Past and Present
The Negro as Artist.—When a few American Negroes, less than three generations ago, began to paint and model and aspire to be “artists,” it was not only thought strange and unusually ambitious, but most people, even they themselves, thought it was the Negro’s first attempt at art. Art in fact, in those days was thought to be the last word in culture; the topmost rung of the ladder of civilization. For the Negro, it was thought to be a little presumptious, like beginning with poetry instead of a “blue-back speller.” The Western world had yet to learn, to its amazement, that primitive civilization not only had its artists but had produced a great art, and that of the many types of primitive art now known but then yet to be discovered, that of the Negro in Africa was by all odds the greatest and the most sophisticated. Yes,—believe it or not, the most sophisticated; at least it is the most sophisticated modern artists and critics of our present generation who say so. And even should they be wrong as to this quality of African art, the fact still remains that there is an artistic tradition and skill in all the major craft arts running back for generations and even centuries, among the principal African tribes, particularly those of the West Coast and Equatorial Africa from which Afro-Americans have descended. These arts are wood and metal sculpture, metal forging, wood carving, ivory and bone carving, weaving, pottery, skillful surface decoration in line and color of all these crafts, in fact everything in the category of the European fine arts except easel painting on canvas, marble sculpture and engraving and etching, and even here the technique of the two latter is represented in the surface carving of much African art. So we must entitle our booklet: Negro Art, Past and Present. The pioneer American Negro artists were, really, unbeknown to themselves, starting the Negro’s second career in art and unconsciously trying to recapture a lost artistic heritage.
How the Heritage was Lost.—The reader will naturally ask: Why should this be? How was this heritage lost? There is one great historical reason; incidentally one that, tragically enough, explains much about the Negro. Slavery is the answer. Slavery not only physically transplanted the Negro, it cut him off sharply from his cultural roots, and by taking away his languages, abruptly changing his habits, putting him in the context of a strangely different civilization, reduced him, so to speak, to cultural zero. And no matter how divided one may be as to the relative values of human civilizations, no one can intelligently think that the African stood, after centuries of living and a long inter-tribal history, at cultural zero. One of the high points in African civilization, like all primitive cultures, was dexterity of hand and foot and that co-ordination of eye and muscle which constitutes physical skill. This expressed itself in elaborate and fine native crafts, the traditions of which had been built up on generations of trial and error experience. These patterns were lost in the nakedness and horror of the slave-ship, where families, castes, tribes were ruthlessly scrambled. When subsequently slavery substituted the crudest body labor with only the crudest tools, it finally severed this bruised trunk nerve of the Negro’s technical skill and manual dexterity. Alexandre Jacovleff, the Russian artist whose drawings of African types are today unsurpassed, has well said of Africa: “It is a continent of beautiful bodies, but above all, of beautiful hands.” This fact is really a symbol: life in Africa required a skill of hand and foot and almost perfect co-ordination of nerve and muscle. And as with all nature peoples, this skill that could throw a weapon accurately and weave or tie with accuracy brought with it an art that could carve, scrape or trace to a nicety. Nature had moulded out of the primitive artisan a primitive artist.
We will never know and cannot estimate how much technical African skill was blotted out in America. The hardships of cotton and rice-field labor, the crudities of the hoe, the axe and the plow reduced the typical Negro hand to a gnarled stump, incapable of fine craftmanship even if materials, patterns and artistic incentives had been available. But we may believe there was some memory of beauty; since by way of compensation, some obviously artistic urges flowed even with the peasant Negro toward the only channels of expression left open,—those of song, graceful movement and poetic speech. Stripped of all else, the Negro’s own body became his prime and only artistic instrument; dance, pantomime and song were the solace for his pent-up emotions. So it was environment that forced American Negroes away from the craft arts and their old ancestral skills to the emotional arts of song and dance for which they are known and noted in America. When a few Negroes did get contact with the skilled crafts, their work showed that here was some slumbering instinct of the artisan left, for especially in the early colonial days, before plantation slavery had become dominant, the Negro craftsmen were well-known as cabinet-makers, marquetry setters, wood carvers and iron-smiths as the workmanship of many colonial mansions in Charleston, New Orleans and other colonial centers of wealth and luxury will attest.
