Word: bearden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cover: Collage by Romare Bearden...
TIME'S cover artists often find themselves spending long hours, even days, devising a plan of attack, a theme that will give some added insight to their work. Romare Bearden, 54, had no such problem. Although he was born in Charlotte, N.C., he has lived in Manhattan most of the past 50 years, and he has strong feelings about the expanding troubles of his adopted city. After discussing his first cover assignment with TIME'S editors on the 25th floor of the TIME and LIFE Building in Manhattan, Bearden happened to look out of the window just before...
Buildings, police, slum kids, street crowds and the mayor-Bearden worked them all into the jigsaw combination of photomontage and pasteup collage that has become his personal style. It is a style he developed after years of study under such teachers as Satirist George Grosz and at Manhattan's Art Students League, and he uses it with remarkable versatility (TIME, Oct. 27, 1967). With it, he has portrayed the varied aspects of the world he has known-from Deep South sharecropper farms to the Harlem neighborhoods, where he spent his youth and later tried his hand at professional songwriting...
Sons & Suns. Bearden, 53, has spent 30 years developing his technique. In the late 1930s he studied under Satirist George Grosz at Manhattan's Art Students League, next fell under the combined influences of Picasso, García Lorca and Hemingway (a 1946 show of gaudy oils and watercolors was inspired by García Lorca's lament for a bullfighter). In the 1950s, he painted in Paris, took a turn in Manhattan as a professional songwriter but periodically returned to canvases of Negro life. He began to use collage only in the 1960s...
What makes the final product so fresh and captivating is the skill with which Bearden employs his polyglot artistic heritage. His jigsaw Afro-American faces borrow their cubistic profiles from Picasso; yet, as Bearden says, Picasso in turn was inspired by African masks. Bearden also cadges tricks from Bosch, Brueghel and the neo-Dadaists, pasting a tiny sun in a woman's eye as she greets her returning juvenile-delinquent son (pun intended) in The Return of the Prodigal Son. All this intermingling has the effect of broadening his pictures from the specific into the universal. It takes...