The Art of Romare Bearden

A Resource for Teachers

The Art of Romare Bearden is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The exhibition is made possible with generous support from AT&T and is sponsored in part by Chevy Chase Bank.

The exhibition is shown at these museums:

• National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 14, 2003 – January 4, 2004
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 7 – May 16, 2004
• Dallas Museum of Art, June 20 – September 12, 2004
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 14, 2004 – January 9, 2005
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, January 29 – April 24, 2005

This packet was written and produced by staff of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Writers: Carla Brenner, Heidi Hinish, and Barbara Moore, division of education. Photo research and permissions by Ira Bartfield, Sara Sanders-Buell, Leo Kasun, and Lesley Keiner. Online production by Stephanie Burnett and Rachel Richards.

Special thanks to Lynn Russell, Chris Vogel, Donna Mann, Phyllis Hecht, and the staff of the exhibition and photography departments. Extra thanks go to Mary Lee Corlett and Ruth Fine, curator of the exhibition, for their help.

Edited by Richard Carter. Designed by Studio A, Alexandria, Virginia.

Every effort was made to find the copyright holders for the materials in this book. Any mistakes will be fixed in later printings.

© 2003 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover: Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 1966/1967, a collage (art made by gluing different papers together) made of various papers with charcoal and pencil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund

Title page: Thank you...For F.U.M.L. (Funking Up My Life), detail, 1978, collage of papers with ink and pencil on fiberboard. Donald Byrd

Back cover: The Street, 1964, collage of papers on cardboard. Milwaukee Art Museum, gift of Friends of Art and the African American Art Acquisition Fund

Except as noted, all artworks by Romare Bearden are © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Goals

This packet will help students learn the following about Romare Bearden:

• Bearden used his own memories, African-American history and culture, and literature as subjects for his art. He showed parts of African-American life in ways that connected to experiences everyone can understand.
• Bearden's artistic style was shaped by many influences: Western European art, African sculpture, other artists working in America and Mexico, and music—especially blues and jazz.
• Bearden is best known for his collage art, which he used in new and creative ways. He also painted with watercolor, gouache (a type of opaque paint), and oil paint. He made prints, monotypes (one-of-a-kind prints), murals, and one sculpture.
• Through his work in the art world, Bearden helped support and promote artists of color.

How to Use This Packet

This packet includes slides, color pictures, transparencies (clear sheets for overhead projectors), and a music CD. Some images appear in more than one form so teachers have more choices.

• Slides follow the order they appear in the text.
• Transparencies match up with the ACTIVITIES.
• Color reproductions are for displaying in the classroom.
• The Branford Marsalis Quartet CD, Romare Bearden Revealed, goes along with the packet's section on music.

Table of Contents

6 Bearden at a Glance

12 Biography

• Activities: Scrutinize a Bearden; Write a Poem Inspired by Collage

22 Memories

• North Carolina
• Pittsburgh
• Harlem
• Paris
• The Caribbean
• Activity: Make a Collage

32 A Leader in the Arts Community

• Working in Black and White
• Activities: Organize an Exhibition; What's Your Cause?; Study Art Like Bearden

40 Music

• Music as Subject
• Music and Aesthetic Choices
• Music and Life
• Activities: Draw to Music; Compare Poetry and Music

54 Artistic and Literary Sources

• Borrowing and Mixing
• Changing
• Activity: Match Bearden's Works with Artistic Models

64 Method

• Collage: Bearden's Signature Style
• Monotypes
• Activity: Make a Monotype

73 Coda: Artist to Artist

74 Slide List

76 Reproduction List

77 Transparency List

78 Resource Finder

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Bearden at a Glance

Meet Romare Bearden. He stood 5 feet 11 inches tall and had a solid, heavyset build. His friends called him Romie. After finishing college, he worked as a social worker while he became one of the most important artists in the United States, from the mid-1960s until his death in 1988.

"I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs. When he finds that, he can start to make limitations. And then he really begins to grow."

Bearden grew up in a house where famous Harlem Renaissance figures—like the poet Langston Hughes—often visited. (The Harlem Renaissance was a period in the 1920s when Black art, music, and writing flourished in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.) So it's no surprise that as an adult, Bearden read constantly: poetry, philosophy, politics, books about myths, religion, art, and ancient literature. He also read the work of writers and thinkers of his own time, many of whom were his personal friends, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Albert Murray.

