September Artist: Romare Bearden

[TheRaven]

Romare Bearden


[''Cattle of the Sun God" 1977]




["Odysseus Leaves" 1979]





["The Dove" 1964]

Known for collages with kaleidoscopic surfaces of fractured forms and space, Romare Bearden captured in his layered narratives the essence of African American life.
Combining inspiration from jazz and the blues, classical mythology, Chinese calligraphy, the African American experience, and certain European painters (Zurbaran, Mondrian, Breughel, and Goya, to name a few), Bearden's work is incredibly diverse in medium, iconography, and style.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the seat of Mecklenburg County, September 2, 1911, Romare Bearden grew up in a middle-class African-American family. His parents Bessye and Howard were both college-educated, and it was expected that Romare would achieve success in life. About 1914, his family joined the Great Migration of southern blacks to points north and west. In the early twentieth century, jim crow laws kept many blacks from voting and from equal access to jobs, education, health care, business, land, and more. Like many southern black families, the Beardens settled in the Harlem section of New York City. Romare would call New York home for the rest of his life.

In the 1920s, Harlem was a rich and vibrant center of cultural and intellectual growth and the focal point of African-American culture. Romare's mother was the New York editor of the Chicago Defender, a widely read African-American weekly newspaper, and became a prominent social and political figure in Harlem.

Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and other well-known artists, writers, and musicians were frequent visitors to the Bearden family home. Such social and intellectual gatherings would become a mainstay in Romare's life. Also, his encounters with these legendary talents must have fostered his lifelong interest in jazz and literature.

Throughout his childhood, Bearden spent time away from Harlem, staying most often with relatives in Mecklenburg County and Pittsburgh. His memory of these experiences, as well as African-American cultural history, would become the subjects of many of his works. Trains, roosters, cats, landscapes, barns, and shingled shacks reflected the rural landscape of his early childhood and summer vacations. Scenes of his grandparents' boardinghouse, bellowing steel mills, and African-American mill workers recalled his Pittsburgh memories.

http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/bearden/bio1.shtm

Bearden also focused on the written art form. He wrote and published articles on numerous topics and is well-known for his written works. Among these talents, he also designed costumes and sets for prominent dance and theater companies, illustrated books by influential authors, co-wrote books about African American art and culture, and composed songs. Many years after he had stopped focusing on athletics, the Philadelphia Athletics offered him the chance to play professional baseball, only if he would agree to “pass as white”—an offer he refused, which jumpstarted his artistic growth.

Bearden had struggled with two artistic sides of himself: his background as “a student of literature and of artistic traditions, and being a black human being involves very real experiences, figurative and concrete” (Witkovsky 1989: 266), which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century “exploration of abstraction” (Witkovsky 1989: 267). His frustration with abstraction won over, as he himself described his paintings’ focus as coming to a plateau. Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country.

During the 1960s civil rights movement, Bearden started to experiment again, this time with forms of collage (Brenner Hinish and Moore, 2003). After helping to found an artist's group in support of civil rights, Bearden's work became more representational and more overtly socially conscious. He used clippings from magazines, which in and of itself was a new medium as glossy magazines were fairly new. He used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how not only were African American rights moving forward, but so was his socially conscious art. In 1964, he held an exhibition he called Projections, where he introduced his new collage style. These works were very well received, and these are generally considered to be his best work (Fine, 2004).

Romare Bearden died in New York March 12, 1988 due to complications from bone cancer. In their obituary for him, the New York Times called Bearden "one of America's pre-eminent artists" and "the nation's foremost collagist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romare_Bearden

Bearden used a variety of different materials for his collage, including snippets from magazines, photographs, painted papers, foils, papers, posters, and art reproductions. His “In a Green Shade” consists of various papers with paint, ink, and graphite.


[''In a Green Shade'' 1984]





["Empress of the Blues" 1974 ]
Legendary singer and songwriter Bessie Smith earned the title “Empress of the Blues.” Acrylic, pencil and paper.



["Piano Lesson" 1983 ]
The central subject of this composition is thought to be jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, who spent her childhood years in Pittsburgh.



["Card Players" 1982]
Photographs of Bearden's studio in the 1940s show a reproduction of Card Players by Paul Cézanne on the wall, thereby revealing his early interest in the subject.


["The Family" 1941]
Bearden's genre scenes from the early 1940s such as The Family permit interpretations that range from the secular to the religious. Forms comprising the man, woman, child, and other details of the composition reveal that Bearden already was concerned with abstraction over literal description.


[''Quilting Time" 1986]
In creating the scene for Quilting Time, artist Romare Bearden considered his love of music and his memories of growing up in rural North Carolina as a boy. At the time, quilting was an important activity among African Americans. In the lower left, notice the basket containing salvaged scraps of fabric, which the two seated women use to sew into a new quilt.

Just as a quilt is made of smaller pieces of material, Quilting Time is a mosaic made of thousands of small pieces of colored glass. Bearden first made a detailed model of this mosaic using pieces of paper glued together, much like a collage. Then the model was given to a mosaicist near Venice, Italy, who produced, cut and glued the small tiles according to Bearden’s specifications. The artist and tile maker’s names appear in glass tile at the lower left.




