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Images of Dignity
John Haberin New York City
Charles White and Soul of a Nation
"An artist must bear a special responsibility." Charles White articulated it and felt it—as an artist, a leftist, and an African American.
MoMA opens its White retrospective with that quote, and it weighs on him at every moment. He felt the necessity to speak to the condition of black America, but also to shape for the better its past and future. Yet, as the quote continues, he also felt that responsibility extend to "a deep, abiding concern for humanity." He wanted to help black people to overcome "a plague of distortions, stereotyped and superficial caricatures . . . in popular visual culture." Yet he also saw his art as "images of dignity." He may have believed in humanity, but, as T. S. Eliot wrote, humankind cannot bear very much reality. 
At only twenty-one, in 1939, fresh out of the Art Institute of Chicago on a merit scholarship, White was already at work on a mural for the Works Progress Administration on Five Great American Negroes. His choices range over a century and from the struggle for freedom, in Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to the struggle for an education and equality in Booker T. Washington. They range, too, to a scientist, George Washington Carver, and a singer, Marian Anderson, whose voice rang out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that very year, to seventy-five thousand listeners. He also shows people gathering behind one leader, in a pained but inexorable march, and looking up to another. Even so, a middle-aged woman in glasses in the foreground looks attractive, intelligent, and intent. The mural is a triumph in its unity, its multipart composition, its focus on people, and its drawing—but can it ever be responsible enough?
Unlike White, "Soul of a Nation" in Brooklyn opens in darkness. The sole bursts of white appear in Ku Klux Klan hoods and in a grim processional. And its painter, better known as an Abstract Expressionist with a delicate touch, has squeezed a tribute to the civil rights marches into a narrowing field bordered above and below by pitch black. Another artist, known for the funk of his colorful painting and photocollage, has channeled his echoes of Cubism, Pop Art, and urban realism into black and white.
Black here, though, is not altogether bleak. The tribute is there, and so is the funk. They speak to the promise of the 1960s in politics, protest, and African American art. Yet they speak, too, to what text in a painting by Merton D. Simpson calls The Hidden Crisis—the shame invisible to white eyes. And then, like Kenny Dunkan dancing, they make both their pride and the blot on America visible. A show subtitled "Art in the Age of Black Power" has less to do with Black Power than with black power, as a matter of art.
A special responsibility
Almost everything for Charles White is about people and drawing. His retrospective, curated by Esther Adler and the Art Institute's Sarah Kelly Oehler, has face after face and gesture after gesture. Most compositions stick to just one person, and any company beyond what a title calls Two Alone is a crowd. As for his line, no one should experience a show in thumbnails, especially not in black and white, but try it here and almost everything becomes a drawing, even tempera or oil. In prints he favored linoleum cuts, like a modern woodcut, for his harsh precision. Another favorite medium, charcoal, could pass for soft pencil at that in its thoroughness and hard edge.
White often started on paper, with faces and broader areas of gray, reinforcing highlights before transferring them to canvas. He favors strong contrasts between substance and highlights, and both run everywhere. Backgrounds share much the same textures as his polished flesh, almost like stippling, and anything beyond sky is rare. Bodies press close to the viewer, as workers, farmers, or preachers. They cross arms or raise the tools of their trade in defiance, even when anxious or in need. As in a portrait of Harry Belafonte, a friend of the artist, with his face raised to the light, nothing matters more than dignity and radiance.
It is a lot to bear, like that special responsibility or reality. The faces and gestures have more in common with the earnest bulk of George Bellows early in the century or the awkward realism of Grant Wood than the overlapping flat fields of African Americans like Jacob Lawrence or Romare Bearden. White would have known American Gothic from the Art Institute, but he "improves" on Wood by giving a woman with a pitchfork a greater self-reliance. He admired the socialism and mural scale of such Mexican artists as Diego Rivera—enough that he and his first wife, Elizabeth Catlett, traveled south of the border to see more of them. Yet he strips them entirely of a grounding in Cubism or even Modernism. At least one strong arm wielding a wrench has the schematic flatness of Soviet realism.
He matures quickly and barely changes, even as his career advances. A soldier in 1945 or a mother left behind looks closer to the style and trauma of World War I in art. In three more murals and in solo faces, White keeps up with the headlines and with history. He befriends Richard Wright, depicts Wright's Native Son, and admires Paul Robeson as not just an actor and African American, but also the man persecuted for his communism. He compares Harriet Tubman to Moses and makes John Brown a bearded prophet. Nothing, though, seems dearer to his heart than music and musicians, most especially singers.
It is hard to separate his personal projects from commercial ones, illustrating on behalf of others. He produced covers for Spartacus, the novel of slave rebellion by Howard Fast, and the Daily Worker—but also for Vanguard records. Born in Chicago, White moved in 1947 to New York, where he lived through the glory years of Abstract Expressionism without its touching him in the least. Still, it brought him closer to the Harlem Renaissance, folk music, and the jazz scene. It must have been hard for him to leave for LA in 1956, where he lived until his death in 1979. Yet his students at Otis Art Institute included Kerry James Marshall and David Hammons.
