African-American Art: 2020

Friday, December 11, 2020

Records for Charles Alston, Wadsworth Jarrell, Augusta Savage and More in African American Art

-----at Swann

The December 10, 2020, sale of African American Art was met with enthusiasm from collectors. The sale saw nine auction records set, as well as an auction debut from contemporary artist Tyrone Geter. The auction total reached $2.8 million bringing the house’s African American Art sale totals for the year to $9.2 million.

Charles Alston

Leading the December sale was Charles Alston’s Black and White #8, oil on canvas, 1961. The largest of the artist’s works yet to come to auction, the stunning abstraction came from an important series of eight works painted between 1959 and 1961. Black and White #8, earned a record for the artist at $197,000.

Abstract Works

Sir Frank Bowling, *Repose for SO*, acrylic on canvas, 1976. Sold for $93,750.

Additional abstract works included Sir Frank Bowling’s Repose for SO, acrylic on canvas, 1976, an example of Bowling’s trailblazing mid-1970s series of “poured paintings,” which brought $93,750. Kenneth Victor Youngand Thomas Sills returned to the Swann auction block after stellar outings in the January white-glove sale of the Johnson Publishing Company’s art collection. Young was present with a circa-2000 acrylic-on-canvas abstraction in fuchsia and blue, which sold for $81,250, and Sills was featured with New Born, oil on canvas, 1958, at $50,000. A 1972 acrylic-on-paper in dark blue-black and deep pink by Alma Thomas earned $62,500; and a 1978 color pastel, dry pigment and pencil work from Ed Clark’s Louisiana Series realized $60,000.

Augusta Savage & Sculpture

Augusta Savage, *Gamin*, plaster painted gold, circa 1929. Sold for $112,500, a record for the artist.

Augusta Savage earned a new auction record with the sale of her iconic 1929 sculpture Gamin. The work was acquired directly from the artist before it made its way across the auction block, selling for $112,500. Also representing sculptural works was Simone Leigh with Head, a 2004 glazed and painted fired stoneware work that brought $93,750.

Figurative Works

Wadsworth Jarrell, *Subway*, acrylic on canvas, 1970. Sold for $125,000, a record for the artist.

Figurative works included Wadsworth Jarrell’s Subway, acrylic on canvas, 1970, which brought a record for the artist at $125,000. Another record was earned with John N. Robinson’s 1952 oil-on-canvas portrait of his wife Gladys at $81,250. Romare Bearden was present with two collage works: Woman and Child, 1968, which sold for $173,000, and The Last of the Blue Devils, 1979, which sold for $100,000. Also of note was Emma Amos’s Water Baby, a 1987 acrylic and fabric collage with Kente cloth borders of from Amos’s body of work depicting women bathers, crossing the block at $100,000, the second-highest price at auction behind Let Me Off Uptown, which sold at Swann in 2019 for $125,000.

