{"data":{"id":"80","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":80,"topgoose_id":2764,"tms_id":80,"display_name":"Romare Bearden","sort_name":"Bearden Romare","display_date":"1911–1988","begin_date":"1911","end_date":"1988","biography":"\u003cp\u003eA leading figure of twentieth-century American art, Romare Bearden is best known for his collaged scenes of everyday African American life. As an undergraduate in the early 1930s, Bearden explored his artistic interests and worked as a political cartoonist for college journals and activist publications. After graduating, he enrolled at the Art Students League and began painting under \u003ca href=\"/artists/540\"\u003eGeorge Grosz\u003c/a\u003e, while studying the work of Mexican muralists, American regionalist painters, and seventeenth- century Dutch masters. Traveling under the GI Bill to Paris in 1950, he also studied French, philosophy, and Buddhism.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the early 1960s, after a notable\ncareer experimenting in a variety of\nabstract idioms, Bearden initiated a dramatic\ntransformation in his art. Returning to\nfiguration, he shifted to an intricate collage\ntechnique as his primary medium for the\nremainder of his prolific career. \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/1440\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eEastern Barn\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e is composed of photograph and magazine\ncutouts combined with fragments of\ncolored and textured paper to portray two\nmen and a woman against the flat planes\nof a barn. Though a location for this scene\nis not named, Bearden often focused\non subjects from the rural South, the locus\nof the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s.\nMemories of his native North Carolina\nand travels to the South inspired a number\nof the collages he produced in the\nlate 1960s. Describing the way in which\ncompositional structure and meaning were\nbuilt from the accumulation of disparate\nelements in these collages, Bearden wrote,\n“My intention . . . is to reveal through pictorial\ncomplexities the richness of a life I know.”\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500007871","wikidata_id":"Q1291679","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:35:36.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-03T07:01:18.290-05:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/80/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/80/exhibitions"}}}}