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William H. Johnson: An American Modern

William H. Johnson, Maternal, ca. 1944. Oil on paperboard, 26 3/4 x 21 in. (68.1 x 53.2 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.639.
William H. Johnson, Maternal, ca. 1944. Oil on paperboard, 26 3/4 x 21 in. (68.1 x 53.2 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.639.

… The world that Johnson painted in Florence that year – a supernaturally colored domain comprised of regal, yet humble, black women installed on porches, children at play and at rest, and flowers in riotous, full bloom – was, at once, familiar and outlandish, connecting the artist to the ultimate locus of origin: mother; while envisioning that same, fundamental life source within a part cultural, part invented space of impromptu games, performed rituals, imparted legacies, and constantly changing scenery. Like the “too-big-to-be-breast-fed” child in Johnson’s Maternal, the artist returned in 1944 to the comforting, all embracing arms of home, partaking of not only the emotional sustenance of the female element, but of the vertigo-inducing experience of self-consciousness, of finally grasping one’s purpose in life even if it meant the proverbial reentry into the symbolic womb: in this instance, Johnson’s primal, African American folk roots. Although it was practically second nature for this Expressionist to feel his way through the world, and to visually cast it in the operative role of emotional vehicle for his art, it was another matter altogether for the bereft and distraught Johnson to totally immerse himself in the maternal lap and bosom of Alice/Florence, and to transform his temporary asylum and sanctuary into a new and, arguably, more honest mode of modern painting.

“Trembling Vistas, Primal Youth: William H. Johnson’s Painterly Expressionism, 1927-1935” and “Devotion and Disrepute: William H. Johnson’s Florence, South Carolina, Paintings, circa 1944” in William H. Johnson: An American Modern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 22-39, 88-101.

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Barkley L. Hendricks, Anew

Barkley L. Hendricks, George Jules Taylor, 1972. Oil on canvas, 232.3 x 153 cm (91 7/16 x 60 1/4 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., William C. Whitney Foundation, 1973.19.2.

Every intermittent sighting of Barkley L. Hendricks’s work over the past few decades has been a revelation. Paintings previously seen (and about which I claimed some critical expertise) were invariably a surprise and an art historical conundrum to behold again and again. The particular modes of dress to which Hendricks’s subjects subscribed were not only a lens onto a prior history of fashion and style, but a close-up view of the multiplicity of personas that Hendricks and his subjects adopted, outwardly crying out it seemed for post-portrait examinations. The few recognizable subjects in paintings whom I later met and had a chance to compare to their artistic portrayals always elicited a barrage of questions in my mind (re: What were the circumstances of the picture?  How does the subject feel about his/her portrayal?  Who is really calling the shots here?). Much of this work has been in existence since the 1960s and, yet, its pictorial weight and eternal allure is a mystery in today’s guileless world of visual excess and hyper-visibility.

“Barkley L. Hendricks, Anew,” Barkley L. Hendricks/Birth of the Cool, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker (Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2008), 38-57.

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Betye Saar’s Mojo Hands

Betye Saar. Black Girl’s Window. 1969.
Wooden window frame with paint,
cut-and-pasted printed and painted
papers, daguerreotype, lenticular
print, and plastic figurine, 35 3/4 x 18
x 1 1/2″ (90.8 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm). Gift
of Candace King Weir through The
Modern Women’s Fund, and Committee
on Painting and Sculpture Funds

On the American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt’s utilization of the African American conjurer as a recurrent character in his short stories, the literary critic Richard H. Brodhead wrote that the act of entreating, via a vernacular hermetic, invariably appears in these writings “as a recourse, a form of power available to the powerless in mortally intolerable situations.”  I thought about this statement and its articulation of a particular set of remedies when I saw Betye Saar’s art assemblage Black Girl’s Window recently.  Completed in 1969 – at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the United States – and exhibited widely in its forty-odd year existence, Black Girl’s Window has long functioned, in the aforementioned framework, as an intersectional, multivalent talisman, inadvertently transforming Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ black-woman-at-the-window allegory into a threshold for which the occult combats a delimiting racial and gendered status quo. Now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Black Girl’s Window tacitly cajoles that revered institution, famous for celebrating formalism and for its indifference to racial and social matters in art, to now confront social concerns and political activism, albeit through Saar’s phantasmagoric aperture.

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Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer. Elvira Dyangani Ose and Mario Marinetti, eds. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2016.