["Golgotha" 1945]

Golgotha depicts the Crucifixion with Christ's anguished form bisecting the composition dramatically. To both left and right, crowds of onlookers are highlighted, encapsulated within washes of bright magenta and blue. Planes of jewel-tone watercolor are articulated with dynamic, linear detailing in India ink.

["Before Dawn"

While the original collage was only twelve inches by eighteen, Before Dawn has since been enlarged into a large tile mosaic at the main library branch of Charlotte. My hometown is finding an identity between its Southern plantation past with its Northern banking future.
In this work, Bearden expresses a similar temporal transition. Between generations of this family, changes in skin tone occur. A dark matriarch, lighter descendents—perhaps a comment on racial identity. I see a grandmother preparing lunch for a granddaughter about to leave for school. A mother standing in an open doorway indicates where action will follow.






["Sirens Song" 1977]
Bearden’s re-imagining of Homer’s classic, The Odyssey

Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden had a prolific and distinguished career. He experimented with many different mediums and artistic styles, but is best known for his richly textured collages, two of which appeared on the covers of Fortune and Time magazines, in 1968. An innovative artist with diverse interests, Bearden also designed costumes and sets for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and programs, sets and designs for Nanette Bearden’s Contemporary Dance Theatre.


Among Bearden’s numerous publications are: A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, which was coauthored with Harry Henderson and published posthumously in 1993; The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden (1983); Six Black Masters of American Art, coauthored with Harry Henderson (1972); The Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, coauthored with Carl Holty (1969); and Li’l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, a children’s book published posthumously in September 2003.


Bearden’s work is included in many important public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has had retrospectives at the Mint Museum of Art (1980), the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1986), as well as numerous posthumous retrospectives, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (1991) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2003).


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 and the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Ronald Reagan, in 1987

Visit the Romare Bearden site:
http://www.beardenfoundation.org/art...iography.shtml

This is a good overview video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXKqQ5sQFk

Each link under an image is to the source of the comment.
I hope this will get you interested in looking at more of his work at his foundation site.
Thank you RandyC and ~JON for letting me present this artist.



Last months artist

[PushingPixels]

I had not heard of this artist before. Thanks for sharing this. He was a tallented man. I love his card players and the way he uses geometry in his works.

[TheRaven]

Thanks for commenting PushingPixels. He was talented in many ways.

[TheRaven]

Almost 70 views and only one comment. We have us some shy individuals or what! Let me know if you dig this work or if you don't. I'd like to know.

[~JON]

Do not be too concerned about the number of comments because many folks do enjoy viewing but are a little shy about commenting.
The important thing is you have provided a very welcome addition to our Artist of the Month series! He is a fascinating man.

I am particularly fond of the piece, Quilting Time. It is quite beautiful. Did anyone else notice the little bird on the fence?

[AddiesArt]

This is wonderful timing! I read this thread last night and tried to think why these were so familiar and then I remembered we had books on him requested at the library last week by an art teacher. I'm new to his name but here his name is again. Isn't it funny how that works in life. I pulled a number of artists from the shelves for the teacher but this one I had a moment to peek through and I loved it! I'm just gaining an interest in collages and I couldn't help but peek. I love the ones that are colorful and have a music theme because I love Color and Music!
Thank you for reminding me of him again.

[AddiesArt]

I can't get the uploader to work. Poo!
Heres a link to one I think is beautiful
http://www.art-lesson-plans.com/imag...oy-posters.jpg

[van]

Thanks for posting this... I was unaware of Bearden before a chance encounter at the local library a month or so ago, and had since forgotten about him. "Golgatha" is the one that really caught my eye... thanks for the reminder!

[Wilsonart]

Very interesting artist, Raven,,,thank you.
I find his collage works to be fascinating, especially the Bessie Smith work, and Golgotha.

[mackb]

Hey Raven, I understand your dismay at the ratio of viewers to commenters, but most people only look. I haden 't heard of this guy before and thanks for expanding my horizon a bit. Not my taste in art, but educational none the less. tanks for teh work you did on this one.

[BlueRiderMan]

Good choice - interesting guy. It's very obvious he was a well read man.
I like them all, but I really like the "In a Green Shade" and "Golgotha."

(yep, I understand, too, about the low responses - been there)

~

[avani]

Lovely choice.
I was especially taken with "The Dove" & "Golgotha". Intriguing.
Thank you Raven. Didn't know about him at all.

[!Artnik]

I never did hear of him before so thanks for the information. I liked watching the video too

[Harry Spitz]

What a great choice! A really wonderful Artist that more people should know about. I agree with PushingPixels The Card Players is a real stand out and
"Empress of the Blues" is a real feast!
Being considered an African American Artist who made Art about the Black experience in America probably provided him with a genre that got him some attention but in some ways that niche may have limited his mainstream exposure. He was known more as an African American Artist than as an Artist. He really should be known as one of the greatest Artists of the 20th Century.

[TheRaven]

Man, this is good to see all of the comments. I had a hectic week and couldn't get time to read this. Thanks for telling me your ideas about Bearden. Harry, I think he was a great artist, as well.