Resuming our discussion of the treatment of the Negro subject in contemporary European art, it is perhaps best to start concretely by naming some of the painters who have done distinctive and distinguished work in this field. Beside the Belgian master Mambour,1 there is the brilliant Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the majority of whose canvases with Negro subjects are strict portraiture as opposed to the type sketch or study. Then notable among German painters we have Max Slevogt, Julius Huether, Max Pechstein, Elaine Stern and Walter von Ruckteschell; among English painters, Neville Lewis, F. C. Gadell, Edith Cheesman, John A. Wells and Frank Potter, and among the French, beginning with the well-known Dinet, the later work of Lucie Cousturier, Germaine Casse, Bonnard and Georges Rouault. As might be expected from grouping artists in terms of this one interest, we are for the time being making strange bedfellows of artists of widely different schools and rank, but there is in this very diversity an indirect tribute to the artistic appeal of the subject matter we are discussing.
What characterizes modern work with the Negro is the gradual outgrowing of the casual interest, either of the exotic or the genre sort, and the development of a matured and sustained interest worthy of the resources and difficulties of this special field. Of course when a Rembrandt or a Rubens, or a Gainsborough or Hogarth, with their masterful control, touched even casually the Negro subject, there was a notable reaction. But the effect upon art tradition was negligible, in spite of the occasional brilliant suggestion of canvases like Rembrandt’s “Two Negroes” of the Hague Museum, or Rubens’ noteworthy “Tetes de Negres” of the Brussel’s Gallery, or even later studies like Feuerbach’s Negro Sketch of the Hamburg Museum. What we are more interested in, and what is more valuable for art is a continuous and sustained treatment of the subject, even though the individual product may not be so outstanding. Perhaps the French Romanticists with their interest in exotic Eastern and North African types prepared the way for this, but not until the full flood of modern realism has the development spread to the true Negro types, which after all offer the greatest novelties and difficulties of technical values and effects.
As a beginning of this particular trend, let us take the Munich Secessionist, Julius Huether. Here we have a front rank artist so enamoured of the Negro subject that it claims nearly a third of his canvases. This interest of Huether’s, we learn, was purely technical, long before he was ever able to visit Africa, or see a considerable number of Negro models. His treatment is the approach of a color romanticist, captivated by the new bronze tones and warm browns of his subject. But gradually as his work matures, we see a growing figure interest, a study of type, and eventually a reaching after the most subtle of all the problems in this field, the curiously typical physiognomic expression which may be said to be racial. In his figure work, Huether revels in his new material like a modern Rubens,—indeed allowing for period differences, there are many reminders in his work of the touch of the Flemish master. In interpretative power over the Negro subject, Huether is more modern, and is to be bracketed with van Dongen and von Ruckteschell; others excel them in decorative and atmospheric values, but for type portrayal in this field these artists are preeminent.
Walter von Ruckteschell’s drawings are already familiar to readers of Opportunity. They represent careful life studies made in German East Africa, but the point of approach is that warm human interest traditional with the South German school. Half realist, half romantic, it has given us always painting in which the human interest values were immediate and irresistible. In the case of von Ruckteschell, apart from the beauty of the drawing, there is a peculiar evocation of what one must call “race soul;” the mellow, sleepy but mystic eye, the sensuous but genial lips, the grotesque, mask-like simplicity of countenance, the velvety tone and texture, the sculptural modelling, common to the many otherwise diverse African types. I do not believe there are many Negroes who understand the underlying race temperament as deeply as the intuitive vision of these artists. When the race awakens consciously to its own spiritual selfhood, such work will be prized beyond measure. It is in fact an artistic forerunner of such an awakening.
Van Dongen is a more mannered artist, inheriting both the Dutch portraitistic skill and the symbolic manner of modern French painting. His portraits are nervous, incisive interpretations of character, more individual than racial. But then, so partial is he to the Negro subject, that an art journal, thinking to exploit this exoticism, asked him to explain his peculiar interest. Van Dongen as artist saw no need for one: his actual reply is worth quoting. It was at the time of Siki’s boxing triumph, so he said, in reply to the question of what peculiar interest he found in Negro types, “If you would only ask Georges Carpentier, perhaps he could tell you.” Of course back of this clever rebuke, was the main lesson of the whole matter. Why explain, the interest justifies itself; it is a question of art, not sociology. Now van Dongen’s work is highly mannered, but only with the general eccentricity of his personal style, the same that produced one of the most striking but debatable interpretations of Anatole France. No connoisseur would put these Negro portraits of van Dongen out of the category of his best and most representative work.