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews: A life in portraits


Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Portrait of the Portrait Painter (Portraits of... Series), 1987, oil and graphite on two canvas panels with painted fabric collage, 80 x 100 x 3/4 inches / 203.2 x 254 x 1.9 cm, signed. Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Janitors at Rest, 1957-58. Oil on canvas with paper and painted fabric collage, 50 x 36 inches / 127 x 91.4 cm, signed.
Benny Andrews once defined his artistic ambition as a desire to represent “a real person before the eyes.” The phrase is the subtitle of a momentous exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Manhattan. “Benny Andrews: Portraits, a Real Person Before the Eyes” brings together 28 of the artist’s imposing depictions of friends, family and artists, the most ever shown together. Made over the course of 35 years with a technique he called “rough collage,” these riveting, eccentric images combine painted motifs with added pieces of canvas and paper, bits of printed fabric and carefully placed fragments of garments. Andrews (1930-2006) was the son of an impoverished Georgia sharecropper who taught him to draw as a child. The skill became an essential tool that compensated for the school he missed while helping his father. He learned in part by drawing biology and plane geometry projects and whatever else the teachers asked for. After serving in the Korean War, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and felt the pressure to take up an abstract expressionist style. He wanted to paint representationally, even though he disliked the constant refinement that realism entailed. One of his instructors, Boris Margo, told him to paint what he knew best and cared about. He took out two birds with one stone, fastening on the school’s janitors, mostly African American, and with whom he was friendly. “They were the kind of people I came from,” he later said. “They were like my relatives.” In “Janitors at Rest,” Andrews depicted three men on a break; one reading, the other two perhaps talking. To avoid refinement and introduce a certain rawness, the artist dotted the surface with scraps of paper such as janitors might sweep up. It was his first foray into rough collage. If painting can be said to have a fourth wall — an invisible partition separating subject and viewer — Andrews broke partly through it. His figures don’t quite step off the canvas, but they don’t quite stay on it either; they hover in an interim zone between canvas and viewer, which can be electrifying and disorienting. They feel uncannily alive while being deliberately made works of art. Arms and legs might be cutout pieces of canvas. Most important are the pieces of recognizable clothing his figures wear; hats or at least their brims are another regular detail. These fragments have seen a lot of use, denoting a life lived like the often weary faces. By the 1970s, Andrews was laying out the components of his paintings one by one on plain white backgrounds, letting the viewer identify the parts and techniques and put their meanings together. In “Louie” (1977), a man in a wide-brimmed hat and a striped shirt — both fragments of the real thing — occupies nearly half the canvas. He is speaking, holding two little flowers delicately between his thumb and forefinger. In the background is a beautiful tree, its green leaves and brown twisted trunk painted on their own separate piece of canvas. And farther off, a line of what seem to be naked brown men disappears into the distance — a stark image of sorrow that symbolizes a cultural memory of oppression for generations of people of color in the United States. Several of Andrews’ paintings are not specific individuals, but portray conditions of marginalization, like the emaciated child in “Famine” (1989), holding a beggar’s bowl, whose face is split between an abstract mask and a visage so ravaged it seems ancient. In contrast, “Portrait of Oppression (Homage to the Black South Africans)” (1985), startles with its understatement. We see part of a figure wearing a denim vest, his hands behind his back as if bound. A chain hangs down into the picture, touching his right shoulder. His face, which is invented, is calm and sensitive. He looks like he could be related to Norman Lewis, the American abstract painter whose debonair portrait greets us near the entrance. All of Andrews’ portraits are notable for their tenderness, especially those of the people to whom he was closest. In “Portrait of George C. Andrews” (1986), his father relaxes in a red easy chair wearing a tobacco-colored work shirt and a newsboy cap. The wall beside him is unlike anything else here: It’s covered with colorful objects suggesting little paintings, toys, fishing flies — an accumulation of artistry and passion. It is also worth noting that the artists he admired and depicted — Alice Neel, Howardena Pindell, Ray Johnson, Nene Humphrey (who was also his wife) — seem especially at peace. The joy of being both an artist and a subject is palpable in “Portrait of the Portrait Painter” in which an artist (probably Andrews) sits opposite a beautifully dressed woman; an untouched canvas lies between their feet — on more bare canvas. The scene is suffused with pleasure and anticipation. In the end, Andrews took Margo’s advice to heart, depicting what he knew and cared about, which — not to oversimplify — came down to art, politics and people: his loved ones and fellow artists as well as human suffering and social injustice, the issues behind his activism. Eventually he portrayed his world and his values, which may be the most you can ask of any artist. — 'Benny Andrews: Portraits, a Real Person Before the Eyes' Through Dec. 23 at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Ave., Manhattan, New York, (212) 247-0082, michaelrosenfeldart.com. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Monday, September 28, 2020

Reckoning with “The Incident”: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural.

John Wilson, Compositional study for The Incident, 1952. Opaque and transparent watercolor, ink, and graphite, squared for transfer. Yale University Art Gallery, Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund. © Estate of John Wilson

John Wilson, Negro Woman, study for The Incident, 1952. Oil on Masonite. Clark Atlanta University Art Collection, Atlanta Annuals. © Estate of John Wilson. Courtesy Clark Atlanta University Art Collection

On September 25, the Yale University Art Gallery opened to visitors for the first time in nearly seven months with new covid-19 safety measures in place.

