We found a great article at The Root website that covers his life story as an artist and celebrating his 100th birthday. We are grateful for the information they provided because Romare Bearden was a pioneer for all Black artists who have pursued careers in art today.
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.
Read the entire article at The Root
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