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Romare Bearden, the most widely known African-American artist of the 20th century, was born 100 years ago, on Sept. 2, 1911. While exhibitions of his work are ongoing, this year has seen quite a few (pdf) remarkable ones. The U.S. Postal Service will also honor Bearden with a group of four stamps next month.
Just like his distant cousin Duke Ellington (the first buyer of a Bearden work), he has always commanded the respect of some establishment critics, while not convincing others. Ellington still faced prejudice-based insults from the establishment decades after wowing the critics.
Bearden, who died in 1988, has inexplicably been excluded from art anthologies and still receives eyebrow-raising, oddly phrased faint praise (such as from a prominent art critic recently). Like Ellington, Bearden mastered the most sophisticated new trends and techniques in his field but always hewed close to the African-American experience.
Bearden tried and excelled at various styles as a young artist and hit his stride in the mid-1960s, synthesizing Euro-American modernist, African and African-American traditions into an original style, making his greatest impact with photomontage and wide varieties of collage. One of his best-known works, The Block -- a sophisticated critique of the New York City building programs of Robert Moses, according to Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition -- is a masterpiece in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has based educational programs around the work and created a cool Web page about it.
The Official Dedication of Memorial to Take Place on Sunday, August 28th.