“Our world has transformed in ways we never could have imagined since the Gallery closed in March. Now, more than ever, cultural institutions strive to be a place for communities to listen, learn, and grow amid rapidly changing current events,” said Stephanie Wiles, the Henry J. Heinz II Director, Yale University Art Gallery.

Three timely exhibitions have been extended through Sunday, February 28, 2021, including Reckoning with “The Incident”: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural.

In 1952, while studying at La Esmeralda, the national school of art in Mexico City, African American artist John Wilson (1922–2015) painted The Incident, a fresco mural of a racial terror lynching at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Executed on an exterior wall at street level, the mural was intended to be temporary, but its commanding composition prompted renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros—who was then the head of Mexico’s department for the protection and restoration of murals—to advocate for its preservation. Though the mural itself is no longer extant, Reckoning with “The Incident”: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural brings together nearly all of the known preparatory sketches and painted studies for the fresco, as well as related drawings and prints, from the collections of the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Iowa, the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and select private lenders.

Monday, July 27, 2020

African Modernism in America

Peter Clarke (South African, 1929-2014) That Evening Sun Goes Down, 1960. Gouache on paper. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville. Gift of Harmon Foundation.

A traveling exhibition planned for late 2022 will illuminate African Modernism in America, 1947–1967. The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and Fisk University Galleries in Nashville, which will be the first venue.

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967 is the first major traveling exhibition to examine the complex connections between modern African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War. During these years, institutions such as the Harmon Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) collected and exhibited works by many of the most important African artists of the mid-twentieth century, including Ben Enwonwu (Nigeria), Gerard Sekoto (South Africa), Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan), and Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia). The inventive and irrefutably contemporary nature of these artists’ paintings, sculptures, and works on paper defied typical Western narratives about African art being isolated to a “primitive past,” and their presentation in the United States rooted their vital work firmly in the present for American audiences. This exhibition, drawn primarily from Fisk University’s remarkable collection of gifts from the Harmon Foundation, features more than seventy artworks by fifty artists that exemplify the relationships between the new art that emerged in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s and American art and cultural politics. The show reveals a transcontinental network of artists, curators, and scholars that challenged assumptions about African art in the United States, and thereby encouraged American engagement with African artists as contemporaries.

In 1961, the Harmon Foundation, a leading American organization devoted to the support and promotion of African and African American artists and to forging links between transatlantic artists and audiences, organized its landmark exhibition Art from Africa of Our Time. That year, the Museum of Modern Art also exhibited its first acquisition of contemporary African art, Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956) by Sam Ntiro (Tanzania). The simultaneity of the Harmon Foundation show and the MoMA purchase was crucially important, drawing attention to African artists’ modernity in a moment of shifting relationships between the United States and African nations. By 1961, many African nations had gained independence from colonial rule. During the same year, the Freedom Riders protested segregation in the American South; Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was killed in a CIA-supported assassination plot; and eminent Pan-Africanist W.E.B. DuBois emigrated to Ghana. Within the changing social and political contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and independence in Africa, artists developed new visual languages, and exhibitions such as Art from Africa of Our Time enabled American audiences to recognize their shared aesthetic and political concerns.

Ben Enwonwu (Nigerian, 1917-1994) Head of Samson. Ebony. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville. Gift of Harmon Foundation. Courtesy Ben Enwonwu Foundation.

African Modernism in America will be presented in four sections. The first, “Art from Africa of Our Time: The Modern African Artist” foregrounds the places and people who supported the display and promotion of modern African artists in the United States. The second section of the exhibition highlights the continent-wide networks of artists, galleries, literary journals, and art education programs instrumental in the development of these new, forward-thinking spaces for the display and discussion of postcolonial modern art. The third section of the exhibition, “African Modernists in America,” highlights the establishment of meaningful connections between African and African American artists in the United States. The exhibition concludes with “The Politics of Selection,” a new commission of the same name by Lagos-based sculptor Ndidi Dike that interrogates the cold-war era collecting histories presented in the exhibition, including those of the Harmon Foundation. Dike will conduct research in the Harmon Foundation and Fisk University archives to produce an immersive multimedia installation that examines the multiplicity of viewpoints, biases, prejudices, allegiances, and omissions found in the archive.

