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 toRomare 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.
Later, Bearden mastered the oil monotype and created works in other media as well. As Bearden and fellow painter Carl Holty wrote in their 1969 book, The Painter's Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, "The great masters have a simplicity that often makes us wonder at the very majesty of something that should appear commonplace."
Indeed, recognizing and artistically bringing forth the majesty of the commonplace -- a snapshot of a Harlem street or Pittsburgh tenement, a woman in her garden or a factory hand preparing for work early in the morning -- is also Bearden's achievement.
Bearden has influenced a wide array of contemporary artists, from Kerry James Marshall to Kara Walker to Jefferson Pinder, but his most famous influence may be on the playwright August Wilson, who once saidthat Bearden's work "defined not only the character of black American life but also its conscience." Bearden was friends with many writers, from Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to Derek Walcott and Ntozake Shange, so it is perhaps fitting that his most widely known influence at this time would be on one of the most celebrated playwrights of the late 20th century.
