Bearden’s 1970’s collages have increasingly taken on music motifs, from the city’s urban blues to the nightclubs in Kansas City and Harlem to the blues and church music in Mecklenburg, North Carolina. Bearden also started designing costumes and dramatic sets for a dance company of his wife and the famous Alvin Ailey Dance Theater that brought visual arts, dance and music together in one art format.
Bearden won many important honours towards the end of his life, including the 1966 election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honorary PhDs and 1987 President’s National Arts Medal. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter held the artist’s White House event. He was honoured by the National Urban League and the NAACP. By 1982, Bearden’s health was deteriorated, although he continued to work until his death. On 12 March 1988 Bearden died of bone cancer at a New York hospital. His ashes were transferred to his property in St. Martin since subsequent works had been the subject of the French West Indies.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of Bearden is a role model for all artists in their confidence in their own vision. Bearden created his own route while Abstract Expressionism was “the” creative style to be engaged with and started collages that were unique to his experiences as an African American man. This tendency to explore the Southern Black Experience and the Urban Black Experience still inspire artists who find their way into their own local and cultural history. Finally, the significance of Bearden is to revise the collage art for American history.
Since the 1980s, the popularity and creative impact of Bearden has risen dramatically. Bearden is no longer alone on the fringes of art history with the increasing inclusion of African American work into conventional, mainly White mainstream survey books and school courses. This exposure is reflected in the practise of the museum collection and significant exhibits that Bearden has held in the last two decades. In addition, the founding of the Romare Bearden Foundation has not only served to increase its name and public recognition, but has also encouraged and encouraged the development of the many artists of today.
Famous Art by Romare Bearden
Folk Musicians
1941-1942
This tableau, painted in deep browns and blues, has three performers, one with a guitar in hand, and Bearden’s liberal use of blue in fact is blues, unique African-American folk music. Bearden and Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, well-established in New York City, were inspired by the social realists of the Great Depression. Influenced by the Soviet Russia’s art and politics, social realists chose the working class, the impoverished and the masses, as themes, in readable forms and compositions, to enhance progressive social change for the benefit of workers of the globe and to correct societal evils.
Blue Lady
1955
After a few years of focus on composing music, Bearden resumed his life in the mid 1950s, showing a more abstract painting style inspired by the Abstract Expressionists; Bearden had connections with several of the leading painters within the group. Bearden has gotten less attention than his social realism and his collages throughout this era of creative growth in part because Bearden’s collages are path-finding works. In contrast, Bearden worked on the edges of Abstract Expressionism since his approach remained figurative.
The Piano Lesson
1983
In this collage, Bearden recalls the work of Henri Matisse by using patterns against flat regions of colour and exploring the interior of space, whose inner spaces with brilliant colours and strong patterns were appealing to the younger artist. Initially, it was inspired by the Jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams (1910-81) and a poster for Bearden’s wife Nanette and Williams to dance and collaborate in music. This piece influenced the award-winning playwright August Wilson. He also placed his play in Pittsburgh, in Bearden’s boyhood and adolescent hometown when he wrote his own Piano Lesson (1990), for which he received his second Pulitzer Prize. Wilson also found inspiration for other plays, particularly in the four-part Pittsburgh Cycle, in the Bearden collages.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- Romare Bearden, a renowned American artist, has produced a brilliant piece honouring the black American experience he has embedded in American modernism (mostly white).
- After working as a painter for many decades, Bearden discovered his own voice in the political turbulent 1960s, making collages of cut and torn images in popular magazines and then gathered them back together in aesthetically stunning comments about African-American living.
- The artist’s topic included Harlem’s urban environment, railroads, migrants, spiritual “conjure” ladies, South rural artists, jazz and blues, African-American religion and spirituality.
- Late in his life, the artist created The Romare Bearden Foundation to support outstanding art students in their study and training.
- Bearden is regarded as a valued 20th-century artist.Although inspired by modernist figures such as Henri Matisse, Bearden’s collages also stem from Afro-American slave art such as quilts and patchworks and the need to produce artwork from all available materials.
- This use of daily materials helped bridge the gap between the fine and popular arts, which allowed a larger variety of cultures and people to take part in the production of arts.Through his picture collection of such magazines as Look and Life and black publications as Ebony and Jet, Bearden has incorporated into his collages the African-American experience, its rich visual and music output, and current racial struggles and victories.In the modernist lexicon, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso introduced collage.
- Bearden identified a way of incorporating much of his life experience as an African American, ranging from rural south to metropolitan north and Paris, into his art.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
