The fact is, artists have always been propagandists.
I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle.
I obviously already celebrated Charles White in Art Class #14. I am forgetful and disorganized and Mr. White is certainly deserving of multiple celebrations. Party on. – JDW
Charles White’s commitment to creating powerful images of African Americans—what his gallerist and, later, White himself described as “images of dignity”—was unwavering over the course of his four-decade career. White believed that art had a role to play in changing the world: “Art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. It must adapt itself to human needs. It must ally itself with the forces of liberation. The fact is, artists have always been propagandists. I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle.”
Using his skills as a draftsman, printmaker, and painter, White developed his style and approach over time to address changing concerns and new audiences.
His 1945 lithograph, Hope for the Future, shows a mother holding her child in front of a window that opens onto a bleak landscape; a noose hanging from a barren tree in the background is just visible over the mother’s right shoulder. With this image, White condemns the violence facing African Americans and forces the viewer to confront it.
In his much later work Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man) (1973), the central figure, a sunglass-wearing street preacher depicted in the brown oil-wash that would become White’s signature medium, commands viewers’ attention with a sandwich board sign reading “NOW.” The preacher is bundled up in a bulky coat and scarf, while his sunglasses mask his gaze. His raised left hand forms a peace sign that also doubles as a papal blessing. Stenciled text at the top of the composition reads “CHICAGO,” and the haunting skeleton hovering behind the preacher and the shapes and shadows filling the background all hint at further meaning without providing clear answers. White frames the street preacher with gravitas befitting a prophet, leaving the viewer to decode the details.
White lived in Chicago, New York, and, finally, Los Angeles over the course of his career, and was a critical member of creative communities in each of these cities. He counted photographer Gordon Parks, painter Jacob Lawrence, and singer and actor Harry Belafonte as friends and colleagues.
From his earliest days as a mature artist, White was also a gifted and dedicated teacher, and David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall were among his many students. His practice of making rigorous, socially committed art affected these younger artists, some of whom continue his legacy in their own work.
As Marshall noted, “Under Charles White’s influence I always knew that I wanted to make work that was about something: history, culture, politics, social issues. . . . It was just a matter of mastering the skills to actually do it.”
Introduction by Esther Adler, Associate Curator, MoMA.
Charles White, who made some of this country’s greatest art, transcends labels
By Philip Kennicott Washington Post Oct. 18, 2018
Charles White was one of the great American artists of the last century, yet his legacy remains caught up in repeating cycles of discovery and rediscovery. His achievement is qualified, subtly, with the label “African American artist” in the same way that African American writers, poets and composers are somehow delimited into a subset of America by the fact of their race. One always encounters his work in relationship to something else: He was socially conscious and politically active, so his art is caught up in the history of left-wing struggle; he was a teacher and inspirational figure, so his name is often attached to that of his prominent students and those who cite him as an influence; he worked as a figure artist and made portraits, so his art is seen in service to promoting ideals of African American power, dignity and beauty.
All of that is true, yet the impression left by a retrospective of his career at the Museum of Modern Art transcends those individual accounts of his importance to the history of American art. Given his talent, his creativity, his vision, his range and his inventiveness, White should be a household name, even among people who don’t closely follow the art world. Among his works are images, including the 1964 drawing “Birmingham Totem” and the 1972 etching “Cat’s Cradle,” that should be as instantly recognizable as Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” or Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.” It shouldn’t be possible to tell the history of American art without White figuring squarely in the middle of it.
But he remains, if not marginal, a respectable figure on the sidelines of 20th-century American culture. Race was a major factor in the egregious failure to calibrate the real worth of his work, not just because he was black, but because he took up black life as his subject. He also worked counter to the prevailing artistic trends of the time, making drawings and paintings, working meticulously with charcoal and ink, limning faces and bodies, capturing the intensity of pain and anguish, and fitting his human subjects into backgrounds that were at turns abstract, minimal or teeming with the social strife of mural art.
Black bodies become monumental in some of his best-known works, including the 1972 “Mississippi,” which shows a black woman shrouded in a pyramid of fabric, with a bloody handprint just above her head, and in the 1969 “Seed of Love,” which depicts a pregnant woman from the side, solitary and statuesque against a shaded background. Images he made of workers in the 1940s and 1950s have both muscularity and soulfulness, a sense of the full human being that surpasses similar images by Thomas Hart Benton or John Steuart Curry 20 years earlier.
