Romare Bearden

1911–1988

A 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 George Grosz, 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.

In the early 1960s, after a notable career experimenting in a variety of abstract idioms, Bearden initiated a dramatic transformation in his art. Returning to figuration, he shifted to an intricate collage technique as his primary medium for the remainder of his prolific career. Eastern Barn is composed of photograph and magazine cutouts combined with fragments of colored and textured paper to portray two men and a woman against the flat planes of a barn. Though a location for this scene is not named, Bearden often focused on subjects from the rural South, the locus of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. Memories of his native North Carolina and travels to the South inspired a number of the collages he produced in the late 1960s. Describing the way in which compositional structure and meaning were built from the accumulation of disparate elements in these collages, Bearden wrote, “My intention . . . is to reveal through pictorial complexities the richness of a life I know.”

Getty record

Introduction

Romare Bearden was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem where his mother led the New York office of an African-American newspaper. As a result, Bearden became familiar with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance at an early age. To support himself, Bearden worked a full-time job in the New York Department of Social Services and, until the 1960s, had to limit his creative output to the evenings and weekends. Early in his career this included writing and songwriting, as well as the fine arts. He began as a painter and later developed an interest in interested in collage and printmaking. He strove to produce innovative work that concentrated on the African-American experience. In 1963, together with Norman Lewis, he founded the Spiral Group, an organization that produced works of art in response to the civil rights movement.

Country of birth

United States

Roles

Artist, collagist, painter, writer

ULAN identifier

500007871

Names

Romare Bearden, Romare Howard Bearden, Rommie Bearden, Romy Bearden, Romare H. Bearden

View the full Getty record

Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 24, 2025.

On view
Floor 5

First acquired
1969

Date of birth
September 2, 1911

API
artists/80