The complex and colorful art of Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is autobiographical and symbolic. Rooted in the history of western, African, and Asian art, as well as in literature and music, Bearden found his primary motifs in personal experiences and the life of his community.

During a career lasting almost half a century Bearden produced approximately two thousand works. Best known for his collages, he also completed paintings, drawings, monotypes, and edition prints; murals for public spaces, record album jackets, magazine and book illustrations, and costume and set designs for theater and ballet.

Music as Subject

Bearden looked to music—jazz and the blues—for many of his subjects. He painted entire series of works entitled Of the Blues and Of Jazz. They emerged from memory and experience of the South—of gospels and spirituals sung in church, of blue notes bending through warm nights. And they emerged from his life in New York—the sophistication of bands playing Harlem clubs, the excitement of crowded dance floors.

How could it be otherwise? When he was a boy, Bearden's family apartment was just across the street from the stage door of the Lafayette. Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald—they were all guests in the Bearden home. He lived only blocks from the Savoy Ballroom and for sixteen years worked in a studio above the fabled Apollo Theatre. Bearden saw jazz as a metaphor for the energy of life.

Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues: I, 1964

Three Folk Musicians, 1967

By Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden, Watching the Good Trains Go By, 1964,

Romare Bearden made art from observation and memory—the sights, sounds, and feelings of his personal history.

For Bearden, trains were weighted symbols. They signified the black migration North after slavery.

Many blacks migrated from the South for industrial jobs in northern cities such as Pittsburgh, and Bearden's grandparents rented rooms to them. This collage recalls the essence of life in their boardinghouse.

At left, a mill worker leaves for his shift, lunch bucket (made of crumpled foil) in hand.

Inside, front and center, is a warmly lit room, where Bearden remembered his grandmother "rubbing new boarders with cocoa butter. They didn't realize, when they first started, the terrific heat from those furnaces....the flames would lick out and scorch them." The life was hard, but the workers were making "a tremendous wage...."

Around the house are signs of "steel" scaffolding, a pulley, smokestacks, belching steam and fire.

The Block" is a tribute to Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City that nurtured both the life and work of artist Romare Bearden. Overall: H. 48, W. 216 in.

Each of the six panels of "The Block" presents an aspect of life in Harlem, depicting such neighborhood institutions as the Evangelical church, the barbershop, and the corner grocery store. Bearden took artistic license in revealing the private moments of tenement life as well as the exuberant humanity that existed in the prototypical city block.