ROMARE BEARDEN

I have always had a keen interest and enjoyment of the work of Romare Bearden. 

Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) 
was an African-American artist.  Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, educated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bearden moved to New York City after high school and went on to graduate from NYU in 1935. He began his artistic career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he endeavored to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War IIon the European front. He later returned to Paris in 1950 and studied Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1950.
 After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s, when Bearden became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the struggle for civil rights.

Details and preliminaries from The Block, 1971 by Romare Bearden 
Cut and pasted printed, colored and metallic papers, photostats, pencil, ink marker, gouache, watercolor, and pen and ink on Masonite

“I listened for hours to recordings of Earl Hines at the piano. Finally, I was able to block out the melody and concentrate on the silences between the notes. I found this was very helpful to me in the placement of objects in my paintings and collages. Jazz has shown me ways of achieving artistic structures that are personal to me.”

Bearden Foundation