Frick Fine Arts Library
University of Pittsburgh
This display coincides with the graduate seminar in the department of History of Art and Architecture, Considering African American Art in the International Arena. Today’s appreciable rise in the status and presence of African American art in public and private arenas within the United States and across the globe make its consideration vital and timely.
During the course of the 20th century, African American art had, out of necessity, established itself as a separate force within the United States. However, given the tumultuous political events which shaped 20th century America– from the lasting legacies of slavery, civil war and emancipation to the monumental periods of reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration and Civil Rights– it might seem implausible that African American art could be considered as anything but central to definitions of American art. However, from the postwar period at least, ‘American’ and ‘African American’ art have played key but often different roles in the international arena. Major international touring exhibitions such as ‘Modern Art in the United States: A selection from the Museum of Modern Art, New York’, 1956, and ‘The New American Painting’ 1959 shown at Tate Gallery in London, characteristically bypassed many key African American artists. Notwithstanding the bifurcated nature of American art in the postwar period, this was an important time for many African American practitioners. Presented here is a small selection of material published in Britain, France, the former German Democratic Republic, Italy and the United States from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, which provide an alternative perspective on American art history in the international arena.
Richard Hylton, February 2020
More +Loïs Mailou Jones Peintures 1937-1951 (1952)
Over the course of a long career, Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) spent many extended periods in France. Beginning in the late 1930s, when she received a scholarship to study at Académie Julian, Paris, Mailou Jones continued to visit Paris annually. Peintures 1937-1951 was published by Presses Georges Frere in 1952 as an edition of 500. Although reproduced largely in black and white, Peintures 1937-1951 remains an important document of the artist’s output over a fourteen-year period. The publication includes texts by Mary Beattie Brady, Director of the Harmon Foundation, Eric Feher, Laureat de l’Institut de France and James A. Porter, Howard University. Writes Porter:
The artist’s philosophy at this time was one of work; her abiding principle one of expression, boldness; her conception of her mission as an artist – the hedonistic values of decorative beauty and simplistic forms. Though a product of the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and an alumna of the Designer’s Art School, Miss Jones in her painting revealed no particular school bias, but rather candor and a directness of style that so often in American art has meant the beginning of powerful, fruitful colloquialism.
Charles White: ein Künstler Amerikas (1955)
Charles White: ein Künstler Amerikas was written by Sidney Finkelstein and published by VEB Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, East Germany in 1955. The first monographic study on White included reproductions of murals, paintings, prints and drawings from 1935 to 1955. It has been recently noted that Finkelstein’s essay was “for a considerable period of time, the most substantial scholarship on the artist” [www.eddiechambers.com/charles-white/]. Opening his assessment and appreciation of White’s practice, Finkelstein notes:
Charles White is a young artist of 37 years. He has created a collective work that is unique in the art of the United States today. It is an art that immediately gains appreciation, even love, of consideration. The image of man designed according to life is their main object. The powerful faces and bodies depicted are filled with joie de vivre and trust in the future of humanity. They shine in sublime beauty. This art broadens our understanding of our fellow human beings and transforms it.
In recent years, the work of Charles White (1918-1979) has received renewed and sustained interest in the United States including from the major touring exhibition Charles White A Retrospective organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2018.
cover image: Freedom, Now!, Pencil, 1954 (Preliminary sketch for O Freedom, 1956)
Ten Negro Artists from the United States (1966)
Ten Negro Artists from the United States was organized as part of the United States visual art contribution to The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, 1–24 April 1966. The brainchild of Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet, leading figure of the Negritude movement and first postcolonial President of Senegal, the Pan-African festival was the first to be organized on the African continent. Participating artists were Barbara Chase (later Chase-Riboud), Emilio Cruz, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Jacob Lawrence, William Majors, Norman Morgan, Robert Reid, Charles White, Todd Williams. Although a much smaller exhibition than originally conceived, its heterogenous selection was nonetheless notable for presenting abstract and figurative art spanning drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture. Although African American artists had an enduring presence within the international arena, dating back to the early nineteenth century, Ten Negro Artists from the United States was the first international group exhibition of African American art. It was also significant because it took place during the height of both the civil rights and decolonizationera. In the catalogue’s Preface, Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), a towering figure in American art reflected on the timing of the exhibition:
…it is hoped that the exhibit will not only provide some insight into what Negro American artists are doing, but that it will make a valid contribution to the total context of the Dakar Festival. Perhaps the latter hope is the more pressing, for the Festival is being held at a time in history when cultural consciousness and social aspirations of the Negro everywhere are being raised in the arts, as well as in other areas of human endeavor.
