Artist 6: the collage work of Romare Bearden

the collage work of Romare Bearden

the following is a selection of collages made by the African-American Artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988).

Mother and child - 1971 

The Calabash - 1970

Pittsburgh Memory - 1964

The Train - 1975

Mother and Child - 1971

110th Street Harlem Blues - 1972

While studying under the tutelage of Artist George Grosz at the Art Students League of New York in 1936-37, Romare Bearden developed a series of paintings depicting life in the American South in a style influenced by the Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Around the same time, Bearden began a short-lived job working as a case worker for the New York Department of Social Services, interacting with the primarily African-American lower-classes of New York City. Between the years of 1942 and 1945 - during World War II - Bearden served in the US Army. After his initial experiences in Europe during the war, Bearden would later return to study philosophy at the sorbonne in 1950, a move that would have significant influence on his artwork, leading to a series of realistic paintings with religious connotations and references.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in the United States, Bearden began experimenting with alternative materials as a means to produce his progressive and socially-conscious collage works, utilizing the glossy and richly colored magazines of the time as source material to illustrate the progressive nature of modern African Americans. In 1964, Bearden exhibited a group of these works in a show he named Projections where he introduced his new collage style. The show was a success, and the style in which the exhibited work would ultimately be considered by many critics as his greatest.

Romare Bearden died on March 12, 1988 in New York due to complications with bone cancer, and the New York Times obituary referred to him as "one of Americas pre-eminent artists".

Of the works shown above, I think my favorite would easily be "Pittsburgh Memory"; the colors alone please me, with Bearden's selective use of warm tones creating a comfortable palette that is easy on the eyes that seems to soften the edges of his cubist treatment of the two faces in the foreground. This image is compelling, captivating, and compositionally keeps the eyes swirling through the center of the image. His use of various magazine clippings to create the two anonymous figures successfully creates an "everyman" identity where Bearden is attempting to represent an entire community through fabricated faces that have been reconstructed from fragments.