The Whitney Museum’s survey of art in America in the 1930s received heavy coverage for reasons that were not, possibly, immediately central to its considerations. Shortly after the opening one read in The New York Times of its having been picketed by a group of artist militants angered by the neglect of black painters which they felt had characterized the Whitney manifestation. Their charge, it seems to me, if it is to be given credence at all, should have been predicated not on a census percentage representation but rather on the possibility that the sources normal to a practicing curator, written history particularly, would have, from the very outset, excluded black material and that, if this is so, then even the most assiduous museum researcher would not have been aware of black achievement in the 1930s (or of any decade for that matter). This tack, I believe, might have deflated the pretensions to qualitative completeness which the Whitney’s director claimed for Curator Agee’s resumé.
The actions of the militants in turn brought attention to an exhibition sponsored by the Studio Museum in Harlem called Invisible Americans, Black Artists of the ’30s, an exhibition which the protesters regarded as an antidote to the Whitney oversight. Since the exhibition was arranged, I believe, as a reply to the alleged Whitney negligence, then on certain issues it did itself a set of ill turns, the most glaring being that it was assembled in haste.
The strongest possible indictment of the Whitney would have been a black exhibition of blinding achievement. As it is; the exhibition but glimmers. Yet, that an artist of the stature of Joseph Delaney, of whom I will speak shortly, was in fact overlooked in the Whitney selection is, in itself, testimony that the central contention of the black artists is true—that the white critical world is, in fact, unaware of major black artistic achievement. The disappointment caused by the black exhibition may be due not to the paucity of black artists but to the haste with which the Harlem manifestation was organized and its lack of attention to historical and other professional niceties. These deficiencies suggest that the black Museum directors themselves may not know of the whereabouts of such longed for (and possibly mythical) achievements. If this is so then black discontent would have an even deeper reason for existing. That the whites should be unaware of black achievement is itself pathetic—but that blacks, by the same sedulous process, should have been detached from this heritage is unpardonable.
In the meanwhile, The New York Times critic, Hilton Kramer, reviewed the uptown manifestation, devoting a considerable Sunday column to the event and, it seemed to me, liberally greeting the exhibition with tact and consideration. His views, however, were repudiated by Mr. Henri Ghent, guest director of the Studio Museum and organizer of the exhibition. Mr. Ghent felt that Mr. Kramer had instead indulged in a “diatribe” and proceeded to observe that “What seems most apparent in Mr. Kramer’s article is the all-pervading concept that what is white must necessarily be superior.” This is, of course, patently untrue, in itself and as an allegation, and, worse, sets an artificial esthetic criterion. In fact, were Mr. Ghent’s view endorsed, then all art criticism by white writers on black art would perforce be gratuitous—no matter the truth or falseness of the observations—on grounds, shall we say, of “original sin,” that is, of having been born white. What Mr. Ghent ignored saying is that were his view accepted, the opposite would obviously apply—that black remarks on white art would also have no foundation.
These comments do not discount the fact that the museum public has very little acquaintance, if any, with the production of black artists during the 1930s, or otherwise. In this connection, one of the issues Mr. Ghent was most censorious of was that Mr. Kramer, who was writing against a copy deadline, had not seen the superb cache of ten small canvases of Henry O. Tanner. Mr. Ghent, in his rebuttal, asserts categorically that they come from the 1930s. I believe that Mr. Ghent may be incorrect in his dating of these pictures and that at the latest they may come from the 1920s. The dating of Tanner’s exquisite late works is still open to conjecture as so much necessary research is still to be done on the artist. The pictures in question are stamped on the back with a cachet d’ atelier, that is, they are, to all intents, unsigned and undated. Whatever their date, however, they cannot by any standard whatsoever be regarded as representative of either black or white artistic aspirations of the 1930s, if such a polarization even exists. Instead, they refer back to the late 19th century and align themselves with a broad popularization of late Pre-Raphaelite sensibility, both in England and the United States. The Philadelphia Museum’s notable Annunciation by Tanner attests to its iconographic derivation (but seen in more immediate and personally real terms) from Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The dating issue would in fact have been only of small concern were it not for the fact that Mr. Ghent had employed Tanner as a means of discrediting Mr. Kramer. Be that as it may, Tanner’s fragile, gem-like evocations certainly rank among the finest American religious and mystical pictures—akin to those of Ryder. It is, of course, of great interest that they were painted not in the United States, but on the outskirts of Paris, where Henry Tanner resided as an expatriate until his death in 1937.
