American artist, the major collagist of the twentieth-century Black American tradition and, alongside Jacob Lawrence, one of the two visual artists whose work has most fully translated the themes of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, and the mid-century Black American experience into a sustained body of visual art.
Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1911, and his family moved to Harlem during the Great Migration when he was a child. He grew up on West 131st Street in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance — the family boardinghouse was a gathering place for Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and other figures — studied at NYU (where he was a cartoonist for the student newspaper), took courses with George Grosz at the Art Students League, and worked as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Services for more than two decades, painting in the time he could make. He studied in Paris on the GI Bill after the war, met Brancusi and Braque, and absorbed the European modernist collage tradition, but the decisive turn in his work came in 1964 when, in response to the civil-rights crisis, he began the series of large photomontage-collages — Projections — that are his signature achievement.
The collages layer photographs from Life and Look magazines, hand-painted paper, fabric, and found materials into dense, flattened compositions depicting Black American life: the rural South of his North Carolina childhood (Mecklenburg County series), the Harlem streets of his youth, jazz clubs, church interiors, baptisms, domestic kitchens, factory work. The method — cutting, repositioning, scaling figures to non-naturalistic proportions — is indebted to Cubist and Dada collage but remade for a specifically Black American subject. The result is neither documentary nor abstraction but a visual equivalent of what Ralph Ellison (Bearden's close friend and the most articulate interpreter of his work) called "the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history."
Bearden's late work extended the collage method into large-scale mural commissions and watercolors of the Caribbean (he kept a studio in St. Martin). He was a co-founder of the Spiral group (1963), formed by Black artists in response to the March on Washington, and of the Cinque Gallery, which exhibited work by young artists of color. His writings on art include the important 1969 essay "The Negro Artist's Dilemma" and, with Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present (1993, posthumous).
Bearden is on the graph as the visual complement to the Black American literary tradition the graph carries most heavily — Ellison, Hughes, Morrison, Baldwin — and as the artist who most fully merged European modernist collage with Black American social and cultural material.