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The presentation of collages by Romare Bearden is the first retrospective of his work since the "Prevalence of Ritual" exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1971.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 2, 1914, Romare Bearden spent his childhood in Pittsburgh. He summered in Charlotte with his grandparents until the age of 14. As an adolescent, Bearden lived in New York City, in Harlem, where he was introduced to, and strongly influenced by, the musical and cultural innovations of jazz by such Harlem Renaissance celebrities as Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. This influence later emerged in Bearden's painting as a form of visual orchestration of many of the musical pieces and styles that he had been exposed to years earlier. After he graduated from New York University in 1935 with a degree in mathematics, he decided to become an artist and studied for a year and a half under George Grosz at the Art Students League.

Bearden served in the army from 1942 to 1945. Between 1950 and 1954, he lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne, where he met a number of European artists, including Brancusi, Helion, Braque and Reichel. He also formed associations with several American writers and artists there, among them poet Samuel Allen and novelists James Baldwin and Albert Murray. Upon his return to the United States, Bearden took up songwriting for a time, but soon returned to painting on the advice of his friend, philosopher Heinrich Bluecher.

In 1971 and 1972, retrospective exhibitions of Bearden's work were held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; North Carolina,

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