Bearden loved his cats: Gypo, Tuttle (named after the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen), Rusty (named after the Persian hero Rustum), and Mikie (short for the Renaissance artist Michelangelo).

Bearden's art doesn't fit into just one category. That's because it connects images of Black life and experience to feelings and experiences that everyone can understand. This is the heart of what Bearden gave to the art world.

Bearden didn't just read—he also wrote. He wrote reviews of art exhibitions, articles about his own art methods and ideas, and three full-length books: The Painter's Mind (1953), Six Black Masters of American Art (1972), and A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (published in 1993, after his death).

Jazz and the blues gave Bearden many subjects for his art. Growing up, he listened to rural blues and uptown jazz—Duke Ellington's orchestra, Earl Hines on piano, and Ella Fitzgerald's scat singing (a jazz singing style using nonsense sounds instead of words). For sixteen years, his art studio was located above the Apollo Theatre, which is still a famous music venue in Harlem today.

Bearden's signature technique was collage. He made his art from cut pieces of magazine photos, painted paper, foil, posters, and pictures of other artwork. These materials were like his "paints." Bearden's collages broke up space and shapes in unusual ways. One writer described them as "patchwork cubism" (cubism is an art style that shows objects broken into geometric shapes and viewed from many angles at once).

The Places Bearden Painted

Rural North Carolina — where he was born and which he visited many times throughout his life.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — a steel-industry town where he spent summers and one year of high school. It was here that he first felt inspired to draw.

Harlem, New York City — the center of Black culture in America, where his family moved when he was a toddler.

St. Martin, in the Caribbean — an island where, later in life, he lived and worked for part of each year.

The Subjects Bearden Painted

• African-American life and traditions
• Stories from religion, history, literature, and myth
• Blues singers and jazz musicians

Bearden's Other Projects

• Illustrations for books
• Record album covers
• Stage sets and costumes
• Public murals

Bearden cared deeply about improving conditions for African-American artists. He didn't like the idea of treating Black artists as separate or special—but he also understood that they often had fewer opportunities than other artists. Bearden took real action to help make things more equal for Black artists.

"…we, as Negroes, could not fail to be touched by the outrage of segregation…" (from the catalogue of the first Spiral Group exhibition, 1965)

Bearden's Techniques

• Watercolor
• Gouache
• Collage
• Collage enlarged and photographed in black and white
• Edition prints (multiple copies of the same print)
• Monotypes (one-of-a-kind prints)
• Oil paintings
• And one sculpture!

Be on the Lookout for These:

Trains, spirit figures (conjurers), rural shacks, row houses and stoops, large hands, birds, musicians, windows, hills, African sculpture, smokestacks, sun and moon, cats, and roosters.

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Biography

Romare Bearden (1911–1988)

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina—the main city of Mecklenburg County—on September 2, 1911. He grew up in a middle-class African-American family. Both of his parents, Bessye and Howard, were college-educated, and everyone expected that Romare would succeed in life.

Around 1914, his family joined the Great Migration—a movement of many southern Black families to the northern and western United States. In the early 1900s, Jim Crow laws in the South stopped many Black Americans from voting and kept them from having equal access to jobs, education, health care, land ownership, and business opportunities. Like many other southern Black families, the Beardens moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Romare would call New York his home for the rest of his life.

In the 1920s, Harlem was a lively center of culture and new ideas—it was the heart of African-American culture at that time. Romare's mother worked as the New York editor of the Chicago Defender, a widely read African-American newspaper, and she became an important social and political figure in Harlem. Famous artists, writers, and musicians—including Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes—often visited the Bearden family's home. These kinds of gatherings would stay important throughout Romare's life. Meeting these talented people probably helped spark his lifelong love of jazz and literature.

"From far off some people that I have seen and remembered have come into the landscape…. Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us. Often you have no choice in dealing with this kind of sensation, things are just there…. There are roads out of the secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others."

Throughout his childhood, Bearden spent time away from Harlem, often staying with relatives in Mecklenburg County and P[assage cuts off here]