A fully illustrated scholarly exhibition catalogue will serve as one of a small but growing number of reference works on African modernism. The catalogue, edited by Perrin Lathrop, will feature new essays by leading scholars and critical biographies of the featured artists, as well as an interview with the late David Driskell, artist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the seat of Mecklenburg County, on September 2, 1911. About 1914, his family joined in the Great Migration north, settling in New York City, which remained Bearden's base for the rest of his life. He became a prolific artist whose works were exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. He was also a respected writer and an eloquent spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. His many awards and honors include the National Medal of Arts he received from President Ronald Reagan in 1987, one year before he died in 1988.

Romare Howard Bearden, In the Garden, from the portfolio Prevalence of Ritual, 1974, screenprint on wove paper. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the William S. Rubin Fund; PR.975.58.1. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

After graduating from New York University, Bearden earned his living as a social case worker for Gypsies for New York City’s Department of Social Services. With the exception of service during World War II and some postwar travel in Europe, he continued his work in social services until retiring at age 58. Until then, he created his paintings and collages at night and on weekends. Even while employed as a social worker, art for Bearden was always a full-time vocation.

While studying and traveling in Europe, Bearden was profoundly influenced by the Dutch paintings of Johannes Vermeer and the collages of Henri Matisse. In addition to his education at NYU, Bearden studied at the Art Students League in New York. He played an important role in Spiral, a salon for black artists interested in social change. Bearden advocated for the responsibility of black artists to reflect their struggles while at the same time illustrating a common humanity that transcended race.

While he is best known for his visual art, Bearden was also a songwriter whose lyrics were performed by Billie Holiday and recorded by Billy Eckstein, who had a major hit with Bearden’s song “Seabreeze.” After drawing inspiration from participants in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Duke Ellington and Ralph Ellison, Bearden, in turn, influenced later generations of musicians and intellectuals, including playwright August Wilson and jazz virtuoso Wynton Marsalis. His artistic interests blended when he designed album covers for jazz recordings, including one by Marsalis.

Romare Bearden, “River Mist” (1962), mixed media, 54 x 40 inches, Romare Bearden Foundation (courtesy DC Moore Gallery, NY. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

Romare Bearden: Abstraction, an important traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts and The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, is comprised of approximately 55 works by the ground-breaking African American artist. Romare Bearden: Abstraction presents the first in-depth examination of Bearden’s engagement with abstraction.

Through paintings, collages, watercolors and photostats ranging from the 1940s to the late 1960s, the exhibition explores and contextualizes Bearden’s important, but relatively unknown, body of abstract work alongside his early figural abstractions and more well-known figurative collages. Central to the exhibition are a group of Bearden’s rarely exhibited stain paintings created between 1952-1963 that reveal a masterfully distinctive experimentation with color and form unlike anything the artist had created before. This important yet underrecognized period in Bearden’s career laid the framework for the celebrated figurative collages that the artist began producing in 1964.

The exhibition was originated by the Neuberger Museum of Art, with the national tour of Romare Bearden: Abstraction to launch in October 2021 with presentations at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC (October 15, 2021 – January 9, 2022); the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (February 5 – May 15, 2022); and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (June 25 – September 18, 2022).

“Romare Bearden is one of the 20th century's great American artists," said Pauline Willis, Director and CEO of the American Federation of Arts. "While Bearden's significance is recognized by the public and art establishment alike, the many layers of innovation within his body of work are relatively unknown. It is with enormous pleasure that the American Federation of Arts presents the important traveling exhibition Romare Bearden: Abstraction that is valuable to scholars and will also bring joy and enrichment to audiences across the United States, reaching from the American South to the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest."

