Envision Equity February 2019 Special Black History Month Edition

Envision Equity February 2019
Romare Bearden
An only child, Romare Bearden was born on September 2, 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina. When he was still a
child, the family moved to Harlem, New York City, where his mother was a well-known journalist and political
activist. He received a bachelor of science degree from New York University because, he said, "I thought I wanted
to be a medical doctor." E. Simms Campbell, the renowned African American cartoonist, encouraged him to
study painting with George Grosz, the German-born painter and satirical draftsman, at the Art Students' League
in New York. "It was Grosz, " Bearden remembered with gratitude, "who first introduced me to classical
draftsmen like Hogarth and Ingres." Essential as formal institutions were to his development as a person and an
artist, his association with African American artists and intellectuals of the Depression period cannot be
minimized. Among these were the painters Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence and the writer Ralph Ellison,
who maintained an atmosphere of social and political concern which heavily influenced Bearden's early work.
Even though his concern for these problems in no way diminished later and all his works abound in ethnic
subject matter, the mild-mannered, almost shy artist insisted that he was not a social propagandist. "My subject
is people, " he said. "They just happen to turn out to be Negro.”
Early in his career he emulated the styles of Rufino Tamayo and José Clemente Orozco, painting simple forms
and echoing the crude power he had come to admire in medieval art. His paintings of everyday black life were
forceful in color; the figures followed simple patterns and their statements were literal, as in graphic art rather
than painting. By 1945 he had begun to adopt a less literal, more personal style, which
proved
to be the most congenial for his unique artistic expressions. In the 1950s, while working as
a New
York City Welfare Department investigator, he expressed his feelings in lyrical
abstractions.
The early 1960s brought a period of transition for Bearden. In 1963 a group of African
American artists began meeting in his Harlem studio. Calling themselves the Spiral
Group, they sought to define their roles as black artists within the context of the
growing civil rights movement.
His "Projections" series, exhibited in 1964, caused a wave of controversy
and excitement. The tormented faces of African American women
hanging upside down on the cracked stoops of Harlem tenements, New
York bridges soaring out of Carolina cotton fields, and African
pyramids colliding with American folk singers strumming guitars
prompted one critic to write that the show comprised "a collection of
headhunters." These startling images, constructed from newspaper
and magazine photographs, had been enlarged from their original
color into huge black-and-white photographs that provided the
artist's desired effect of urgency.
Mr. Jeremiah's Sunset Guitar, 1981.