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-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.

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.

 

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.

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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.