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.

Red Grooms

For over fifty years, American artist Red Grooms (born 1937) has used his brush to capture the great panorama of life. And for over fifty years people have delighted in his luscious, loud, laughing depictions that so uniquely celebrate the famous and the anonymous, the meaningful and the absurd, the high and the low, of twentieth-century America.

Red Grooms, Cedar Bar, 1986. Colored pencil and crayon on five sheets in artist’s wood frame. Yale University Art Gallery, Charles B. Benenson, b.a. 1933, Collection

Executed in colored pencil and watercolor on five large sheets of paper, Cedar Bar depicts the legendary members of the New York School as they may have looked during the hey-day of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that intensely creative postwar period, the Cedar Tavern—a hole-in-the-wall bar located at 24 University Place in New York City—became the preferred gathering spot of this group of artists and beat writers to drink and talk about art and politics deep into the night. The group liked the bar for its cheap booze and absence of tourists. Demolished in 1963, the Cedar Tavern has come down in history as something of a cult locale—an almost mythical place where, reputedly, drunken brawls were as common as stimulating dialogue.

The other two paintings feature as their subject Pablo Picasso:

Red Grooms, Picasso Goes to Heaven, 1973. Acrylic and charcoal on paper laid down on canvases with wood extensions. Yale University Art Gallery, Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, Collection

In 1973 the death of Pablo Picasso inspired Red Grooms to paint this eulogy to the great twentieth-century master. Dominating the lower center of the composition, dressed only in checkered boxer shorts, a jolly Picasso prepares to swing himself heavenward, where other prominent art-world figures wait to greet him. This is Grooms’s jubilant Technicolor vision of how Picasso’s heaven might appear to him after a long life lived to its fullest.

Studio at the Rue des Grands-Augustins
1990-96
Acrylic on canvas in six parts with wood frame

Moved by the grave socio-political conflicts of the early 1990s—from the Gulf War in Iraq and Kuwait to the human-rights atrocities playing out in Bosnia and Somalia—Red Grooms was inspired to paint this monumental work. It depicts Pablo Picasso hard at work in his studio in May 1937 on his great masterpiece Guernica—a gruesome yet triumphant refutation of the unconscionable violence wrought by the Nazis that April upon the innocent victims of the small Spanish village. By creating this tribute to Picasso, Grooms was working through his own grief over the abuses of power and greed continuing to play out throughout the world, then over fifty years later.

Hudson River Museum Presents Red Grooms' Lincoln on the Hudson and The Blue and The Gray

The Civil War, America’s story, is told by Red Grooms, who for 50 years has brought city and country life to sculpture and canvas.

In two exhibitions, Lincoln on the Hudson and The Blue and The Gray, Grooms creates the world of 1860s America and its parade of personalities who fought the Civil War, a war now 150 years old that continues to hold our thoughts and feelings in books, movies, and music. It percolates, even today, through our nation’s politics.

Lincoln on the Hudson
Red Grooms has filled the galleries of the Hudson River Museum with Lincoln on the Hudson, a larger-than-life, walk-through scene of the historic appearance of President-elect Lincoln in Westchester County’s village of Peekskill on the banks of the Hudson.

Grooms is famed for creating environments in which colorful sculptures of people navigate scenes filled with details that make us smile and want to walk through a Grooms’ world. “I’m so excited to be showing The Blue and The Gray at the Hudson River Museum, said Red Grooms. “And as soon as I heard the story of Lincoln’s train stopping in Peekskill, the idea for Lincoln on the Hudson hit me in a flash. I saw the whole thing in the Museum’s 30-foot-tall main gallery. That doesn’t always happen to me.”

The artist created a “Lincoln” work that fills 775 square feet of the Museum’s gallery space and stands 17 feet high — a world constructed from foam core, canvas, and bright paint. Lincoln stands at the back of the train that crossed the country from Midwest to east to take him to his 1861 inauguration and is greeted by cheering villagers, mounted soldiers (the Civil War is about to begin), a drummer boy, and a brass band. He thanks New Yorkers for their “kind greeting” and says, . . . I will say in a single sentence, in regard to the difficulties that lie before me and our beloved country, that if I can only be as generously and unanimously sustained as the demonstrations I have witnessed indicate I shall be, I shall not fail. . .

