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Explanation:
Considered 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 photomontage compositions made from torn images of popular magazines and assembled into visually powerful statements on African-American life.
Romare Bearden's Art and Style
The works of Romare Bearden’s cover a wide range of techniques, themes, and styles. In college, Bearden aspired to be a cartoonist, drawing for and then editing Boston College’s humor magazine in the early 1930s.
He continued his cartooning after he moved to New York City to attend New York University. Studying for medical school, he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in science.
Romare Bearden is perhaps best known for his collage and photomontage 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 patch-work quilts, and the necessity of using whatever materials are available.
