Romare Bearden Honoring Black Culture
LiveAuctionTalk.com
Photo courtesy of Treadway Gallery.
African-American artist Romare Bearden was eight years old when his parents moved from rural North Carolina to Harlem. It was 1914, the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance. Pablo Picasso’s art and African art was also flourishing.
“Painting and art cannot be taught. You can save time if someone tells you to put blue and yellow together to make green, but the essence of painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.”
At the same time hundreds of thousands of blacks were migrating from the South and Harlem took on the feel of the South. When he decided to become an artist Bearden had lots to inspire him. Like any good storyteller he took it all in. He had community all around him and was also motivated by a group of black artists who later became the Harlem Artists Guild.
Bearden was light-skinned and could have easily passed for white but refused to do so. Instead, he devoted most of his art to the struggles of black people.
“You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from,” he said.
In his early years Bearden moved from tempera to watercolor to oil. Later on he took images of Harlem and the American South and created collages using magazine and newspaper clippings, photos, paper and fabrics. He also used sandpaper, graphite and paint.
Bearden wove his vision of day-to-day life into his art and like a jigsaw puzzle it all came together. Each piece in his collages had a purpose and history. He captured black culture in a Cubist style. He said his point was to paint the life of his people as he knew it. He began each work with an open mind and allowed it to develop spontaneously. In that sense, it was like jazz improvisation.
He advised one young artist to become a blues singer. Only sing on canvas he said. Music often became his subject matter.
No surprise, Duke Ellington (who was also a cousin) was one of his first patrons.
“The more I played around with visual notions as if I was improvising like a jazz musician the more I realized what I wanted to do as a painter, and how I wanted to do it,” he said.
Bearden tried a dozen different styles before he found himself really at home with collage. He raised the medium into an art form and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1987.
By the early 1960s, the works of two black artists, Bearden and Jacob Lawrence were showing up in New York’s best galleries.
“Painting and art cannot be taught. You can save time if someone tells you to put blue and yellow together to make green, but the essence of painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself,” he said.
Today Bearden’s works art resides in every major New York art museum and more around the country. At the time of his death the New York Times described him as one of America’s preeminent artists and the nation’s foremost collagist’s. Bearden’s work has also been reproduced into lithographic prints and sold worldwide.
Treadway Gallery offered a selection of Bearden’s signed, original, lithographs in its Sept. 15, and Nov. 24, 2019 auctions.
Here are some current values.
Romare Bearden Lithographs
Mecklenburg Autumn; signed, dated and titled; 4 of 30; 1981; 24 inches by 18 inches; $2,000.
The Falling Star; signed and numbered; 97 of 175; 23 ¾ inches by 18 inches; $2,500.
The Lantern; signed and numbered; 8 of 175; 23 ½ inches by 15 ½ inches; $2,990.
The Open Door; signed and numbered; 94 of 175; 24 inches by 17 ½ inches; $3,750.
