The American painter-collagist Romare Howard Bearden (1914-1988) was a leading abstractionist until racial strife in the United States led him to focus more directly on African American subject matter, with related changes in his style and technique.

An only child, Romare Bearden was born on September 2, 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina. When he was still a child, the family moved to Harlem, New York City, where his mother was a well-known journalist and political activist. He received a bachelor of science degree from New York University because, he said, "I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor." E. Simms Campbell, the renowned African American cartoonist, encouraged him to study painting with George Grosz, the German-born painter and satirical draftsman, at the Art Students' League in New York. "It was Grosz," Bearden remembered with gratitude, "who first introduced me to classical draftsmen like Hogarth and Ingres." Essential as formal...