Romare Bearden one of the 20 th centurys

“…Romare Bearden, one of the 20 th century's first ‘collagists’, magnificently transmuted the collage medium into personal and universal statements of African American culture…” ROMARE BEARDEN American; 1911 -1988

Romare Bearden: Background/History -Born in Charlotte, North Carolina. His family moved to Harlem, New York, at the zenith of the Harlem Renaissance, a Black cultural movement. Moved because of the “Great Migration” and oppressive Jim Crow Laws -Although Bearden is best-known for his work in collage he achieved success in a staggering array of media, including watercolor, gouache, oil, painting, drawing, monotype, edition prints, photography, designs for record albums, costumes and stage sets, book illustration, and one known wood sculpture -Bearden employed a variety of media to create his collage artwork, including cuttings from magazines, sample catalogs, wallpaper, art reproductions, and painted papers. -Bearden preferred the improvisational nature of the collage medium and other influences around him. He carefully selected and accumulated images (photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings) which he kept in bags in his studio. Then he would choose those which most effectively completed his pieces. Aware of the Cubist movement's debt to African sculpture, he created faces inspired by African masks and sculpture -Bearden’s collages are known for employing flat areas of color defined by cut papers as wells as more patterned or textured areas created by cuttings of preprinted images, handpainted papers, foils, and fabrics. Surface manipulation was also an ongoing concern for the artist. Bearden was also well known for “juxtaposition of both negative and positive space. ” -A turning point in Bearden's career was his creation of “Projections”, enlarged photostatic copies of smaller collages.

“The Family” Romare Bearden, c. 1941 gouache with ink and graphite on brown paper Bearden's genre scenes from the early 1940 s 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.

“At Five in the Afternoon” 1946 - early cubist painting by Bearden's inspiration for At Five in the Afternoon was the dramatic poem Lament for a Bullfighter by Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca. For most of us, 5: 00 in the afternoon signifies the end of a working day; but Romare Bearden chose the time as the climax of a bullfight in his painting. The figure of the bullfighter has merged with that of the bull so that it is difficult to see where one begins and the other ends. Bearden chose a style similar to "Synthetic Cubism, " which was invented by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso more than 40 years before At Five in the Afternoon was painted. Although Romare Bearden used paint instead of gluing paper to the canvas, his solid shapes appear to have been cut of construction paper. Bearden chose bright colors to convey

“Jazz Grand Terrace” - – Romare Bearden 1964 -Photomontage

“Pittsburgh Memory” – Romare Bearden 1964 -Photomontage Bearden said: “In most instances in creating a picture, I use many disparate elements to form a figure, or part of a background. . I feel that when some photographic detail, such as a hand or an eye, is taken out of its original context and is fractured and integrated into a different space and form configuration, it acquires a plastic quality it did not have in the original. . ”