Somehow, too, in this dislocating process of being transplanted from Africa to America, Negro art and the Negro artist got separated. It was generations before they got together again. Meanwhile, we had African art forgotten and discredited; the Negro theme and subject matter neglected by American artists generally, and many Negro artists who themselves regarded Negro art as a Ghetto restriction from which they fled in protest and indignation. All this has changed and today the exact opposite is largely true. African art today is widely recognized and highly prized; in fact for the last twenty years has been a great inspiration for the best and most original modern painters and sculptors. Gradually American artists have come to treat the Negro subject as something more than a passing and condescending side interest; the portrayal of Negro types with serious dignity and understanding has become a major theme in the program for developing a “native American art.” And still more importantly, the younger generation Negro artists now regard it as one of their main objectives and opportunities to interpret the Negro and to develop what is now called “Negro art.” For although the Negro as a vital part of the American scene is the common property of American artists, black and white, he is certainly the special property and a particular artistic interest and asset of the Negro artist. However, this could come about only after African art and the Negro theme had acquired artistic dignity through the recognition of master artists and world critics. Before that the shadow of prejudice clouded the Negro in the mirror of art almost as darkly as prejudice and social discrimination hampered and clouded his real life.
Art, in fact, always mirrors social ideals and values. If the history books were all lost or destroyed, we could almost rewrite history from art. A keen eye could tell from the way in which art painted him just what the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries thought of the Negro,—or for that matter any other class, race or type. And whenever there has been a significant change of social attitude, it has either been reflected in the mirror of art or sometimes even, this sensitive medium has registered the change before it has become generally apparent in the conventional attitudes of society at large. By this token, for example, we may reliably judge that for the Seventeenth Century, the Negro was an unfamiliar figure exciting curiosity and romantic interest, and that this attitude shown first in the blackamoor figures of the Negro king in the three legendary magi who came to Bethlehem with their gold, myrrh and frankincense continued into the tradition of the Eighteenth Century, when most Negroes painted, though personal attendants of notables, were fancy dress favorites obviously as personally intimate as court jesters, only more prized and petted because of their rarity. Few portraits of the courtesans of the Empire and Pompadour period were complete without this traditional figure of the black page or personal attendant, dressed elegantly as a pet possession. And of course, we must not forget the occasional black notable or scholar, whose idealized portrait reflected the admiration and sentimental interest of the Eighteenth Century in the Negro. As literary examples, characters like “Oronooko” by Mrs. Aphra Behn, or “Rasselas, Prince of Ethiopia” by Voltaire, are typical. These men, like Juan Latino, the Spanish Negro scholar, Gomez Parera, the apprentice disciple of Velasquez, Capitein, the black Dutch theologian, down to Samuel Brown, the learned servant of Samuel Johnson, sat for the best painters and engravers of their day, and thus from this tradition we have the occasional but important Negro figure portrait of a Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Reynolds or a Hogarth.
