Bearden at a Glance
|
||
|
Meet Romare Bearden. He was 5 feet 11 inches tall and heavyset. His friends
called him Romie. After graduating from college, he had a career as
a social worker while becoming one of the preeminent artists in the
United States from the mid 1960s until his death in 1988. Bearden's art transcends categories because it joins
the imagery of black life and circumstance to universally understood
experience. This is the essence of Bearden's contribution.
Bearden and his cat Gypo, mid-1970s. Estate of
Romare Bearden, courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation, New York,
photo: Nancy Crampton
Bearden loved his cats: Gypo, Tuttle (short for the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen), Rusty (named after the Persian Hercules Rustum), and Mikie (short for the Renaissance artist Michelangelo). |
Having grown up in a house where Harlem Renaissance luminaries
like poet Langston Hughes were regular visitors, it is no surprise
that adult Bearden read all the time: poetry, philosophy, politics,
works about myth, religion and art, and ancient literature. He also read contemporary
writers and intellectuals, many of them personal friends, including
Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Albert Murray.
Bearden didn't just read. He also wrote—exhibition reviews, articles about his own working methods and artistic ideas, and three book-length studies, The Painter's Mind (1953), Six Black Masters of American Art (1972), and A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (1993, posthumously). Jazz and the blues provided Bearden with many subjects. He grew up hearing rural blues and uptown jazz: Duke Ellington's orchestra, Earl Hines' piano, Ella Fitzgerald's scat singing. For sixteen years, his studio was above the Apollo Theatre, still a Harlem musical landmark. 
Duke Ellington conducting from the piano, 1943. Library of Congress, photo: Gordon Parks |
"I think the artist has to be something like a whale,
swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has
what he really needs. When he finds that, he can start to make limitations.
And then he really begins to grow." 
Bearden working in his studio, early 1980s. Romare Bearden Foundation, New York, photo: Frank Stewart Bearden's signature technique was collage. Snippets from magazine photographs, painted papers, foil, posters, and art reproductions were among his materials. They were his "paints." Bearden's collages fractured space and form, leading one writer to describe them as "patchwork cubism."
|
