Romare Bearden: The Complete Story
Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was the American artist who turned cut paper and photographs into the great visual record of Black life, from North Carolina porches to Harlem streets, and he found his signature medium, collage, at 52.
Before that he had been a mathematician, a songwriter, and for thirty years a New York social worker. All of it went into the pictures.
Romare Bearden at a glance
1911. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina. The family soon joined the Great Migration north to Harlem.
1935. Began drawing weekly political cartoons for the Baltimore Afro-American.
1954. Married the dancer Nanette Rohan, his partner and organizer for the rest of his life.
1964. Projections, the enlarged photostat collages, gave him his breakout show at 53.
1987. Received the National Medal of Arts, the year before his death.
Charlotte to Harlem
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, Bearden was carried north as a child in the Great Migration his art would later chronicle. He grew up in Harlem, where his mother, the journalist and activist Bessye Bearden, ran a salon that drew Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes through the family apartment.
The long apprenticeship
He took a mathematics degree in 1935, studied with the German satirist George Grosz at the Art Students League, and then spent three decades as a New York City caseworker, painting nights and weekends.
He even had a hit as a songwriter: Sea Breeze, recorded by Billy Eckstine. The myth of the overnight collage genius hides thirty patient years of painting first.
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1963, and the turn to collage
In 1963, as the civil rights movement crested, Bearden co-founded the Spiral group in his studio with Norman Lewis and others, asking what Black artists owed the moment.
Out of those meetings came his answer: photostat collages of Harlem and the South, shown as Projections in 1964. He was 52, and he had found the medium that made him Bearden.
The Block and the late fame
His six-metre collage The Block, a Harlem street unrolled like sheet music, entered the Met in the 1970s, and MoMA gave him a retrospective in 1971. In 1969 he helped found Cinque Gallery to show young Black artists, and in 1987 President Reagan hung the National Medal of Arts around the neck of a former caseworker from 125th Street.
The jazz standard he co-wrote
In the early 1950s, during a stretch away from painting, Bearden co-wrote songs.
One of them, Sea Breeze, was recorded by Billy Eckstine and became a real jukebox hit.
The collages that came later are full of trains, blues, and horn players. He had been inside the music, not just beside it.
A Black Odyssey
In 1977 Bearden retold Homer, casting the Odyssey with Black figures in cut paper seas.
Odysseus, Circe, and Poseidon move through flat blues and greens that remember both the Aegean and the Caribbean.
The Smithsonian toured the series nationally decades later, in 2012.
St. Martin, the second studio
From the 1970s Bearden and Nanette spent long stretches on St. Martin, her family’s island.
The Caribbean light loosened his color, and watercolors poured out between collages.
Harlem gave him his subject. The island gave him his palette’s second register.
Where to see Bearden
The Met owns The Block, MoMA and the Whitney hold major collages, the National Gallery in Washington keeps a deep group, and the Studio Museum in Harlem shows him in context. In Charlotte, the city named a downtown park after him in 2013.
The Romare Bearden questions that keep coming up
What is Romare Bearden famous for? Collages of Black American life, jazz-driven, layered from cut paper and photographs.
When did he start making collage? In 1963-64, at 52, after decades as a painter.
What was Spiral? The Black artists' group he co-founded in 1963 to answer the civil rights moment.
Where can I see his work? The Met, MoMA, the Whitney, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Did Romare Bearden write music? Yes. He co-wrote Sea Breeze, recorded by Billy Eckstine, during an early 1950s stretch away from painting.
What is A Black Odyssey? His 1977 series retelling Homer’s Odyssey with Black protagonists in collage, toured nationally by the Smithsonian in 2012.
More secrets to unlock
The caseworker with a retrospective
For most of the years he was making the collages the museums now fight over, Bearden kept his day job at the Department of Social Services. He processed cases until 1969, five years after Projections made him famous.
