TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012990/0129400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 152 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 82

Two Centuries of Stereotypes


A show at the Corcoran examines the portrayal of blacks in
America

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Obviously, the meanings of art are not confined to
masterpieces. A piece of kitsch can tell us as much about its
time as a Mondrian, which does not mean that it ceases to be
kitsch. Mediocre or rotten art carries all sorts of social data
-- messages that may have been overt or subliminal, but in
either case work their way out (with a final tweak from their
interpreters) over the years.

    So it is with most of the art in "Facing History: The Black
Image in American Art 1710-1940," the new exhibition at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (on view through March
25). Anyone who visits the exhibition with hopes of high
aesthetic pleasure will be disappointed. There are a few
paintings in it, and one small sculpture, of real substance and
beauty: work by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas
Eakins, Eastman Johnson and William Harnett, and a bronze study
of a black soldier's head done for the Shaw Memorial in Boston,
his greatest public work of art, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. And
there is a great deal of poor to average American 19th century
art -- clumsy, cliche ridden, provincial, earnest. But the
show's point lies elsewhere: in the subject matter and how it
is treated.

    As curated by Guy C. McElroy, this is a highly polemical
exhibition. Its main aim is to show how white American artists
(and a few black ones) depicted black American people -- to
argue against the notion that art is color-blind. Most American
painters, in McElroy's view, put racial stereotypes in their
work. These were usually negative. "Prosperous collectors
created a demand for depictions that fulfilled their own ideas
of blacks as grotesque buffoons, servile menials, comic
entertainers, or threatening subhumans," McElroy writes in the
catalog. "This vicious cycle of supply and demand sustained
images that denied the inherent humanity of black people by
reinforcing their limited role in American society."

    Before the abolition of slavery, whites felt superior to
blacks. After abolition, they kept right on feeling superior --
for what other race could make such a noble gesture as
abolition? When blacks appeared on monuments after abolition,
they continued to kneel, looking up at their white liberators.
To unpick such stereotypes and "subtexts" -- the prejudicial
stories behind the images -- is the purpose of this show.

    In the main McElroy succeeds very well, though he sometimes
overstrains his argument and has not been able to borrow all the
paintings he needed. A book hovers behind this exhibition, a
multi-volume work by various authors that is one of the great
scholarly efforts of the 1980s: The Image of the Black in
Western Art, published by the Menil Foundation and Harvard
University Press.

    The first important figure of a black in American art is in
Copley's Watson and the Shark, 1778. The black has just thrown
a line, without avail, to naked Watson, who wallows helplessly
in the green waters of Havana Harbor as the shark charges in to
bite his leg off. As McElroy observes, the outstretched arms of
Watson and the black "mirror each other," and it may even be
that Copley meant Watson's presence in the water to remind us,
by reversal as it were, of the slavers' practice of dumping dead
Africans into the sea.

    Not until Homer's Dressing for the Carnival, 1877 -- beyond
comparison the most moving and solidly imagined painting in the
show -- were the subtlety, sympathy and fullness of Copley's
rendering repeated. Nevertheless, there are times when McElroy's
prosecutorial zeal gets away from him. Samuel Jennings' Liberty
Displaying the Arts and Sciences, 1792, may be a naive image,
but no one could doubt that its heart is in the right place. It
shows the Goddess of Freedom in her temple offering the emblems
of civilization -- books, an artist's palette, a lyre, a globe
and, most important of all, a broken chain -- to a group of
grateful freed slaves, while in the background more blacks
celebrate a liberty pole. McElroy complains that the artist
"avoids presenting images that describe individual black
people": none of the black figures is a portrait. But so what?
There is no individual white person in the painting either,
except for a bronze bust of the abolitionist Henry Thornton; the
goddess Liberty, far from being "a white noblewoman," is a
standard allegorical figure.

    Likewise, McElroy notes with disapproval that in Eakins'
Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting (Rail Shooting), 1876,
the hunter with the gun in the boat is named while the black
guide with the pole is not. But a title is not a picture, and
in the painting itself Eakins has taken scrupulous care with the
guide's face, posture, attentiveness -- all that describes a
skilled man at work. If we think Eakins meant "Blackman" as a
cipher, we are off the mark.

    Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Alexandre Dumas in France
boasted of their African ancestry; one cannot imagine an
American writer or artist having done so. But the relative
poverty of images of blacks in American painting was also
largely caused by different conditions of work. Patronage in the
U.S. was thin. Artists had to scramble for portrait commissions,
which few blacks could afford to give them. But there were
perfectly dignified, solid, objective portraits by white artists
of black clients such as the Pennsylvania clergyman Absolom
Jones by Raphaelle Peale before 1810, or Elisha Hammond's 1844
portrait of the young Frederick Douglass, neither of which is in
this show. On the other hand, unlike France or even England,
young America had no real market for "philosophical" pictures
in which blacks might figure -- allegories of freedom,
brotherhood and the like.

    What the American market mainly wanted before the Civil War
was genre scenes of American life, which might or might not
include blacks. Most American genre painting before Homer and
Eakins was lowbrow stuff, in which blacks tended to get the
roles played by the fiddling boors and carousing peasants in
Dutch genre. They become lazy Sambos with watermelons, fiddling
clowns, butts of practical jokes. But not all the time. "Sambo
is not my man and brother," snorted William Makepeace Thackeray
during his lecture tour of America in 1852-53. Yet when his
secretary, Eyre Crowe, painted a group of black women and a
field hand waiting to be auctioned in Virginia, the image was
all sympathy and respect, without a trace of his employer's
bigotry.

    Except for one noxious painting of a minstrel chorus from
the 1830s, this show contains nothing to rival the virulence
launched against blacks by popular art after the Civil War:
illustration, advertising and political cartooning. The collapse
of Reconstruction released a swarm of derogatory images, as
hysterical and all-pervading as anything aimed at Jews by Joseph
Goebbels. Those figures of shiftless Jim Crow and servile,
hustling Zip Coon should have been put on the walls of the
exhibition, not just reproduced in the catalog.

    The coarser and more hackish the art, the more offensive the
attitudes. But the reverse was also true. Quite a number of
artists, from Homer and Thomas Anshutz to the little-known
Joseph Decker -- whose Our Gang, 1886, is a sharp and scary
image of a small African-American boy backed against a
poster-covered wall by white street kids -- were reaching for
understanding, for a sense of shared humanity and common
decency. Can it be only a coincidence that their work is also,
in aesthetic terms, the best in the show?