Romare Bearden

Romare Howard Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the second of September 1911. His family migrated to Harlem when he was a young child. He took his undergraduate degree at New York University (1935) and graduate work at the Art Students League under the German immigrant artist George Grosz from 1936 to 1937.

He worked as a New York City social-services caseworker for over twenty years while painting in the evenings and weekends. His early painting (1940s and 1950s) moved through social-realist figuration into a more abstract Cubist-derived idiom in the 1950s.

In 1964 — in his early fifties — Bearden began the collage practice that defined the rest of his career. The Projections series (1964) of large photomontages, made by enlarging small collages composed from cut-up magazine reproductions, established the technical and thematic vocabulary that would occupy him for the next twenty-four years. Bearden's collage compositions — drawing on African American religious life, jazz, the rural South of his childhood, Greek mythology, and the Caribbean — became the principal visual idiom of African American art in the second half of the twentieth century.

He co-founded the Cinque Gallery in 1969 (with Ernest Crichlow and Norman Lewis) to support younger African American artists. He published seven books, mounted retrospectives at the Mint Museum (1980), the Brooklyn Museum (1981), and the National Gallery of Art (1981) during his lifetime. He received the National Medal of Arts from Ronald Reagan in 1987.

He died of bone cancer in New York on the twelfth of March 1988, age seventy-six.

He is honored here as the collagist whose visual idiom gave African American art its dominant late-twentieth-century form.