Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina on September 2, 1911. Though he moved with his family to Harlem at a very early age, he maintained familial ties to rural Mecklenburg County, North Carolina and Pittsburgh throughout his childhood. The iconography of his art reflects these continuing emotional and cultural attachments, with images both of rural landscapes and industrial settings.

Bearden took a degree in education from New York University in 1935, while also studying art with the German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League. Despite Bearden’s prodigious reputation as an artist, he was in fact also a professional caseworker with the New York City Department of Social Services (he did not fully retire from this affiliation until 1969), a songwriter, and arts writer. With the painter Carl Holty, he co-authored A Painter's Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting, and with journalist Harry Henderson, he co-wrote the posthumously published A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present.

Romare Bearden served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1945. In 1950, supported by the GI Bill, he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne. While in Europe, he also traveled extensively in Italy and Spain, studying the artists he most admired at the time — Picasso, Matisse, Duccio, and Giotto.

Upon his return to New York from Europe, Bearden married Nanette Rohan, a dancer and choreographer born on Staten Island in New York, with family origins in the Caribbean island of St. Martin.

Bearden’s early work reflects a more classical style, developing out of his interests in literature and religion. His art in this period meditates on such subjects as the Passion of Christ, Federico García Lorca's poem "Lament for a Bullfighter," François Rabelais' social satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Homer's epics. There are intimations of the collage work to come: these paintings are both abstracted and figural, with bold colors and outlines.

The collage work for which Bearden became internationally renowned began simply, composed primarily from magazine and newspaper cuttings. They marked a dramatic departure in his career as an artist, evolving from their early simplicity to the intricate preparation – the texturing, hand-painting, the use of fabric and other mixed media – of his mature and highly acclaimed work.

Romare Bearden co-founded the Cinqué Gallery, an artspace named after the Amistad mutiny of 1839 and dedicated to young minority artists in need of exhibition opportunities. In 1968, he also helped found the Studio Museum in Harlem (1968).