His lifelong interest in the human figure, and his commitment to social causes including civil rights, the rights of workers and the equality of women, were connected. He might have addressed his political topics through a conceptual or abstract process, but he found greater freedom and clarity in representational art. It connected him both to the people for whom he struggled and to other artists, including the Mexican muralists, who worked along similar lines. It also allowed him to take up history in a direct way, making images of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman.
One of the earliest paintings in the exhibition, a 1939 watercolor called “Kitchenette Debutantes,” shows two women framed at an angle in a window, their clothes loose and disheveled. They might be sex workers, although the painting’s title refers to the substandard kitchenette apartments in which many African Americans were forced to live in the 1940s, when racism drove poverty, forcing those who had fled the murderous South to live in Chicago’s overcrowded neighborhoods and overcrowded subdivided apartments. “Kitchenette Debutantes” sets up a sequence of glances that speaks to the humanism at the core of White’s work: One woman holds up a mirror as if to observe herself but looks away from it to the other woman, who looks out the window. The narcissism of self-observation has been turned into observation of another human being, and that, in turn, has been directed outward to observation of the world.
White’s art takes black life as a universal subject, while America has resolutely insisted that the Venn diagram of black life overlaps only in places with the larger trajectory of American culture. The human figure allowed White to challenge racism at the instinctual level, disrupting viewers at the precognitive moment of how we identify ourselves and others. When he paints children, his images stir the viewer’s sense of wanting to protect and nurture them; when he paints workers, we are inclined to admire their strength and competence, rather than their use-value to capitalism; when he paints women, they are not only beautiful, but project a powerful sense of intelligence.
A 1956 drawing, “I’ve been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” shows a woman standing in a doorway, with a view through a narrow shack to an open window beyond. She is, perhaps, a grandmother: Her hair is gray, and her clothes hang on her loosely. The title seems to refer to her personal history of suffering, while with one hand she is gesturing as if to explain something. She is, perhaps, telling us her history, and by extension the larger history she has lived. She is both intimidating and maternal, and she clearly doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But there is an extraordinary nuance in the image, in the form of the window seen behind her. The promise implicit in the image seems to be the hope that drove White as an artist, and it’s something we might cling to today: that if we listen carefully to this fellow human being, we might get through to the other side.
Charles White: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, October 7, 2018 – January 13, 2019
From Artsummary.com OCTOBER 9, 2018.
“Charles White: A Retrospective is the first major exhibition dedicated to Charles White (1918–1979) in over three decades. Organized chronologically, the retrospective charts the entirety of White’s career, illuminating his socially motivated responses to the tumultuous events and cultural episodes that defined 20th-century American history. The exhibition’s roughly 100 drawings, paintings, and prints, along with additional ephemera, attest to White’s continually developing body of work, and serve as a model for the active role art can play in contemporary society.
The exhibition includes representative work from the three artistic centers in which White lived, created, and taught throughout his life: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. It begins with early paintings and murals White made for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Depression-era Chicago, where he grew up. Shortly thereafter, between 1942 and 1956, White lived mainly in New York City, teaching drawing, exhibiting at the progressive ACA Gallery on 57th Street, and supporting the Committee for the Negro in the Arts in Harlem. A selection of White’s personal photographs, also on view in the exhibition, capture his life in New York, while the inclusion of his work for album covers, publications, film, and television emphasize his dedication to more accessible distribution outlets for his art. The presentation concludes with the inventive output from his last decades as an internationally established figure and influential teacher in Los Angeles during the 1960s and ’70s.” — MoMA
Charles White: A Retrospective is organized by Esther Adler, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA; and Sarah Kelly Oehler, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition was on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from June 8 through September 3, 2018, and following its MoMA presentation it will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where it will be on view from February 17 through June 9, 2019.
Images courtesy The Museum of Modern Art.
Please follow the link below to ‘A Black Artist Named White.’
I wanted to write about Kerry James Marshall, but realized he’d be upset with me if I highlighted him before Charles White. Watched Sam Pollard’s HBO documentary ‘Black Art: In the Absence of Light’ and when KJM came on screen in his soft plaid shirt, I thought ‘that guy and I would immediately become close friends.’
I don’t want to piss him off before we even meet. I seem to do that with a lot of people.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/31/a-black-artist-named-white/