According the exhibition curator, Dr. Tracy Fitzpatrick, “Prior to this exhibition, very little substantive scholarly attention had been paid to the body of work that directly precedes the works for which Bearden is best known. Romare Bearden: Abstraction corrects that omission by providing the first substantive and scholarly examination of this extraordinary non-representational, large-scale stain paintings and mixed media collages important body of work. The project contributes to the development of alternate storylines around the dominant narrative of post-war abstraction while at the same time revealing, for the first time, the roots of the body of work for which Bearden is best known."

Romare Bearden, Melon Season, 1967, Mixed media on canvas, 56½ × 44½ inches, Collection Neuberger, Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, Gift of Roy R. Neuberger, 1976.26.45, Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, Courtesy American Federation of Arts.

Romare Bearden and the Road to Abstraction

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911. In 1914 his parents relocated the family to Harlem as part of the “Great Migration,” during which many southern-born African Americans fled north to escape the Jim Crow South. Bearden began his training in the 1930s, studying art alternately at New York University, Boston University, and at the Art Students League under the tutelage of George Grosz. This diversity of influences contributed to a rich artistic education; and by 1940, Bearden secured his first solo show in New York. Assembled chronologically and according to medium, this exhibition emphasizes the importance of Bearden’s abstract paintings and collages in the course of his formal development, including examples of the abstracted figural compositions from the mid-1940s and the mature collages for which he is widely regarded today.

Though initially rooted in the figurative tradition, Bearden progressively moved towards abstraction in the 1940s. A breakthrough came in 1945 when Bearden’s work was included in a group exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in Paris. Shown alongside works by William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell, Bearden was rightly associated with the leading contemporary artists of the American vanguard. Following the positive reception of an exhibition in Washington, DC, Bearden was offered representation by the influential New York gallerist and proponent of abstraction, Samuel M. Kootz. Works from this period illustrate both the artist’s affinity for abstracted forms as well as his remarkable facility with watercolor and ink.

Following the closure of the Kootz gallery in 1948 and a brief sojourn in Paris, Bearden began fully engaging with non-representational subjects in the 1950s. The abstract works from this period are striking for their exceptional quality, variety and scale. Easel size watercolors and oil paintings such as Blue Ridge (ca. 1952) and Mountains of the Moon (1955) show Bearden’s singular interpretations of landscape through abstraction.

Romare Bearden, Strange Land, ca. 1959 Oil and casein on canvas, 58 x 42 1/8 in. Nanette Bearden Trust © Romare Bearden Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York and American Federation of Arts.

Though initially reluctant to work in oil, Bearden’s skill in the medium reached its apex in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was introduced to Chinese ink wash painting by a local bookseller. Inspired by this technique, Bearden began thinning oil paint with turpentine to achieve a more fluid facture, closer to the watercolor that he was most comfortable with. Applying thinned pigment to unsized canvas—what is now commonly referred to as stain painting—was a method employed by several other artists during this period, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. Bearden’s work ranks among the best examples of this innovative application; realized in both luminous tones and somber hues, these paintings are exemplary of the artist’s remarkable sensitivity to color. Works such as Green Torches Welcome New Ghosts (1961) show Bearden enthusiastically brushing, pouring, and spraying diluted oil, while the curving lines of Eastern Gate (1961) reveal the inspiration of Chinese calligraphy.

Bearden continually reimagined his approach to artmaking. By mixing thinned oil pigment together with casein and then painting it on sized canvas or paper, he relied on the immiscibility of oil and water to create a marbled effect. With Blue (1962) and Strange Land (1959) epitomize the marbleized patterns; these compositions are suggestive of natural substances, as though seeing the speckled and veined qualities of rocks and plants in magnified detail. Bearden combined oil and collage in another group of works he was producing at this time, which he began by cutting up his paintings and then collaging them onto painted boards. River Mist (1962) is a work of washed and splattered blues reminiscent of moving water, with areas of painted oranges and white stained canvas. The painted elements are cut, then fitted together and finally adhered to a brown painted board. Such works are clear precursors to the figurative collages produced after 1964.

