59 Facts About Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was an American artist, author, and songwriter.

Romare Bearden worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages.

Romare Bearden began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South.

Romare Bearden returned to Paris in 1950 and studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Romare Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the civil rights movement.

Romare Bearden was a songwriter, known as co-writer of the jazz classic "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine, a former high school classmate at Peabody High School, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Romare Bearden had long supported young, emerging artists, and he and his wife established the Bearden Foundation to continue this work, as well as to support young scholars.

In 1987, Romare Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Romare Bearden was born September 2,1911, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Romare Bearden's family moved with him to New York City when he was a toddler, as part of the Great Migration.

Romare Bearden was a New York correspondent for The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper.

Romare Bearden enrolled in Lincoln University, the nation's second oldest historically Black college, founded in 1854.

Romare Bearden later transferred to Boston University where he served as art director for Beanpot, Boston University's student humor magazine.

Romare Bearden continued his studies at New York University, where he started to focus more on his art and less on athletics, and became a lead cartoonist and art editor for The Medley, the monthly journal of the secretive Eucleian Society at NYU.

Romare Bearden studied art, education, science, and mathematics, graduating with a degree in science and education in 1935.

Romare Bearden continued his artistic study under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937.

Romare Bearden enjoyed sports, throwing discus for his high school track team and trying out for football.

Romare Bearden was awarded a certificate of merit for his pitching at BU, which he hung with pride in subsequent homes throughout his life.

Romare Bearden tended to play with them during the BU baseball off-season and had opportunities to play both iconic Negro League and white baseball teams.

Sources conflict about whether Mack thought Romare Bearden was white or told Romare Bearden he would have to pass for white.

Romare Bearden grew as an artist by exploring his life experiences.

In 1935, Romare Bearden became a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services.

Romare Bearden had evolved from what Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York Times, called a "debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns" to what became known as his stylistic approach, which participated in the post-war aims of avant-garde American art.

Romare Bearden's works were exhibited at the Samuel M Kootz gallery until it was deemed not abstract enough.

The eye of the viewer is drawn to the middle of the image first, where Romare Bearden has rendered Christ's body.

Romare Bearden used these colors and contrasts because of the abstract influence of the time, but for their meanings.

Romare Bearden wanted to explore the emotions and actions of the crowds gathered around the Crucifixion.

Romare Bearden wanted to show ideas of humanism and thought that cannot be seen by the eye, but "must be digested by the mind".

Romare Bearden depicted humanity through abstract expressionism after feeling he did not see it during the war.

Romare Bearden's work was less abstract than these other artists, and Sam Kootz's gallery ended its representation of him.

Romare Bearden turned to music, co-writing the hit song "Sea Breeze", which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie.

Romare Bearden used layers of oil paint to produce muted, hidden effects.

In 1956, Romare Bearden began studying with a Chinese calligrapher, whom he credits with introducing him to new ideas about space and composition which he used in painting.

Romare Bearden spent much time studying famous European paintings he admired, particularly the work of the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Rembrandt.

In 1961, Romare Bearden joined the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York City, which would represent him for the rest of his career.

Romare Bearden first combined images cut from magazines and colored paper, which he would often further alter with the use of sandpaper, bleach, graphite or paint.

The City of Berkeley then commissioned Romare Bearden to create a mural for the City Council chambers.

In 1954, at age 42, Romare Bearden married Nanette Rohan, a 27-year-old dancer from Staten Island, New York.

Romare Bearden died in New York City on March 12,1988, due to complications from bone cancer.

Romare Bearden must enter wholeheartedly into the situation he wishes to convey.

In 1942, Romare Bearden produced Factory Workers, which was commissioned by Forbes magazine to accompany an article titled The Negro's War.

Romare 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," which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century "exploration of abstraction".

Romare Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country.

Romare Bearden used clippings from magazines, which in and of itself was a new medium, as glossy magazines were fairly new.

Romare Bearden used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how African-American rights were moving forward, and so was his socially conscious art.

Romare Bearden used these collages to show his rejection of the Harmon Foundation's emphasis on the idea that African Americans must reproduce their culture in their art.

Romare Bearden found this approach to be a burden on African artists, because he saw the idea as creating an emphasis on reproduction of something that already exists in the world.

Romare Bearden used this new series to speak out against this limitation on Black artists, and to emphasize modern art.

Romare Bearden was influenced by Francisco de Zurbaran, and based Baptism on Zurbaran's painting The Virgin Protectress of the Carthusians.

Romare Bearden wanted to show how the water that is about to be poured on the subject being baptized is always moving, giving the whole collage a feel and sense of temporal flux.

Romare Bearden wanted to express how African Americans' rights were always changing, and society itself was in a temporal flux at the time.

Romare Bearden wanted to show that nothing is fixed, and expressed this idea throughout the image: not only is the subject about to have water poured from the top, but the subject is to be submerged in water.

Romare Bearden took his imagery from both the everyday rituals of African American rural life in the south and urban life in the north, melding those American experiences with his personal experiences and with the themes of classical literature, religion, myth, music and daily human ritual.

Romare Bearden was paid $90,000 for the project, titled Pittsburgh Recollections.

Two years after his death, the Romare Bearden Foundation was founded.

In Charlotte, a street was named after Romare Bearden, intersecting West Boulevard, on the west side of the city.

Romare Bearden Drive is lined by the West Boulevard Public Library and rows of townhouses.

Romare Bearden was publicly honored at the ceremony for her contribution.

Romare Bearden's home in Harlem, New York is a Historic Landmark Preservation site.