Working in a modernist style, Romare Bearden, as a Black American, tried to express on canvas and collage the complexities and uniqueness of being a minority in American society. Many of his themes dealt with music. Another strong presence in many of Bearden's works is trains. Bearden felt that there was a commonality, or link between trains and their symbolic tie to life; he saw trains as communicating life's fluctuations and constant change. He also saw this in jazz, so in many of his works the viewer will see images of both trains and jazz.

Bearden's use of color was also unique. He was strongly affected by a trip he made to the Caribbean. Because he lived in such urban, "dirty" cities as New York, Bearden was overwhelmed by the rich, vivid, "clean" colors of the tropics. He soaked in these colors, and used them in his works to try and bring a little of that experience to his viewers back home in the city. Through all of Bearden's wide oeuvre, and all of his motivations for painting in a certain style, it all comes back to the same quote: "My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexities the life I know." Bearden succeeded in revealing those complexities, made possible by his knowledge of his own life experiences.

Bearden was highly praised critically, but this high praise was never matched by a high price for his work. Bearden never considered himself a black artist, either, although many wanted to pigeonhole him as such.

His tone was affectionate and celebratory, and subjects include many aspects of American life from that in New York City to Southern voodoo women that recalled experiences in his youth in rural North Carolina. During the 1960s he turned to collages dealing with the daily life of black people.

He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and spent his youth in Harlem of New York City, where his father was very active in the New York arts scene. Bearden remembered having artists and musicians in the family home all the time, a presence that carried over into his own adult lifestyle. When he began to live on his own, it was his apartment that became the gathering place for artists and musicians. Bearden became a huge jazz and blues fanatic through this lifelong exposure, and he constantly incorporated his love of music into his art.

In 1935, he graduated from New York University with a degree in mathematics, and the following year he studied with George Grosz at the Art Students League. Although he studied philosophy and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris, Bearden never had a formal education in art making, but this did not stop him from following his heart and pursuing something that he truly loved to do. From 1938, he was intermittently employed as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Service and also was a song writer with several published works.

Early in Bearden's art career he met Stuart Davis, another successful painter of the time. Davis was also strongly influenced by jazz, and he showed Bearden how to visualize relationships between painting and jazz, which may not initially seem to share many similarities.

Bearden, through associations with other artists such as Davis as well as his own self-study, developed a strong link between the two disciplines. For example, jazz and painting can be "hot" or "cool." Both require great order and integrity. Both have improvisation as a key ingredient in the creative process. In his painting, Bearden sought connections. And as in many great jazz works, Bearden refused to "close" his painting--he left the painting open to interpretation and manipulation by the viewer.

In 1974, he did a huge commissioned mural for Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, but it was rejected because it had bared female breasts and because it had Black American images but nothing that reflected the local Latino population. The mural sat in a warehouse until personnel of Bellevue Hospital rescued and installed it, with its final location being the hospital chapel