It has recently been noted that this exhibition was always intended to be part of the much larger exhibition ‘Tendencies and ‘Confrontations’ involving over two-hundred artists from twenty-five countries from the African diaspora. [see Cédric Vincent ‘Tendencies and ‘Confrontations: Dakar 1966’, Afterall Spring/Summer 2017]
cover image: Todd Williams, Coney Island, 1965c
Barbara Chase-Riboud – Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris (1974)
Following her John Hay Whitney Fellowship to Rome in 1957 poet, novelist and sculptor, Barbara Chase-Riboud (1939–) eventually relocated to Paris in the early 1960s. Although no longer the art world’s epicenter, the ‘city of light’ remained the alluring and inspirational city it had been during the early 20th century for writers, artists, musicians and poets. Equally, Paris offered a variety of possibilities, for African American artists, not least “the quest for freedom, and hope of a refuge from segregation and racial turmoil...as well as the greater possibility of European patronage and gallery representation.” (Leininger-Miller: 2001, 249). Chase-Riboud received her first solo exhibition in a public gallery at Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris in 1974. Published to coincide with this exhibition, this catalogue includes an essay by curator Françoise Cachin-Nora.
cover image: Le Mantea, bronze, 1973 (detail)
Künstlerplakate aus den USA (1980)
Künstlerplakate aus den USA (Artist Posters from the USA) took place at the Staactliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett (March 11 – April 30, 1980. Including the work of seventy artists from Jim Dine and Dan Flavin to Georgia O’Keefe and Salvador Dali, the exhibition also included works by Romare Bearden and Charles White and thus represented a relatively rare example of African American artists figuring in an international survey on American art.
cover image: Ellsworth Kelly, After the Painting: Red Green Blue (detail) oil on canvas, 1964
Jean Michel Basquiat Paintings 1981–1984 (1984)
In Europe the reputation of Jean Michel Basquiat rests largely on his inclusion in important surveys or thematic exhibitions, and this exhibition represents the first attempt to bring together a substantial body of his paintings covering the four years of activity since he first came to attention in Diego Cortez’s ‘New York New Wave’ show in 1981. Mark Francis 1984
Jean Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1987) meteoric rise to international stardom was unconventional and spectacular, arriving when he was barely in his twenties and without formal art school training. Despite his relatively short life, Basquiat became the ‘go-too’ Black American artist, his profile and exhibition activity in the international arena eclipsing all other Black American artists. Since his untimely death in 1988, Basquiat continues to receive a seemingly interminable level of attention from across the international arts arena. Major retrospectives, copious publications, several films and, most significant of all, ever-increasing, eye-watering sums of money paid for his art at auction. In the UK, Basquiat has been the subject of two major posthumous retrospective exhibitions in 1996 and 2017. This catalogue from Jean Michel Basquiat Paintings 1981 -1984 was the artist’s only solo exhibition in a public gallery in the UK during his short but illustrious career. Originating at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (11 August – 23 September 1984) the exhibition subsequently toured to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (14 December 1984 – 27 January 1985) and Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (9 February – 31 1985). The catalogue includes an essay by Mark Francis entitled Black Magic Marker, colour reproductions of paintings and an iconic portrait by photographer James Van Der Zee from 1982 of the artist with siamese cat on his lap.
cover image: Quetzalcoatl (front and back of catalogue) n.d.