The other work by more than twenty black artists appear coincidental with the more accepted senses of the 1930s. Many reflections of Social Realist paintings were of course in evidence. More striking, perhaps, than this anticipated slant, were absorptions of School of Paris semi-abstraction, such as A Paris Vista by Ronald Joseph, and Archibald Motley’s In the Street. In terms of a central American primitivism one noted Romare Bearden’s The Visitation and Eldzier Corter’s suave nudes. Of the naive painters, creditable New York scenes by Palmer Hayden were included (one wondered where the Horace Pippins were). A single artist of tremendous merit was revealed to me in terms of a developed, tough, and by moments self-mocking Expressionism—Joseph Delaney. Since the exhibition omitted the dates of the paintings, one could not know for sure which works came first, but I presume the earliest one depicts a Village Studio Party, including in the scene of group camaraderie an image of what must have seemed then to be the daring option of depicting a white girl dancing with a black man (despite the model provided by Nancy Cunard). A somewhat later work—if Delaney’s work in fact moves to a greater clarity and finesse of touch—is a view of the now lost Waldorf Café, once a scrubby Sixth Avenue haven of down-and-outers, old style Wobblies, the first trippers-out and the early beatniks like Maxwell Bodenheim. Delaney’s Waldorf Café (is the subliminal model van Gogh’s Night Café in Arles?) is terrifically painted with a breadth and ease of caricature that would please an Ensor. The most recent Delaney, I presume, is a portrait of Clara strumming a guitar. It is a fine painting with a wispy, meditative quality that at moments suggests Kokoschka and a lyricism reminiscent of Kuniyoshi.
A small display of sculpture attested to a wide vocabulary, though standard for the period. The most notable artist was Augusta Savage, who presented a firm anecdotalist head of a black’ Gamin and a charming pair of more suavely generalized bookends depicting two men facing each other in a pissotière.
From a humanistic point of view (and therefore, a highly suspect kind of esthetic insidiousness) there can be no question that a respectable array of work, no worse or better, than that produced by myriad numbers of white confreres during this period, is in itself a considerable achievement, taking into account the endless conscious or unconscious social pressures which black artists have had to face. What seems to be more interesting, from an art historical point of view, is that an entire and familiar black style of the 1920s and 1930s has been totally neglected, one might say even intentionally overthrown. I refer to what became known in decorator parlance as “le style nègre.” Associated with the French Arts Déco movement of the 1920s, the style, for example, envisioned Josephine Baker as a kind of Leda, imprinting her image on countless black glass perfume bottles, substituting a swan for her celebrated skirt of bananas. The style continued into the 1930s but defocused its luxurious connotations into a kind of philonegrism accountable in part to Carl Van Vechten in his double role as writer and photographer. On its most contemptible level it resulted in slumming in Harlem to see the latest spectacle and hear the latest sound at the Cotton Club. Lena Horne, in her memoirs, provides a clear glimpse of the hard line segregation imposed assiduously even by successful black entrepreneurs of the period. These examples may seem extraordinarily detached from the subject at hand but in the arts they are relevant to the tenacity of le style nègre; one has only to recall the ebony and ivory fold-screens of Rayonnist black jazzmen that were once de rigueur for cocktail lounges. Such interior conceits echoed the continued French exploitation of African colonial holdings and inspired the decoration of numerous pavilions up to the very last great European World’s Fair, held in Paris in 1937. It is this style that is gratefully and eminently absent for the first broad examination of black painters and painting held in New York City, an absence so marked as to underscore more forcibly than ever the fact that this single known black style (I mean in the United States and Europe) all along had been both a white fiction and a white imposition.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
