Romare Bearden

Bearden grew up in a Harlem apartment that doubled as a salon for the Renaissance — his mother Bessye ran a Democratic women's league and wrote for the Chicago Defender, and Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes were the kind of people who came through. He had Cherokee, Italian and African ancestry and skin fair enough to move through rooms other Black New Yorkers could not enter. He was also good enough at baseball to pitch for Boston University and the semi-pro Pittsburgh Crawfords against Satchel Paige, and Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics offered him a contract in the 1930s, fifteen years before Jackie Robinson — on the condition, by some accounts, that Bearden pass as white to take it. He said no and studied art instead.

He drew political cartoons for the Baltimore Afro-American through the late 1930s while working days as a New York City welfare caseworker, served in the Army in Europe from 1942 to 1945, then studied philosophy in Paris on the GI Bill and met Picasso. None of it was the breakthrough. That came in 1963, when he helped found Spiral, a Harlem collective of Black artists arguing over what art owed the civil rights movement, and started cutting magazine photographs into scenes of Southern and Harlem life — baptisms, trains, kitchens, the blues. He enlarged the results into six-foot photostats for a 1964 series called Projections, and spent the next 24 years as the country's best-known practitioner of collage, with commissions running from a Berkeley mural to a Pittsburgh transit hall the size of a football field.

The baseball story is the one people repeat, but it points at a pattern. In the 1950s, when Bearden was painting biblical and abstract work, a New York Times critic praised him for outgrowing what he called Bearden's "debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns." A decade later Bearden built his reputation on exactly that ground, cutting Harlem baptisms, trains and kitchens out of magazines and pasting them into the collages that made him famous — the subject the critical establishment had once congratulated him for leaving behind. He also kept his day job at the city welfare department into his late forties, gallery representation notwithstanding, because painting alone did not pay the rent.

Bearden died in New York on March 12, 1988, of complications from bone cancer, a year after Reagan gave him the National Medal of Arts. The Times obituary called him the nation's foremost collagist. The Romare Bearden Foundation, set up two years later by his widow Nanette Rohan, now funds scholarships and artist grants and controls the rights to work that hangs in the Met, MoMA, the National Gallery and the Whitney. In 2011 the Postal Service put four of his paintings on a set of stamps. The Harlem building where he grew up is a landmark now, and the mother's salon it once housed gets cited more than the baseball diamond he walked away from.

Romare Bearden's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Spiral company
  Harlem collective he co-founded with Hale Woodruff and others 1963
• Projections artwork
  The photostat-enlarged collage series that made his reputation 1964
• Berkeley City Council mural building
  Sixteen feet wide, commissioned after a MoMA retrospective 1973
• Pittsburgh Gateway Center mural artwork
  Valued at roughly 15 million dollars by 2008 1984

• September 2, 1911 aged 0 Born in Charlotte, North Carolina
• 1935 aged ~24 Graduates NYU and begins drawing cartoons for the Baltimore Afro-American
• 1942 aged ~31 Enlists in the U.S. Army and serves in Europe through 1945
• 1950 aged ~39 Studies in Paris on the GI Bill and meets Picasso
• 1954 aged ~43 Marries Nanette Rohan
• July 5, 1963 aged 51 Co-founds the Spiral art collective in his studio
• 1964 aged ~53 Debuts the Projections collage series
• 1987 aged ~76 Receives the National Medal of Arts
• March 12, 1988 aged 76 Dies in New York City

• Jacob Lawrence 1917–2000
  Painter whose Migration Series chronicled the Great Migration of African Americans to the North. fellow chronicler of Black life
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. Harlem Renaissance connection through his mother's salon
• James Baldwin 1924–1987
  Essayist and novelist whose searing explorations of race, sexuality, and identity remain profoundly relevant. literary contemporary
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. awarded him the National Medal of Arts