The Brown Paper Bag Test: Hervé Télémaque’s Exploded Discourse

Fonds d’Actualite, no 1., 2002. Acrylic on canvas. 295 x 375 cm. Centre National des Artes Plastiques / Fonds National d’Art Contemporain. On loan to the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Courtesy Hervé Télémaque. Photo: ADAGP, Paris/CNAP/Visuel Fourni par La Gallerie.

In his collection of essays, Caribbean Discourse, ´Edouard Glissant describes the Creole languages and literatures of the French Antilles and the pedagogical projects that strive to bring greater understanding and appreciation to créolitié as an “exploded discourse.” In Glissant’s thinking, the ruptures and disassembling in vernacular speech in the Francophone Caribbean result in an “exemplary phenomenon,” a “counterpoetics,” and a “compact mass, pushing us through a dimension of emptiness where we must with difficulty and pain put it all back together.” Glissant’s idea of fractured yet imaginative Creole communiqués have a counterpart in the paintings, sculptures, and collages of the Haitian-born, Paris-based artist Hervé Télémaque (b. 1937). After studying in the mid-1950s at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Télémaque moved to New York City, where he attended the Art Students League and embraced abstract expressionism. By 1961, Télémaque had relocated to Paris, where his first paintings produced there brought him much success. Télémaque’s subsequent career, during which he took up structuralist, poststructuralist, and postmodernist modes of image making, not only garnered broad institutional recognition and critical accolades, but also situated him within the French art historical modernist canon and a cultural field that one might describe as black Atlantic, global in scope and discursively cosmopolitan. This article summarily tracks Hervé Télémaque’s sixty-plus-year career: a path where his artistic practices harken back to Glissant’s theories of an insurgent creolité and produce uncharted, creative passageways in concert with his fellow wayfarers throughout the greater African diaspora.

“The Brown Paper Bag Test: Hervé Télémaque’s Exploded Discourse,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 42-43 (November 2018): 234-249.

https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-7185905

Black Parnassus: Chicago in the Interwar Years

Photograph of a painting class at the South Side community art center (with Eldzier Cortor and Gordon Parks).
Painting class at the South Side community art center (with Eldzier Cortor and Gordon Parks). Photographer: Jack Delano. Library of Congress.

In the early to mid-20th-century Chicago, Illinois loomed large in the collective imaginations of African Americans.  Unlike the similarly romanticized, predominately black New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Chicago’s African American South Side retained a kind of folk/rural character and racial authenticity as compared to other northern U.S. destinations for southern black migrants.  Even when one considers Harlem’s international notoriety – a residual effect of Harlem’s pivotal location in Manhattan – and its black cultural infusions from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Caribbean, Chicago’s large black population and their familial ties to the deep South and that region’s treasured jazz and blues traditions ineradicably colored that community’s persona and, in conjunction with a marked commercial/industrial profile, an illustrious cohort of black entrepreneurs, and an indispensible working-class, reinforced Chicago’s reputation as the other early 20th-century, African American urban mecca.

Harlem’s cultural efflorescence in the 1920s and 1930s, which thrust into a national spotlight artistic luminaries like Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Paul Robeson, had an equivalent in the somewhat synchronic “Chicago Negro Renaissance,” as evidenced in the latter’s creative offerings from Earl Hines, Richard Wright, Archibald Motley, and Katherine Dunham.  These two, competing black urban “rebirths” were more accurately examples of a global black modernist, or “New Negro,” movement that, in addition to New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, emerged in the interwar years in other metropolises (like Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Kingston, Jamaica; and Paris, France) with sizeable black intelligentsias and creative cliques.

And, yet, in the years roughly between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II black Chicago experienced its own cultural flowering: a place and time in which the arts and letters, from Florence Price’s symphonic works to Big Bill Broonzy’s blues recordings, and from William Edouard Scott’s impressionistic canvases to Archibald Motley’s hothouse paintings, contributed to Chicago’s reputation as an African American focalized destination.  Like Mount Parnassus in antiquity, Chicago’s South Side, in spite of the economic hardships of its inhabitants, was also the home of poetry, music, and art, expressed in plaintive or remonstrating testimonials, rousing church services, foot-tapping jazz, and images of beautiful and fashionable people.  Painting a broad picture of interwar black Chicago, this essay explores how Chicago’s South Side became an African American cultural capital, with special attention to the role that the visual arts and culture more broadly played in this conferral.

“Black Parnassus: Chicago in the Interwar Years,” in Gordon Parks, The New Tide: Early Works 1940-1950, ed. Philip Brookman, Wash., DC: National Gallery of Art, 2018, 259-265.

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