That may come as a surprise, given their storytelling, experiment, and (in the case of Hammons) elusiveness. Still, he did finally start to grow, at least a little. He adds scumbling, text, and a seemingly bloody hand print. He allows fragmented planes akin to photocollage. He drops his eternal optimism in 1966 long enough to title a series J'Accuse, after the 1898 pamphlet by Emile Zola in protest of anti-Semitism. He bases another series on wanted posters, in 1971, decades before Black Lives Matter. He had lived through the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but neither proved radical enough, even as his artistic conservatism would never fully go away.
The power in Black Power
"Soul of a Nation" has little to do with any one movement, and it seems to redouble not one but two museum surveys of black artists, one political and the other entirely abstract, although it omits Eugene J. Martin. It claims work from 1958 to 1983, although the six or eight years before 1971 account for almost all of it. Even then the image of Martin Luther King, Jr., and not Stokely Carmichael (who coined the term Black Power) dominates. The sole documentary TV clip can do only so much to compensate. An unseen interviewer asks Malcolm X if he is not on the "lunatic fringe"—oblivious to Malcolm's having just called the treatment of millions of black Americans a "collective lunacy." In art, too, sanity and multiplicity have the last word.
The work belongs to many movements, workshops, and institutions. The Abstract Expressionist was Norman Lewis, the photocollage was from Romare Bearden, and they met at Bearden's loft with Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff to found Spiral in 1963. They met downtown, but soon enough Roy DeCarava founded the Kamoinge Workshop for a collective portrait of Harlem in photographs. The Studio Museum in Harlem opened in 1968 and a community gallery at the Brooklyn Museum the same year. By then, the show has detoured to LA for assemblage, the Bay Area for Emory Douglas, and Chicago for AfriCOBRA.
The show follows surveys of "Black Radical Women" and Latin American women, with "Grief and Grievance" to come, but women are key to its diversity, too. Spiral included Emma Amos and her spilling into color, while Kay Brown in painting and Elizabeth Catlett in polished wood bring much to images of fists, flags, and black unity by Benny Andrews and others in New York. Betye Saar adds the humor of The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and the vulnerability of human hair to a cabinet for King by John Outterbridge in LA. One may need them to counter macho displays with a bit of art. Douglas fills his posters with demands to take up arms against the invasion of police. Painting in Chicago emulates psychedelia and a Jimi Hendrix album cover, but that is about it.
The past two shows were sprawling and tendentious, at the expense of some amazing art. Sure enough, just when you thought you had made it from James Van Der Zee and the Harlem Renaissance to Black Power, this one starts all over again a floor below with, of all things, portraiture and abstraction. The sole white contributor, Alice Neel, paints Faith Ringgold, the painter, while Charles White imitates a wanted poster and Beauford Delaney portrays James Baldwin. Abstraction can carry political weight as well, like a black triangle for Malcolm by Jack Whitten, but it need not. William T. Williams has his geometries, Alma Thomas her dabs of color, Virginia Jaramillo her racing curves, and Howardena Pindell her paper dots on white. Suzanne Jackson dilutes acrylic to the point of watercolor, Ed Clark paints his Venom with a broom, and Sam Gilliam drapes an entire room off the stairs with his stained canvas.
Fluidity here is the order of the day, and it can carry political import. It does with watery African and American continents from Frank Bowling. It does for Melvin Edwards with barbed wire and chains, hanging just off the wall between painting and sculpture. A fence to keep people in or out has taken on air and light, much as real human beings have had to find a space for their lives in slavery and oppression. David Hammons always keeps his identity as an artist fluid, if not invisible. Here he has both dark blurred portraits and greasy shopping bags as Bag Lady in Flight.
By now the show has crept into a new generation, for whom identity politics mixes satisfaction and irony, and Black Power is ancient history. Senga Nengudi has her weighted stockings, just as decades at the black-run gallery Just Above Midtown, and Lorraine O'Grady closes things out by framing marchers with hand-held picture frames. Harlem in photographs by Dawoud Bey or Ming Smith looks far indeed from DeCavara's dark streets and smoky rooms. As curators, Mark Godfrey and the Tate's Zoe Whitley with Ashley James seem unable to decide whether to stick to a radical moment, to survey African American art, or something in between. Not to include views of the civil rights movement by Gordon Parks (who also photographed Charles White) or of the South by Beverly Buchanan seems equally arbitrary, when Black Power could have been a show to itself. Not even politics can account for the nation's soul or the art's power.
Charles White ran at The Museum of Modern Art through January 13, 2019, "Soul of a Nation" at The Brooklyn Museum through February 3.