Bearden premiered a new body of work in October 1964. Collectively titled “Projections”, these works represent yet another innovative development in the artist’s body of work. Perpetually intrigued by collage, Bearden began utilizing cut paper to form representational images rather than abstract arrangements. First created at small scale and then enlarged via photostatic reproduction, this process would eventually culminate in the large-scale figurative collages that Bearden created for the rest of his career.

Although his abstract work was well-received contemporaneously in galleries and by the press, Bearden chose to adopt figuration as his primary artistic mode after 1964. While several of the abstract compositions are included in public and private collections, many have remained in storage since they were first exhibited, while others have never been shown outside of this exhibition. Romare Bearden: Abstraction serves as a rare opportunity for public view of these important abstract works and an invitation to reassess the career of one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era.



Romare Bearden. Sunday after Sermon, 1969. Collage on cardboard. 101,6 x 127 cm © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Romare Bearden, Evening, 1985, Collage on Board, 14 x 12 inches

Romare Bearde, Sunrise-The China Lamp, 1985, Collage on Board, 13 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Romare Bearden’s birth, Jerald Melberg Gallery presented a major exhibition of over forty collages, watercolors and prints featuring the artist’s memories of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

Romare Bearden was born in his great-grandfather's house in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the morning of September 2, 1911. Although at the time this was the rural south, his family was prosperous and well respected. At the age of two, Bearden moved with his parents to New York City where they felt there was more opportunity to pursue their interests in journalism and politics. Bearden's memories of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina were ingrained during summer-long visits until he was 14. These memories were the subject of his art as he wanted to transform his experiences rather than merely describe them. I am trying to explore the particulars of the life that I know best; those things common to all cultures, he once said. Drawing upon the recollections of his Southern roots for inspiration, he conjured up both his own childhood memories and the shared memories of his ancestors. Bearden absorbed the traditional rituals of the church, the hymns and gospels, sermons and testimonies; as well as the traditional rituals of the family, the music of the kitchen, the wash place and fire circle, which permeated his upbringing.

Romare Bearden's "Evening of the Gray Cat."

At his death on March 12, 1988, he was called the foremost "black artist" of the 20th century, so he was. But the phrase black artist must be understood as a description, not a label. He has also been called America's greatest collage artist. In this medium, he stretched its possibilities raising it "to a mode of expression, so intensely personal, that it is difficult to think of another artist so closely associated with it." His collages reflect optimism. Even in works that represent poverty, there is still a sense of affirmation and strength. In the lives of his people-their happiness and pain, their music and ritual-he felt the potential for myth.

Romare Bearden, The Lamp, 1984. Lithograph. The Amistad Center for Art & Culture. © 2019 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Dox Thrash

Also see:

https://www.hydecollection.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Thrash-online-exhibition2.pdf

Dox Thrash, "Saturday Night," c. 1944-45, etching. Courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Dox Thrash, Saturday Night, c. 1944-45, etching. Courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell.

Philadelphia-based artist Dox Thrash (1893–1965) was both a pioneering printmaker and a noted participant in the “New Negro” movement of the 1930s and ’40s. A veteran of World War I as well as the minstrel stage, he trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before making his way to Philadelphia, where he ultimately forged a career as both a painter and a graphic artist.

Dox Thrash, Cabin with a Star in the Window, c. 1944–45, carborundum mezzotint, proof reworked in ink. Private collection, image courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell.
Image: Penn State

In 1937, Thrash signed on for employment with the Federal Art Project’s Fine Print Workshop. There, while working with fellow artists Hugh Mesibov and Michael Gallagher, he began to experiment with a new approach to intaglio printmaking, which today is known as the carborundum mezzotint process. With its broad tonal range, the new process was ideally suited to the sensitive portrayals of Black life for which Thrash would become known.

http://news.psu.edu/sites/default/files/styles/photo_gallery_large/public/TODAYLife.jpg?itok=LQxPSCY5

Dox Thrash, "Life," c. 1938–39, carborundum mezzotint, 10 7/8 x 8 13/16 inches.

