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Artist Quotation

"It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda…"

"[but] the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel. My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexities the life I know."—Romare Bearden

First a student of George Grosz at the Art Students League in New York, Romare Bearden then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Active and accomplished as a jazz and folk musician during the 1940s, Bearden experimented with abstraction when he returned to painting in the 1950s. Bearden and other African American artists formed a group known as Spiral, which considered the artist's responsibility to the community. He based his illustrations of the daily life and mythology of his people on a style partly derived from the use of photo projection and collage.

Source: Therese Thau Heyman. Posters American Style (New York and Washington, D.C.: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the National Museum of American Art, 1998).

Pictured: Romare Bearden, 1912–1988, Family, 1986, collage on wood, 28 x 20 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, Art-in-Architecture Program.