A happy moment in time, it is underscored with concern that Lincoln expresses. Grooms crowns Lincoln with a very tall stovepipe hat, branding him the country’s leader and its hope.

The Blue and The Gray
Forty-six paintings record, unforgettably, four years of history.

Red Grooms has been painting the Civil War for over 20 years. Growing up in the South, close to the battlefields of the epic struggle, he turned to its battles and key players to paint large and small-scale works for the exhibition The Blue and The Gray. In oil and graphite, on sliced logs and wood, he records the faces of steely-eyed generals, femme fatale spies, crusading abolitionists, and teen aged African American soldiers. Each year Grooms adds another face and another perspective to The Blue and The Gray. In 2016 using paper much like the cloth squares of a quilt, Grooms has assembled a monumental drawing of Sojourner Truth, the great female Black activist who joins a panoply that includes General George Custer, standing tall with the attitude for which he is famous, and Grooms’ triptych of Robert E. Lee that shows the embattled general growing grimmer as the flag behind him changes from Confederate red to Union blue.

Laura Vookles, Chair of the Museum’s Curatorial Department said, “One thing people may not know about Red Grooms, when they look at his whimsical art, is how devoted he is to the real. For the Museum’s Bookstore, he filled sketchbooks with drawings of the Pierpont Morgan Library and Mendoza’s used book shop. The same holds true for the Civil War. When his subject is the past, he seeks out historical photographs that bring those personalities and scenes to life for him.”

The Blue and The Gray is based on an exhibition organized by the Tennessee State Museum. Lincoln on the Hudson was organized by the Hudson River Museum.

Red Grooms
Long linked to the Hudson River Museum by The Bookstore, 1979, a “walk-through” environment, Red Grooms, in the 1950s, first joined New York City’s cultural scene to make films and participate in “happenings,” both involving the creation of artistic stage sets. From The City of Chicago, 1967 and Ruckus Mountain, 1975, he has evolved large-scale artworks into complex environments, inviting audience participation. All of his environmental installations evoke a feeling of place, which he achieves by researching primary sources and sketches on the spot.

William H. Johnson

William H. Johnson, Jitterbugs (I), ca. 1940-1941, gouache and pen and ink on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1063

Jitterbugs (II)
William H. Johnson, ca. 1941, oil on paperboard. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation. 1967.59.611

By almost any standard, William H. Johnson (1901–1970) can be considered a major American artist. He produced hundreds of works in a virtuosic, eclectic career that spanned several decades as well as several continents. It was not until very recently, however, that his work began to receive the attention it deserves.

William H. Johnson, Folk Family, ca. 1944, oil on plywood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1055

"And even if I have studied for many years and all over the world, . . . I have still been able to preserve the primitive in me. . . . My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me." — William H. Johnson quoted in Richard J. Powell, "In My Family of Primitiveness and Tradition: William H. Johnson's Jesus and the Three Marys, " American Art 5:4 (Fall 1991): 21.

One of the most brilliant yet tragic careers of an early twentieth-century African-American artist was that of William H. Johnson. Originally from the Deep South, Johnson became a world traveler who absorbed the customs and cultures of New York, Europe, and North Africa. He completed hundreds of oils, watercolors, gouaches, pen-and-ink sketches, block prints, silk screens, and ceramics. Johnson's career also spanned a gamut of styles from the academic, through Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and German Expressionism, to, finally, a "conscious naiveté".

Johnson was born on March 18, 1901,in Florence, South Carolina. The eldest of five children, he dropped out of school at an early age to help support his family. As a child he frequently copied cartoons from local newspapers, an activity that developed his ability to tell a story in witty pictures. Johnson left Florence around 1918 and moved to New York where he enrolled in the National Academy of Design and worked notably with the painter Charles Hawthorne. In 1926 Hawthorne raised funds to send Johnson abroad to study.

During the winter of 1926 Johnson traveled to France where he studied and painted in Paris, Moret-sur-Loing, and Cagnes-sur-Mer. From 1927 to 1929 he also visited Corsica, Nice, Belgium, and Denmark. Johnson's earliest works in Paris and Corsica were impressionistic landscapes and cityscapes. He quickly developed a short-hand technique that included only the essentials of design. In late 1929 Johnson returned to New York with a number of his French-Corsican paintings. He exhibited some of these works in the Harmon Foundation show of 1930 and received the coveted gold medal.

