Romare Bearden: Collages of African American Life

In the late 20th century, Romare Bearden's colorful collages, featuring fractured images of figures in a swirl of colorful, frenetic energy, came to be viewed as a poetic distillation of the African American experience. As a black American Bearden lived through a time of wrenching change, and the art for which he is best known today was profoundly influenced by the social forces at play during the mid-20th century and by his response to them.

Bearden was a founding member of Spiral, a group of progressive black artists in New York City. In the early 1960s, the consortium sought ways to explore the role of the artist in relation to the cultural and social events then under way and to contribute directly to the rising call for civil rights. One of Bearden's ideas was that Spiral should create a large collaborative project, speaking in one unified voice. To that end he brought together a collection of images cut from magazines and other sources, many highlighting African Americans and the civil rights struggle, for use in a monumental collage. As a collaborative project, the idea ultimately went nowhere, but Bearden began using the images himself. From this root developed the style and methods that would define his artistic vocabulary for the rest of his life.

Collage had a long history in 20th-century Western art before Bearden first experimented with it. The late cutouts of Henri Matisse, for example, were among the most popular and influential works of the post-World War II school of Paris. Papier collé, the technique of using paper elements that are cut and pasted to create forms, had earlier been a very important technique for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their development of synthetic cubism. Bearden knew the work of these masters well, and indeed, much of his work makes good use of the essential tools of synthetic cubism. Another notable influence on Bearden's development was the German American artist George Grosz, Bearden's teacher at the Art Students League of New York in the 1930s. Grosz's work is notable for its vivid figurative imagery and stark social commentary, both of which were present in Bearden's early collages.

Although Bearden had become a respected figure on the American art scene by the 1960s, his trajectory as an artist followed a path very similar to that of many of his contemporaries, both black and white. Respect and prosperity were not necessarily intertwined, and by necessity he continued to work a day job at New York's Department of Social Services until 1969. His first significant works, produced in the 1930s, fit easily within the definition of social realism, as he depicted the plight of (mostly black) urban workers during the difficult times of the Great Depression. He spent the war years in military service and then, under benefits of the GI Bill of Rights, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. His first postwar paintings deal mostly with literary or religious themes, whether scenes from the life of Christ, Homer's Iliad, or the works of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Stylistically, Bearden's use of broad, flat color areas in the paintings of the 1940s seems to foreshadow his later collages, but essentially these works show a talented, maturing artist internalizing the accumulated lessons of Western painting. Returning to New York City from Paris, Bearden found an art world dominated by abstract expressionism, and his works turned toward a gentle and sensuous form of lyrical abstraction. In fact his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s owe a distinct debt to the St. Petersburg-born painter Nicolas de Staël, whose work Bearden admired.

All of these influences, coupled with Bearden's own reaction to the civil rights struggle, inspired him to revive his idea for the collaborative project. Collage became his primary medium, and Bearden began to reassert himself as a figurative and, more importantly, African American artist who was concerned with social realities. As his work became widely exhibited and reproduced, he received broader public recognition.

Bearden's first important series of collaged images were exhibited at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York City in 1964 and then in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery in 1965. This first group, known as Projections, included photostatic enlargements of relatively small collage works. The subject matter was drawn from autobiographical sources--memories of the rural south, of time spent in Pittsburgh's Hill District, and from his life in urban Harlem. The small original collages contained some color, but they were enlarged in black and white, tuning them to a plaintive note. The fractured images, featuring distorted faces, African masks, and prominent eyes, harbored a compacted energy that could scarcely be contained within the pictures' borders. In their day, at the height of the civil rights struggle, they were recognized as timely and powerful images reflective of both the tensions and aspirations emanating from the soul of black America. Thus it was through his collages that Bearden established himself as one of the leading visionaries of the African American consciousness in a rapidly changing world.

In later years exuberant color infused his collages, which became more upbeat as he explored musical themes, jazz in particular, and other topics important to African American culture. By the time of his death in 1988, Bearden was widely recognized as the most important African American artist of his time. In 2003 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized the largest retrospective exhibition of Bearden's work to date. After closing in the nation's capital in January 2004, the show traveled to San Francisco, Dallas, New York City, and Atlanta.