Romare Bearden
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Biography:
Romare Bearden is one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. Romare Bearden’s artwork depicted the African-American culture and experience in creative and thought-provoking ways. Born in North Carolina in 1912, Bearden spent much of his career in New York City. Virtually self-taught, his early works were realistic images, often with religious themes. He later transitioned to abstract and Cubist style paintings in oil and watercolor. He is best known for his photo montage compositions made from torn images of popular magazines and assembled into visually powerful statements on African-American life.
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina Bearden's family moved to New York City as a toddler. When the family arrived to New York City their household became a meeting place for major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. His mother Bessye Bearden was involved with New York City's Board of Education. She also served as founder and president of the Colored Women's Democratic League. She was also a New York correspondent for The Chicago Defender which was an African-American newspaper. Bearden started his education at the nation's first Historically Black College and University, Lincoln University. Lincoln University was founded in 1854. Bearden transferred from Lincoln University to Boston University. During his tenure at Boston University, he served as art director for Boston University's student humor magazine Beanpot. Bearden transferred from Boston University to New York University (NYU). At NYU he started to focus more on art and less on athletics. He became the lead cartoonist and art editor for a secretive student society called Eucleian Society. They had a monthly journal called The Medley. He graduated from NYU with a degree in science and education in 1935. Living in Harlem he joined a black artist group and became interested in modern art. More specifically he became interested in Cubism, Post Impressionism, and Surrealism. His paintings painted scenes of the American South. In these paintings, he showed the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. His other paintings were done in the Cubist style with rich colors and simple forms. As a struggling artist, he couldn't make a living solely from selling his art. He juggled several jobs while taking advanced art classes and drew cartoons for several African-American publications like W.E.B. Dubois' The Crisis. After serving in the Army during World War II, Bearden created a series of cubist inspired watercolors and paintings called, The Passion of Christ. This series was first exhibited at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in Bearden’s first New York show. Interestingly, most of the series was done in watercolor. When Bearden was offered this solo exhibition at the Kootz Gallery in New York the dealer felt the series would benefit from the addition of a few oil paintings. We don’t know how many oil paintings Bearden created in this series, but we do know that The Cummer was one of them.
The series and this painting are not so much a translation of a biblical text as it is a statement about the human condition, and the artists' hope for the future of his race. He completed 24 pieces based on the gospels of Saint Matthew and Mark. The Passions of Christ depicts the anguished form of the crucifixion which bisects the composition dramatically. Romare Bearden is perhaps best known for his collage and photo montage compositions, which he began creating in the mid-1960s. 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. For Bearden, abstraction wasn’t clear enough for him to tell his story. He felt his art was coming to a plateau, so he started to experiment again. Combining images from magazines and colored paper, he would work in other textures such as sandpaper, graphite, and paint. Influenced by the Civil Rights movement, his work became more representational and socially conscious. Although his collage work shows influence of abstract art, it also shows signs of African-American slave crafts, such as patchwork 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. Some of Bearden's collage work has been compared to jazz improvisation. Bearden was exposed to many jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Dizzy Gillespie. In his jazz influenced collages you can clearly see musicians playing instruments and singing. 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. Conceptualized around the visionary paintings of Harlem-born artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988), saxophonist Branford Marsalis' Romare Bearden Revealed celebrates the obvious as well as the less tangible connections between the jazz Bearden loved and the artwork it inspired. Reflectively performing some of the songs Bearden co-opted as titles for paintings, Marsalis also includes original compositions inspired by the bluesy, organic quality inherent in Bearden's art. He died on March 12, 1988, in New York City, New York.
