The Art of Romare Bearden

A Resource for Teachers

The Art of Romare Bearden was organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition received generous support from AT&T and additional sponsorship from Chevy Chase Bank. It traveled to five 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's division of education. The writers were Carla Brenner, Heidi Hinish, and Barbara Moore. Photo research and permissions were handled by Ira Bartfield, Sara Sanders-Buell, Leo Kasun, and Lesley Keiner. Stephanie Burnett and Rachel Richards produced the online version.

Special thanks go to Lynn Russell (chair, division of education), Chris Vogel (production manager), Donna Mann (senior publications manager), Phyllis Hecht (web manager), and the staff of the exhibition and photography departments. The education division also thanks Mary Lee Corlett, research associate, 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 copyright holders for the materials used here. Any omissions will be corrected in later printings.

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

Cover: Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 1966/1967, a collage of various papers with charcoal and graphite on canvas, 46 x 56 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund

Title page: Thank you...For F.U.M.L. (Funking Up My Life), detail, 1978, a collage of various papers with ink and graphite on fiberboard, 15 x 18⅜ in. Donald Byrd

Back cover: The Street, 1964, a collage of various papers on cardboard, 9⅝ x 11⅜ in. Milwaukee Art Museum, gift of Friends of Art and the African American Art Acquisition Fund

Except where noted, all works of art by Romare Bearden are © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Objectives

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

• Bearden drew on personal memories, African American cultural history, and literature as sources for his subject matter. He placed aspects of African American life within the context of universal themes—ideas and experiences that all people, regardless of background, can recognize and understand.
• Bearden's style was shaped by many influences, including Western European art, African sculpture, the work of his contemporaries in America and Mexico, and music—especially blues and jazz.
• Bearden is best known for his collages (artworks made by cutting and pasting various materials together), which he used in unique and inventive ways. He also worked in watercolor, gouache (a type of opaque watercolor paint), and oil; created edition prints and monotypes (a printmaking technique that produces a single, unique image); painted murals; and made one sculpture.
• Through his work within the arts community, Bearden supported and promoted artists of color.

How to Use This Packet

This packet includes slides, color reproductions, transparencies, and a music CD. Some images appear in more than one format to give teachers flexibility.

• Slides follow the order in which they appear in the text.
• Transparencies are linked to specific activities.
• Color reproductions are meant for classroom display.
• The Branford Marsalis Quartet CD, Romare Bearden Revealed, complements the packet's section on music.

Table of Contents

• Bearden at a Glance — 6
• Biography — 12
• Activities: Scrutinize a Bearden; Write a Poem Inspired by Collage
• Memories — 22
• North Carolina; Pittsburgh; Harlem; Paris; The Caribbean
• Activity: Make a Collage
• A Leader in the Arts Community — 32
• Working in Black and White
• Activities: Organize an Exhibition; What's Your Cause?; Study Art Like Bearden
• Music — 40
• Music as Subject; Music and Aesthetic Choices; Music and Life
• Activities: Draw to Music; Compare Poetry and Music
• Artistic and Literary Sources — 54
• Borrowing and Mixing; Changing
• Activity: Match Bearden's Works with Artistic Models
• Method — 64
• Collage: Bearden's Signature Style; Monotypes
• Activity: Make a Monotype
• Coda: Artist to Artist — 73
• Slide List — 74
• Reproduction List — 76
• Transparency List — 77
• Resource Finder — 78

Bearden at a Glance

Meet Romare Bearden. He stood 5 feet 11 inches and had a heavyset build. His friends called him Romie. After college, he worked as a social worker before becoming one of the most important artists in the United States, a status he held 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 household frequently visited by leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance—a flourishing of Black art, music, and literature centered in Harlem in the 1920s—including the poet Langston Hughes. So it's no surprise that as an adult, Bearden was a constant reader. He read poetry, philosophy, politics, and works on myth, religion, art, and ancient literature. He also read contemporary writers and thinkers, 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 Hercules Rustum); and Mikie (short for the Renaissance artist Michelangelo).

Bearden's art rises above easy categories because it connects the imagery of Black life and experience to universally understood human experience. This connection is the essence of Bearden's contribution to art.

Bearden didn't just read—he also wrote. He produced exhibition reviews, articles about his own artistic 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 after his death in 1993.

Jazz and blues music gave Bearden many of his subjects. Growing up, he heard both rural blues and uptown jazz—Duke Ellington's orchestra, Earl Hines's piano playing, and Ella Fitzgerald's scat singing (a jazz vocal style using improvised, wordless syllables). For sixteen years, his studio sat above the Apollo Theatre, which remains a landmark of Harlem's musical history.

Bearden's signature technique was collage. He used snippets from magazine photographs, painted papers, foil, posters, and art reproductions as his materials—his "paints," so to speak. His collages broke up space and form so distinctively that one writer described them as "patchwork cubism" (a reference to Cubism, an early-20th-century art movement that showed subjects as fragmented and viewed from multiple 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, and where he first felt inspired to draw.
• Harlem, New York City—the center of Black culture at the time—where his family moved when he was a toddler.
• St. Martin, an island in the Caribbean where, later in life, he lived and worked 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 was dedicated to improving opportunities for African American artists. Although he criticized the idea of giving Black artists special or separate treatment, he also recognized how limited their opportunities actually were. He made real, lasting commitments to leveling the playing field 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 photographically in black and white
• Edition prints
• Monotypes
• Oil paintings
• And one sculpture!

Be on the lookout for these recurring images:
Trains; spirit figures (conjurers); rural shacks; row houses and stoops; large hands; birds; musicians; windows; hills; African sculpture; smokestacks; sun and moon; cats; roosters.

Biography

Romare Bearden (1911–1988)

"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."

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina—the county seat of Mecklenburg County—on September 2, 1911, into a middle-class African American family. Both of his parents, Bessye and Howard, were college-educated, and Romare was expected to achieve success in life. Around 1914, his family joined the Great Migration, the movement of southern Black families to the North and West in search of better opportunities. At the time, Jim Crow laws in the South barred many Black citizens from voting and denied them equal access to jobs, education, health care, land ownership, and other basic rights. Like many southern Black families of that era, the Beardens settled in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City. Romare would call New York home for the rest of his life.

In the 1920s, Harlem was a thriving center of cultural and intellectual life and the heart of African American culture nationwide. Romare's mother served as the New York editor of the Chicago Defender, a widely read African American weekly newspaper, and became a prominent social and political figure in Harlem. Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and other celebrated artists, writers, and musicians were frequent guests at the Bearden family home. These social and intellectual gatherings would remain a constant in Romare's life, and his early encounters with such influential figures likely helped spark his lifelong love of jazz and literature.

Throughout his childhood, Bearden spent time away from Harlem, often staying with relatives in Mecklenburg County and...