Charles White – A Retrospective

Charles White by Andrea D. Barnwell was published in 2002 and was, at the time, a rare monographic study on this most influential and important figure in twentieth-century American art. We have to go back several decades, however, to find the last major museum exhibition, a retrospective staged at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1982, three years after the artist’s death.This inexplicable critical hiatus has been met recently by a spate of exhibitions and publications that mark a resurgent, or indeed unprecedented level of institutional interest in White’s art and legacy: a book and small display produced in 2017–18 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a forthcoming display celebrating a gift of the artist’s works to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Charles White: A Retrospective – which began at the Art Institute of Chicago and will go to Los Angeles County Museum of Art – offers the most expansive assessment of White’s art to date.The exhibition brings together the breadth of White’s artistic career from the 1930s to his untimely death in 1979 at the age of sixty-one. It comprises over a hundred works, in drawing, painting and printmaking and examples of his photography, book and record cover illustrations and archival materials. Divided into several sections, the largely chronological display follows White’s practice from the late 1930s and his early career in Chicago, where he was born in 1918, to his move to New York in the 1940s and then to Los Angeles during the mid-1950s, where he lived until his death.

History would play an enduring role in White’s practice. Equally, his work was fuelled by a desire to express and reflect on contemporary matters. As the exhibition’s co-curator Sarah Kelly Oehler observes, White ‘had witnessed and participated in many of the radical social upheavals and political events of twentieth-century America: the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the Second World War, McCarthyism, the civil rights era and the rise of the Black Power Movement’ (p.21). During the 1940s, social commentary was also a key component of White’s art. Drawings such as Can a negro study law in Texas (1946; no.27) and Trenton six (1949; no.34) dramatically recount miscarriages of justice and social inequality. White’s distinctive use of multiple black figures and stylised expressionism, which characterised these early compelling drawings, slowly made way for a greater focus on the individual. The diminutive but powerful monochromatic preparatory studies for murals from the early 1940s, such as Paul Robeson (no.16; Fig.22) and Denmark Vesey (no.17), offer glimpses of what was to follow during the 1950s and 1960s. 

Gideon(1951; no.39) is a mesmerising lithograph depicting a man staring thoughtfully into the distance. Precise intricate lines and rich tonal variation detail this bust- like composition, imbuing it with a statuesque authority. Preacher (1952; no.44) also depicts an individual, but here the figure is more animated, arms outstretched and mouth open, in oratorical mid-flow. White elevates his subjects, literally and metaphorically, endowing them with reverence and stature. In his catalogue essay, the painter Kerry James Marshall writes that White is ‘a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority’ (p.15). The veracity of such a sentiment is authenticated by White’s attention to the detail – for example, the stories told through his depiction of hands. In Preacher and the painting Bessie Smith (1950; no.35) hands are a gestural and emotive presence; prominently positioned they demand our attention. In the drawings Work (Young worker) (1953; no.46) or Oh, Mary, don’t you weep (1956; no.53), they are work-worn and muscular, while in Ye shall inherit the earth (1953; no.47) they are the large protective hands of a woman cradling a child. 

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