Romare Bearden, born in 1912 in Charlotte, N.C., to a railway worker and a politically active editor, Romare Bearden lived at various times in Saskatchewan and Pittsburgh. He attended Boston University and New York University. Later, he studied with the German expatriate George Grosz at the Art Students' League. His first job, in 1938, was as a caseworker with the New York City department of social services. Following a wartime stint with the U.S. Army, he had a socialist-realist painting accepted into the biennial exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Thus encouraged, he sailed for France, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Still, Bearden did not ignore his origins. Romare Bearden emerged as a major artist in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights struggle. His "photomontage projections" -- made up of images snipped from newspapers and magazines, then enlarged photographically -- perfectly captured the tension, alienation and dislocation of contemporary black life. In this he was distinctly a man of his era, and of his people. Yet Bearden, who died in 1988 at age 76, was far more than a visually stimulating blip on the social-awareness meter. His creative career, like his precedent-setting work, embodied much that was pertinent in the tumultuous days of the "freedom rides," Dr. Martin Luther King, the murders in Mississippi and the snarling police dogs of Bull Connor in Birmingham, Ala. He was, for one thing, a fine musician. His photomontages drew upon the vitality of jazz as it had developed during the Harlem Renaissance. He also was a cultural chronicler, working into his complex works all sorts of art-historical references, including some that might have been reviled as passe by his more "relevant" peers. Finally, he was a daring innovator, using art-making processes we most likely would dismiss as primitive -- paste-up, photographic copying and enlargement -- to bring about results that, in their balance, spatial dynamism and internal rhythms have seldom been surpassed, even in these days of copying machines. He truly was his own man.

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"Early Carolina Morning "
Limited Edition 950
Lithograph
Estate signed
image Size= 30" x 21"

"School Bell Time" Limited Edition 950 Lithograph Estate signed image Size= 38" x 26" Price $1050 Quantity desired

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