ABSTRACT
Although Romare Bearden is considered one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century, his early cartooning has never received the attention it deserves, perhaps because its aggressive political message contrasts too much with his later, less activist and more mainstream work. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, Bearden acted as a historian, necessarily from the margins of mainstream historians, because of the racial climate in the United States. Bearden, as an African American artist profoundly interested in questions of memory and identity, had a commitment to this issue dating from the political cartooning he had done as a young man attending New York University, a period when he was greatly inuenced both by African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois’s views on memory and identity and the German émigré artist George Grosz, whose work was also tied to remembrance. His training under Grosz profoundly inuenced his cartooning, as well as his career for the next ve decades.