Perhaps it is appropriate at this point to recall again Lucie Cousturier. Madame Cousturier’s work represents a painstaking absorption of Negro life. She belongs to that school of artists who believe that Negro types cannot be fully interpreted until their cultural background has been adequately absorbed and reexpressed. For them the African background, and the racial idiom is an essential part of the picture. It requires social as well as artistic vision to approach the subject in this way, and Lucie Cousturier was one of the pioneers of such a broad humanistic view in European art. Artists like Max Slevogt, Max Pechstein, and even Elaine Stern are led to their African subjects by an interest in the exotic; as local colorists, they are the counterparts in painting of the colonial novelists. But the cultural interest which work like Madame Cousturier started has gradually pervaded their work, and raised it to the plane of serious and dignified human interpretation. Slevogt’s and Pechstein’s paintings are dramatic and in instances only superficially interpretative, but Slevogt’s African work would fill a moderate gallery, and in addition to his local color sketches, Max Pechstein carries over into much of his general painting stylistic mannerisms borrowed from African art together with the sharp tropical tone contrasts and color exuberances of the African scene. Though by no means in the full maturity of her art development, the work of Elaine Stern has a depth and veracity of interpretation that makes her work notably promising. Moreover she has a fine symbolic touch, like some carry over of Gauguin from the South Seas into tropical Africa. Her Madonna of the Tropics, which I saw in Frankfort and of which there was regrettably no reproduction obtainable is one of the first dozen canvases I should purchase for a gallery of Negro pictures. It has the poetry and symbolism that pervades the work of Mambour and that stamps him as the modern master of this subject, representing until the arrival of the great Negro artist interpreter the high water mark for the present in the treatment of Negro types.
We next come to a class of work in which a great number of lesser names could be mentioned, especially if we should include work in black and white mediums and the semi-serious. It is essentially a French tradition. Like the American cartoonist, the French black and white artist has a penchant for the Negro subject, with this difference,—that his treatment is both socially more kind and artistically more decorative. This modern interest in the black rogue—a revival on another level perhaps of the rather erotic Eighteenth Century French interest in the Negro, has been responsible for a considerable amount of work with deft skill and charm. This typical Latin interest and tradition, with its kindly farce in which there is no hint of social offense or disparagement, no matter how broad or caricaturistic the brush, is familiar to us now in the work of Miguel Covarrubias. It may yet be an antidote for that comic art which is so responsible for the hypersensitive feelings of American Negroes and stands between them and the full appreciation of any portrayal of race types. Surely the time has come when we should have our own comic and semi-serious art, and our own Cruikshanks and Max Beerbohms. And perhaps we shall have to go to the French artists for inspiration. At any rate this Quixotic realism, caught up into the texture of great art, characterizes the work of Bonnard and Georges Rouault, with Rouault a sort of French Henry Bellows. Rouault’s lumpy canvases reproduce none too well, and it is perhaps just as well for those who are gradually getting over the pathetic fallacies of injured race pride that we are not reproducing pictures like Bonnard’s “Sylvestre” or Rouault’s “La Negresse” or “Le Boxeur.” But in the municipal Museum of Grenoble, where nine of Rouault’s works hang, one can forget for hours at a time that the Alps are outdoors. So at least it must be art. And if it is art, why question further?
The sad question is that the Anglo-Saxon mind does. That is, the English and the American, including even the Aframerican. And even the artists, most emancipated of the lot, have to rub their eyes twice, so to speak. Louise Herrick Wall, speaking to von Ruckteschell of “the mask of an unfamiliar physiognomy,” quotes him as saying, “Mask! It is we who wear it.” I did not intend to chastize English and American artists particularly, but in most of their work, except possibly in work like that of Alfred Wollmark and John Wells, whose beautiful “Star of Bethlehem” has been selected as the cover illustration, there is the obvious effect of a public opinion holding them down to genre limitations. An excuse for painting the subject lurks in the corner of most of the canvases. English art hasn’t much of a tradition in this line. There is the single Gainsborough, the single Hogarth, that gorgeously exotic Negro girl in Rossetti’s “Beloved.” But we remember that the former were Eighteenth century and that Rossetti was Italian after all.
But English art is outgrowing its limitations in a way. Edith Cheesman had some brilliant studies of Gold Coast life at the Empire Exhibition, particularly striking a Native Court and a Market Scene at Accra. Lewis Neville and F. C. B. Gadell have done some quite competent colonial type studies, but with the impression that what is good material in a colonial setting would never do in London. But it is a different matter with Frank Potter, and Alfred Wollmark and John A. Wells. For them the psychological limitations of the local color school have been discarded, and the subject treated with the fullest resources, imaginative and technical, of the artist. From such treatment comes an interpretative depth that lends an instantly recognizable dignity and universalized meaning to the subject. It is to this level that modern art is gradually rising.
What needs most to be gained is the sense of the complete artistic propriety of the Negro subject. So that neither the slant and squint of social snobbery nor the stare and blink of inordinate curiosity should spoil with a sense of oddness, grotesqueness or triviality the message of the artist. The presentment of the Negro in art may then be in any vein, in any style,—it is for art to choose—with the mannerisms, the distortions even, that go along with individualisms of style, but with a sober technical interest and with appreciation for any serious interpretation of a subject which is difficult because it has not centuries of painting tradition behind it, and important because it does have before it the important significance of yet unexpressed human forms and feeling.