Monday Morning, c.1967
collage
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, he received his degree in mathe- matics from New York University. In 1936 he entered the Art Students League where he studied with George Grosz. At the same time Bearden began his association with the "306 Group" which included Robert Blackburn, Jacob Lawrence, and other artists living in Harlem.
Through the late thirties and forties he participated in a variety of exhibitions, even while he served in the United States Army from 1942-1945. In 1950, while studying at the Sorbonne under the G.l. Bill, he was introduced to Picasso, Braque, and Leger, and formed friendships with Jean Helion and Constantin Brancusi.
After his return to the states, and throughout the remainder of his life, he continued to exhibit in important group shows and was featured in major one- man retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1971), the Everson Museum in Syracuse (1975) and the Mint Museum inC harlotte (1981). In 1987 he was awarded The National Medal of the Arts Award by President Ronald Reagan. Currently, a major retrospective, organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem is on exhibit at UCLA's Wight Art Gallery. An exhibition focusing on Bearden's musical subjects called "Finding the Rhythm" is also touring the country.
Like so many other mid-century artists, Romare Bearden struggled for a time over what he should paint. His earliest artistic ambition was to be a political cartoonist; his paintings at the time were in the style of social realism.
But soon his friendships with the cognoscenti of the Harlem Renaissance, and then with members of the American Abstract Artists group, especially Carl Holty and Stuart Davis, helped to shift his sensibilities toward a less literal
style of painting. He worked through figurative abstraction and (briefly) abstract expressionist moments, before evolving his most personal and unique form of expression in the collages of the 1960s. For these formally dense works he looked to his own childhood experiences in the South, and the experience of the urban American black.
Bearden's great love and understanding of jazz (he wondered at some point whether he should be a song-writer or a painter) was an inspiration to his explo rations in pictorial structure. He spent hours listening to the improvisations of piano master Earl "Fatha'' Hines, "studying his acute sense of intervals... the variation in time between the notes struck and the silences, as Hines progresses from one sequence of notes to another. His variations are master- fut,' wrote Bearden. "I liken this to a variation in a painting of colors and forms." Bearden often referred to the impact of jazz music and musicians on his art, always making it clear, however, that his teachers were, first of all, the painters. The influences are clear; Picasso and the Cubists, the Dutch genre painters, West African sculpture, Chinese calligraphy. It has perhaps becomea cliche to call Bearden a 'student of the world,' and yet, what other artist has moved with such facility within such a broad frame of reference?