Image: Dox Thrash / Courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell

Dox Thrash, Black Life, and the Carborundum Mezzotint brings together numerous examples of the experimental process by Thrash and other colleagues working in the Fine Print Workshop. Also on view are works by Thrash in other print mediums, as well as watercolors and drawings, all of which powerfully document the artist’s intimate, invested engagement with African American culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/f5/3d/c0f53d56d49f11f1223fc3bd131d378f.jpg

Dox Thrash, "Defense Worker", c. Carborundum mezzotint over etched guidelines.

In much of his work, Thrash portrays black families transitioning from the South to the North during the Great Migration, making a hopeful, daring leap to attempt to be equal members of the society that has historically oppressed them. Their hopeful gazes convey the optimism of the scores of African Americans who left the countryside to pursue better job opportunities, health care, and education in urban centers.

Start with one work, "Glory Be!" This small, deeply inky intaglio print by Dox Thrash, made in the first years of World War II, shows a half dozen people looking and pointing upward. This is a religious moment, silhouettes before a wild ivory-white background that almost looks like fire, and we see the striving emotive possibilities of such a fervent meeting with just the large effect of shapes and light.

Nearby is a drawing with more detail, a mirror image version that was the study for the print. The print has more power because it shows less, and it does so with material richness. This was made with a new process, the carborundum mezzotint, invented in part by the artist as an innovation based on traditional mezzotint.

The new show at the Hyde, "Dox Thrash, Black Life, and the Carborundum Mezzotint," circles around this technique. These prints, the real high points of Thrash's career, might be outnumbered by watercolors, drawings, and etchings, but the show gives a fuller measure of this African-American's contribution to 20th-century American art.

The contribution lies foremost not in the carborundum process, as important as that is, but in the content of the artist's work. There are simple evocations of everyday life like "Churning Butter," presented in two different mezzotint versions, and there are portraits, several of them bold and brooding, using a variety of techniques. The many portraits alone recall for me how often I've heard African-American students remark how bracing and positive it is for them to see images — photographs or paintings — that represent them. It matters more than you might imagine.

"Saturday Night" is a carborundum relief etching from 1944-45, a complex version of the usual method that adds greater linear clarity to the broader textural effects of the mezzotint. In it we see a woman preparing for a night out, and its plain but elegant tenderness recalls Degas and Cassatt. "The Champ" is an aquatint depiction of the boxer Joe Louis, with surfaces writhing in dark black and warm brown details that plunge into sadness and intensity.

The portraits, figure studies, and scenes with houses and buildings build a picture of a world that was underrepresented, and is vigorously given moody depth with these new techniques. It was in December 1937 that Thrash first stumbled on the beginnings of his novel mode of intaglio. He used a rough carborundum powder to rub a copper plate, and the surface with all its shards of metal that he said "stick up like hills" allowed for selective burnishing and then inking and printing.

The complexity of tones possible, depending on the amount of burnishing, made for a 20th-century aquatint that gave dark, deep prints favoring tonal effects over specific details. Look into the darkness of "Cabin Days," where both the sunset sky and the foreground fence and driveway embrace the key detail in the center, a service star in the window of the simple cabin.

Thrash was born in Georgia and joined the great northward migration of African-Americans in midcentury, going first to Chicago and serving in World War I before eventually making Philadelphia his home. It was there, with the help of the WPA, that he joined the Fine Print Workshop in 1937, and his career solidified as he worked on his new printing process.

It's natural to compare Thrash to more famous black artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, since they or their families were all part of the Great Migration, but Thrash was a generation earlier, a breakthrough artist more closely aligned to the Harlem Renaissance and what was called the New Negro movement, which defined black Americans objectively, against stereotypes. Thrash's portraits give dignity and honesty to his subjects, and his depictions of buildings or occupations do not avoid the poverty and difficult lives people faced.

If Thrash is less convincing in his watercolors, the subjects are still significant: a baptism at the shore, row houses and a rail yard, and a series of portraits. But the prints — the etchings, lithographs, aquatints, and most of all his specialized mezzotints — are bold and beautiful, laying bare a part of the world receding fast into history.

African-American Art