Romare Bearden

Monday, March 14, 1988
The Philadelphia Inquirer
OBITUARIES

By Laurie Becklund
Los Angeles Times

Romare Bearden, 75, whose striking collages of urban and rural black life earned him renown as one of the foremost contemporary American artists, died of cancer Saturday in New York.

Because he was highly successful early in his career, he became a symbol in the black art world and often used his personal influence to help younger black artists. His works are in the collections of virtually every major museum in the country. Last year, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Reagan.

"I think certainly that he's one of the great masters of the 20th century, especially over the last 40 years," said Lowery Sims, associate curator of 20th century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Though he began his 50-year artistic career as a painter, he was best known for his collages: tapestries of black life fashioned from scraps of photographs, cloth, colored paper and paint. For images, he frequently turned to women, birds, factories, jazz musicians and trains, as well as certain religious themes, such as baptism.

Though Mr. Bearden chose as his favorite subject matter the black world he knew, he resisted from early in his career the notion that there was such a thing as "black art and "white"art.

"It would be highly artificial for the Negro artist to attempt a resurrection of African culture in America ... culture is not a biologically inherited phenomenon," he wrote in 1946. "The critic asks that the Negro stay away from the white man's art. But the true artist feels that there is only one art, and that it belongs to all mankind."

Born in Charlotte, N.C., of middle class parents, he moved to New York City when he was a child and grew up in Harlem and Pittsburgh. He majored in mathematics at New York University and, at his mother's insistence,had planned to go to medical school. Not until he did cartooning for a college magazine did he grow interested in art and drop his plans to become a doctor.

During the Depression, he studied with the satiric German master George Grosz at the Art Students League in New York. He became associated with the 306 Group, an infor- mal organization of Harlem artists, the best known of whom was Jacob Lawrence.

His first exhibited paintings were mostly simple, stylized statements that drew from his childhood memories in the South and were well received. But his career was interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the all-black 372d Infantry Regiment.

After the war, he studied cubism and early abstract expressionism and held three solo exhibitions in 1945 alone. Feeling the need for more formal study, he went to Paris in the early 1950s, meeting Picasso, Braque and other artists of the time.

His determination to learn from the masters gave him a formal strength that set him apart from some of his contemporaries. His inspirations came from sources as diverse as the Iliad and the Odyssey to Chinese line drawings and Matisse.

With the growth of the civil rights movement, Mr. Bearden began refocusing more on his experiences as a black man in America. Black artists who called themselves the Spiral Group began meeting at his studio, discussing their problems as black artists and struggle for social, as well as artistic, equality.

Without being overtly political or sentimental, Mr. Bearden began portraying more intensely the disjointed rhythms of life in Harlem tenements and the communal rhythms of' black families he recalled from his' childhood days in the South.

Behind his art, there seemed always to be a story begging to be told. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson was so inspired by a Bearden painting titled Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket that he wrote a play about it called Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Mr. Bearden was also a songwriter who composed the music for the hit song "Sea Breeze" and about 20 other songs in the 1950s. As a youth, he pitched for the Boston Tigers, an all black baseball team. He also illustrated covers for magazines in the 1960s and '70s, including TV Guide, and designed sets for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company based in Harlem.

A large man whose modest, easygoing manner made him as appealing personally as he was artistically, he lived part-time in New York City.