Romare Howard Bearden New York (1911-1988) WATERFALL LANDSCAPE, ST. MARTIN, VIRGIN ISLANDS watercolor, framed, signed: upper right sight size: H12" W8 1/2" *Artist biography: Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and studied at Boston University, New York University (B.A. 1935), the Art Students League (1936-37), and Columbia University. During the 1930s, Bearden was involved with 306, an art school and workshop in Harlem where his cousin by marriage, Charles Alston, was a leading instructor. From 1942-1945, Bearden served in the United States Army, and in 1950, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris, where he studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne and met, among others, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Miro. He was a founding member of Spiral group (1963) and a co-founder with Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow of the Cinque Gallery, a non-profit organization that showed the work of minority artists (1969). Bearden's early work belongs to the school of social realism, but after his return from Europe his images became more abstract. In the early 1960s, Bearden began to make collages. For Bearden the collages were "an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience." By integrating new and old materials, Bearden created complex scenes that were often inspired by the African-American experience, mythology and religion. Bearden's work has been celebrated in numerous museum exhibitions across the United States, and in 1990 the Romare Bearden Foundation was established to preserve the legacy of the artist. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC organized a retrospective for 2003.