Such a tradition even carried over into early colonial America, wherever the aristocratic tradition was strong. We see it unmistakably in the portrait of George Washington’s family, where the dark brown, elegantly groomed Lee is a prominent figure in the group. In fact, there is scarcely a grotesque or carelessly painted Negro figure in art before the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, which coincides exactly with the Negro’s lapse into chattel slavery and plantation bondage. Then it was, that the social stigma was branded from which it has taken more than a century to free him; and from which he is only now slowly emerging. For a time, the Negro completely disappears from the canvas of art, and when he makes his reappearance it is in the background corner as a clownish, grotesque object setting off the glory of his master or as the comic subject of his amused condescension. The “old faithful uncle,”—later Uncle Tom, Uncle Ned and Uncle Remus, the broad expansive “mammy” from Aunt Chloe to Aunt Jemima, the jigging plantation hands in tattered jeans and the sprawling pickaninnies all became typical stereotypes, and scarcely any Nineteenth Century art show was without its genre portrait study of one or more of these types or its realistically painted or sketched portrayal of “The Plantation Quarters” or “Ole Virginia Life” or some such glorification of the slave system. The tradition was so strong that it lasted forty years at least after the nominal fall of chattel slavery; and it has been and still is one of the mainstays of the literary and artistic defense of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. In fact the cleverest argument for the slave system was this misrepresentation of the Negro as happy, content and “naturally in place” in such a romanticized presentment of the patriarchal régime of the Southern plantation. It was from this that American art had to react in the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century, and it was this tradition that made the Negro artist, during all that period dread and avoid the Negro subject like the black plague itself.
Few were able to remember that the Negro subject had been treated with dignity and even romantic touch in the previous century; and no one dared to resume it against so strong and flourishing a stereotype of Nordic pride and prejudice. A Negro figure not obviously a peasant or servant, decently clad, with decent clothes and without a counterfoil of his over lord to show his inferior social status was a rarity; a book in a Negro hand instead of a serving tray would have been an intolerable heresy. Oddly enough, the few Negro painters and sculptors did not realize that at this juncture it was their duty and opportunity to furnish the antidote to this social poison. For the most part, instead of counteracting it, they, too, shunned the Negro subject. Gradually this fixed tradition began to lapse. It was undermined for artistic rather than social reasons, and for the most part by pioneering white artists. As we shall see in more detail later on, while a few Negro painters were proving that Negroes could become competent and recognized artists, pioneering realists and “Americanists,” were developing a realistic art of native types including a new and almost revolutionizing portrayal of the Negro subject. Some of them began, like Winslow Homer, with sketches of the exotic Negro of the West Indies, less familiar and therefore less subject to the American stereotype; others started with one foot in the plantation school, like Wayman Adams, but the other rather firmly in the advance ground of true type portraiture. Finally, with the great American realists, like Robert Henri and George Luks at the turn of the Twentieth Century, Negro types took on the technical thoroughness of a major artistic problem, and finally reflected the dignity of an entirely changed artistic approach and social attitude. Now with contemporary artists like George Bellows, John Stewart Curry, James Chapin, Julius Bloch, Thomas Benton, and many others, the Negro subject has become a matter of a major interest and reached dignified, sympathetic portrayal even, at times, spiritual interpretation.
But this is just a favorable beginning. Now that the Negro subject has become artistically respectable and important again, it is the duty and opportunity of the Negro artist to develop this province of American art as perhaps only he can. Certainly from the point of view of spiritual values and interpretation, the Negro painter and sculptor and graphic artist ought to be able to advance an additional message, if not add the last word. Although one-tenth of the population, one trembles to think what posterity would have thought of us had some Vesuvius buried us under or tidal wave washed us out in 1920. The archeologists of the next age of civilization, digging out the evidences of American art, would not only have had a sorry idea of the Negro but no clue as to his factual bulk or cultural character. By only the narrow margin of a little over a decade, then, are we safe from such a serious misrepresentation.
There is a double duty and function to Negro art,—and by that we mean the proper development of the Negro subject as an artistic theme—the role of interpreting the Negro in the American scene to America at large is important, but more important still is the interpretation of the Negro to himself. Frankness compels the admission and constructive self-criticism dictates the wisdom of pointing out that the Negro’s own conception of himself has been warped by prejudice and the common American stereotypes. To these there is no better or effective antidote than a more representative Negro art of wider range and deeper penetration. Not an art artificially corrective or self-pluming; but at least one that aims to tell the whole truth, as the artist sees it, and tells it, as all good art must, with an accent of understanding or beauty, or both.
Negro art, then, is an important province of American art, and a vital challenge to the Negro artist.