Artist and author, Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 2nd, 1911, but grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh. As part of the Great Migration, his parents became active participants in the Harlem Renaissance, and their home served as a meeting place for artists, musicians, and writers, including Langston Hughes and W.E.B DuBois. Throughout his youth, Bearden spent summers in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina where his grandfather was a preacher. Here, the rural South’s cabins and fields, community rituals, and strong women captured his imagination, an altogether different Black culture than the one he knew in Harlem. Bearden’s life-long interest in Black art and in jazz and blues music dates from this period.
Early on, Bearden debated whether to be an artist, a musician, or a professional baseball player, though he eventually settled on being an artist. After graduating from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, Pa, in 1929, where he was living with his maternal grandmother, Bearden played a little semi-pro baseball in Boston. Bearden began his studies at Lincoln University, PA., then transferred to Boston University where he served as the art director of Beanpot, the student humor magazine of Boston University. He returned to New York City to attend New York University, with plans to go to medical school. While at NYU, Bearden took extensive courses in art and was a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the monthly journal "The Medley". Bearden published many journal covers during his university years and the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues.
He majored in science at New York University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1935. Bearden subsequently undertook formal art training at the Art Students League, studying drawing and painting with George Grosz. Within three years, New York galleries were regularly exhibiting his canvases. While studying at the Arts Students League he exhibited early figurative paintings at the Harlem YMCA and the Harlem Art Workshop. He became close friends with several older artists, including Stuart Davis, who was an important mentor. In 1935, Bearden joined the Harlem Artists Guild and began contributing political cartoons to the weekly Baltimore Afro-American. In 1935, Bearden became a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services. Throughout his career as an artist, Bearden worked as a case worker off and on to supplement his income.
He became excited about modern art, particularly Cubism, Futurism, post-Impressionism and Surrealism. Romare Bearden would spend the rest of his life immersed in art, studying Cezanne, and Matisse, African sculpture and masks, Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints and Chinese landscape paintings. His huge talent was recognized at his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940. He then had another, four years later, at the G Place Gallery in Washington, DC, while he was serving in the Army. Bearden was drafted into the United States Army in 1942 and served in the all-Black 372nd Infantry Regiment until May 1945. After serving in the army, Bearden joined the Samuel Kootz Gallery, a commercial gallery in New York that featured avant-garde art. He produced paintings at this time in "an expressionistic, linear, semi-abstract style."
Bearden used funding from the GI Bill to study philosophy and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. There he met leading modernists as Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși. Bearden’s experience in Paris precipitated his stylistic transition to abstraction, wherein he used watery oils to create soft, muted tones and to render shapes that appear to be free-floating. During this period he developed his mature, collage style. The artist soon became a central figure within Paris's Black, expatriate community. There he studied literature, philosophy, Buddhism, and spent many hours in museums, not only in France but also in Italy and Spain. Having produced no paintings in Paris, Bearden returned to New York in 1951.
He abandoned painting for two years while concentrating on songwriting, and a number of his songs were published. Upon his return to New York City, Bearden resumed his caseworker duties, and two years later he married Nanette Rohan, a dancer and artist. During the mid 1950s, with the encouragement of his friends and wife, Bearden resumed painting, concentrating on oils and acrylics. When he began painting watercolors he employed bright color patterns with bold black lines to delineate shapes. The next step included oils that were largely extensions of his watercolors. Bearden's early interest in flat painting was largely inspired by Stuart Davis. Davis was deeply influenced by jazz and helped Bearden visualize a relationship between painting and jazz.
Bearden acquired a studio above the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and began creating the collages for which he is best known. Bearden began experimenting with abstraction. His technique involved applying broad areas of color in various thicknesses on rice paper and then gluing the painted papers on canvas, usually in several layers. He then tore sections of the paper away and added more paper until a motif or image presented itself. He completed the work by painting additional elements. By the 1960s he had come to be regarded as the preeminent collagist in the United States. Although his collage work shows influence of abstract art, it also shows signs of African American enslaved crafts, such as patch-work quilts, and the necessity of using whatever materials are available.
Taking images from mainstream pictorial magazines such as Life and Look and Black magazines such as Ebony and Jet, Bearden crafted the African American experience in his works. Bearden enlarged these collages through the photostat process. Bearden was passionately engaged in Harlem-based cultural and artistic movements. During this time, he felt he was struggling in his art between expressing his experiences as a Black man and the obscurity of abstract painting. Bearden always insisted that his works were paintings, not collages, because he used the techniques and materials of collage to create the rhythms, surfaces, tones, and moods associated with painting.
Growing up during the Harlem Renaissance, he was exposed to many of the jazz greats. Ellington was one of his first patrons. Bearden was knowledgeable and passionate about jazz and composed several jazz tunes. He co-wrote the hit song "Sea Breeze," which Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Eckstine recorded. Bearden wrote songs for Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie. In his collages, Bearden’s images reflect some of the elements of jazz with its interplay among the characters and improvisation of the materials used. Bearden experimented with a variety of forms and styles over the years, and his work reflects his interest in the 20th-century art movements of cubism, social realism, and abstraction.
Bearden was also a writer. His first book, "The Painter's Mind", was co written with the artist Carl Holty in 1969. In addition to being an artist and writer Bearden was an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. His role as a cultural pioneer was confirmed when, in 1964, he became the first art director of the newly established Harlem Cultural Council. He was involved in the establishment of several important arts organizations and venues, such as “306”, which met in his cousin Charles Alston’s studio, and the "Spiral Group". The Spiral Group was an association of African American artists, including Hale Woodruff and others, that came together in 1963 to support the civil rights movement. As a group they attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963).
Bearden produced some of his most innovative works in the late 1960s. One of Bearden’s works that best captures this amalgam of styles is titled "The Block". In this horizontally expansive work, Bearden pays tribute to Harlem. It depicts a Harlem street, with row-house buildings and the bustling life of the neighborhood. Through a fusion of cut-paper images, painted elements, and overlapping textures, Bearden creates a visual narrative that reflects African-American life, migration, and memory. The piece draws inspiration from the improvisational nature of jazz, structuring its composition like a musical arrangement—fragmented yet harmonized. Each window and doorway opens into a unique story, making “The Block” a powerful testament to Bearden’s gift for storytelling in art. Composed of two or more fragments of photos, they begin to reveal a lifetime of experiences.
Between 1967 and 1969, Bearden produced some of his largest and most innovative works. Memories of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, abound, reaffirming Bearden's roots in the rural South. Often incorporating life size imagery, these paintings combine collage with acrylics, drawings and oils, mosaics of real textures, and black and white photographs. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bearden refined his style and continued to emphasize subjects derived from African American genre and myth. In 1977, an exhibition entitled Romare Bearden, Odysseus at Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York, included paintings inspired by classical themes. His paintings had been exhibited at various galleries and institutions since the 1930s. The retrospective exhibition of his paintings organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1971 canonized his significance to modern American art.
Romare Bearden was the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his lifetime. Honorary doctorates were given by Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Davidson College and Atlanta University, to name but a few. He received the Mayor's Award of Honor for Art and Culture in New York City in 1984. Bearden received five honorary doctoral degrees, and was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1966. A year before his death in 1988, Bearden received the prestigious President's National Medal of the Arts. In the last few years of his life, Bearden and his wife made plans for a foundation that would aid in the education and training of talented art students. The Romare Bearden opened in 1990.