Following this success, Johnson returned to Europe and married a Danish textile artist, Holcha Krake, whom he had met in southern France. The newlywed Johnsons traveled across France and Belgium to Denmark where they settled in the small fishing village of Kerteminde, near his wife's home. The people of Kerteminde welcomed Johnson warmly and were fascinated by his paintings of gardens, old houses, and scenes of marine life.

In 1933 the Johnsons spent several months in North Africa where they delighted in the colorful Arabian bazaars and mosques, painted numerous portraits of the residents, worked in ceramics, and were taught age-old secrets of glazing and firing. The couple then traveled across Norway by bicycle. Johnson's paintings of that period capture the fresh atmosphere of spring with blossoming trees, the clear water of the deep fjords, and the blues of distant snow-capped mountains. Sailing next from Aalesund, Sweden, north to Tromsö, the two artists continued to paint and immerse themselves in the beauties of nature. They lived in Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands where Johnson painted and Holcha painted and wove her copy of the Baldishol Tapestry.

The threat of World War II prompted Johnson to return to the United States in 1938. In a pronounced and unexpected transition in his style, Johnson became interested in religious paintings and his subjects were almost exclusively African American. Using a palette of only four or five colors and painting frequently on burlap or plywood, Johnson developed a flat, consciously naive style. During the early 1940s, war activities, the Red Cross, and other related events interested Johnson and provided grist for his widely exhibited narrative paintings.

In January 1944 Johnson's wife Holcha died of cancer, an event that nearly shattered both his life and career. In June 1944 Johnson traveled to Florence, South Carolina, to visit his mother for the first time in fourteen years. There he painted a number of portraits of family and friends, as well as a series of paintings portraying seated women staring directly at the observer.

In 1945 Johnson began his final paintings—social, historical, andpolitical panels including a series of narrative themes built around single subjects such as Booker T. Washington and John Brown. These paintings were exhibited only once in the United States.

Late in 1946, still despondent over his wife's death, Johnson packed all of his art and returned to Denmark where he hoped to find peace among his wife's family in the country that he had grown to love. He exhibited his historical and political paintings in Copenhagen in March 1947, which was the last exhibition of his works held during his lifetime. There is quite a bit of Matisse's worship of unrestricted colors in his pictures," wrote a Danish critic of Johnson's last show, "But where Matisse is an aesthetician, Johnson goes further and shows us the working people of the southern states, the Negroes and their leaders, and their entirely strangely colorful world. . . ."

William H. Johnson, Café, ca. 1939-1940, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.669

Johnson spent decades traveling the world, searching for the authentic spirit of ordinary people from different cultures. In the late 1930s, he found what he was looking for in his own African American community. The strong colors and silhouettes in this painting evoke the African art that black artists and writers had embraced during the Harlem Renaissance. But this affectionate couple also had the fashionable flash of zooit-suiters in the big band era. Above the table, the two figures coolly take in the café scene; below, a tangle of legs and limbs hints at the erotic energy of a night on the town.

Johnson, whose peculiar behavior had been noticed by close friends, became mentally ill shortly after his last show in Denmark. He was cared for temporarily in Denmark and later sent back to New York where he was hospitalized. On April 13, 1970, Johnson died at Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, where he had spent the last twenty-three years of his life in obscurity, unable to produce any art. Today Johnson is considered one of the most important African-American artists of his generation.

William H. Johnson, Street Musicians, ca. 1939-1940, screenprint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Douglas E. Younger, 1971.143

William H. Johnson, Sowing, ca. 1940, oil on burlap, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.1002

Sowing presents a simple narrative of farm life suggestive of Johnson’s upbringing in South Carolina, but the brilliant palette disguises elements of tension. The plow the man grips is stained with red streaks of iron-suffused earth. The woman’s hand is tightly clenched as she holds the seed above the soil before releasing it. A ghost moon in the sky hints at things both visible and unseen.

A painting of a black woman in a blue dress seated on a yellow chair

Image: William Henry Johnson (American, 1901–1970). Woman in Blue, c. 1943. Oil on burlap. Framed: 35 × 27 in. (88.9 × 68.6 cm). Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Permanent Loan from the National Collection of Fine Art, 1969.013. Courtesy Clark Atlanta University Art Museum