Blockbuster
The Addison's African-American bonanza
by Christopher Millis
"TO CONSERVE A LEGACY: AMERICAN ART FROM HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES"
At the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover.
Through October 31.
The signature image for the remarkable show at the Addison Gallery in Andover -- the painting that
acts as catalogue cover and cover for the press packet but (because it's the
Addison Gallery) does not appear on tote bags and coasters -- depicts a black man as black men are seldom
seen. Frederick C. Flemister's 1940 Man with a Brush shows the head and
upper torso of the painter at work. He's holding a brush daubed with red
pigment that's tilting toward a nearby canvas. Behind him, a dark, velvety
drape has been pulled to one side of a window whose exposed half reveals a
panoramic vista of land and sky.
In some respects, it's a perfectly traditional image that turns tradition
upside down: a black man -- an American in the Jim Crow South at that -- dons
the dress and attitude of a 16th-century Flemish master. It's the visual
equivalent of Hattie McDaniel slapping Scarlett O'Hara in the face and putting
her to work in the kitchen while Hattie drops her accent, rags, and demeanor to
assert her rightful place as the mistress of Tara.
Unimaginable.
But Flemister's gentle boldness doesn't stop there. With his vaguely troubled,
enigmatic gaze, his plush tunic and silver necklace, the artist at work in his
studio isn't really working. The large hand that holds the paintbrush isn't
painting -- the canvas is blank, the oil paint at the brush tip hasn't been
smeared, and the angle of his grasp makes it clear that he's not about to make
anything. Instead, the whole image is presented as a demonstration. With his
Renaissance outfit, Tuscan backdrop, and effete pose, Man with a Brush
is not about capturing a moment of the creative process but about articulating
who this artist is: a son of slavery who wears the anomalous mantle of European
culture.
That same tension, the tension between present and past, freedom and shackles,
art and the reality from which it issues, is to be found throughout this
extraordinary exhibit. "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically
Black Colleges and Universities" has been years in the making. It represents a
traveling exhibit of the collections from six historically black universities,
all of them Southern: Clark Atlanta, Fisk, Hampton, Howard, North Carolina
Central, and Tuskegee. And the collections themselves span more than a century
of focused curatorial attention toward African-American art, from Hampton
University in Virginia, whose museum was founded three years after the Civil
War, to North Carolina Central, which established its museum in 1972.
Yet the pleasures of "To Conserve a Legacy" are immediate, not historic. The
exhibit brings together more than 250 works by more than 100 artists; but the
show feels intimate rather than gargantuan, and sensitively selective and paced
rather than clumsily inclusive. In its own conservative way, it's a
blockbuster.
The big names are there, black and white -- Romare Beardon, John Biggers,
Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe. More important, the big names are presented,
like the unknowns and the underknowns, as being significant for their
contributions to a larger enterprise. No one feels trotted out for his or her
celebrity or strength in auction catalogues (the ironies persist) or hype. Who
until this show, for instance, knew Frederick C. Flemister? "To Conserve a
Legacy" is no Sensation; it's just deeply felt.
The show's most mesmerizing works are figurative, though its more stylized,
abstract components -- Aaron Douglas's Art Deco murals and prints, Romare
Beardon's dizzying, discordant, jazz-inspired collages -- prove compelling in
different ways. Maybe the greatest riches of this thrilling trove lie among
those artists we've never heard of as well as those we have heard of but now
get to see -- not as icons but as individuals belonging to a profound, personal
tradition.
John Biggers belongs to the latter group. No matter the scale in which Biggers
works (he's got one small sculpture and two large paintings in the exhibit),
whatever he does feels larger than life, and the lives are stark and difficult.
His dark, highly mannered, highly exaggerated paintings suggest at once a
phantasmagoric Gray's Anatomy and Magic Card illustrations of the rural
South, hyperbolic yet genuine.
Old Coffee Drinker, for instance, depicts a crenelated, old black
man with feet the size of soup pots in gnarled contortions on a diner stool.
The man's pant creases look like sinewy, thick leg muscles, and where his flesh
is exposed, it looks as if the skin had been peeled away from his hands and
feet. Still, the bones and tendons stay black.
A combative despair informs the Old Coffee Drinker's
posture and surroundings. His frayed pant cuffs and ripped-up shoes, his eyes
that appear too heavy to open, are offset by shoulders made large by work and a
thumb that's half the size of his coffee mug. Biggers's imagery and palette are
so distended and extreme that simply looking at Old Coffee Drinker can
be a challenge. The artist tells you so much at once, pitting strength against
fatigue, size against humbleness, grandeur against ugliness, that you want to
back away. And yet when you return to the painting's undulating hues, it's to
realize that the man's force is sympathetic, not assaultive. Old Coffee
Drinker registers ultimately as both loving and nightmarish; I found myself
wishing he weren't so raw and powerful yet so proximate to defeat.
Love and nightmare of a different order overwhelm you when you glimpse Nat
Werner's wood sculpture Lynching, which depicts a nearly life-sized
naked male form whose neck has been snapped by a rope; his head and the noose
and a broken tree limb rest perpendicular on his shoulders.
Lynching is one of those works of such immediacy as well as human and
historic magnitude -- imagine a Kosovar artist creating an installation called
"Open Grave" -- that were it not so refined and accomplished, it would forbid
comment. Among the piece's astonishing accomplishments is the artist's
understanding of height: Werner puts you in the tree with the young man so that
your sympathies don't have time to be considered, politicized. Suddenly you're
in front of the image of a corpse at once disfigured and handsome. It might be
minutes before you realize that the round forms at his feet are the heads and
hands of people pulling him down.
Among the other highlights of "To Conserve a Legacy" are the prints by
Elizabeth Catlett from her "Negro Woman Series" of 1946-'47, poignant,
psychologically rich linocut studies. Powerful, too, are the stylized,
figurative scenes in gouache by Jacob Lawrence (particularly the woman sawing a
log and his 1949 homage to baseball, Strike), the sad, defiant
Portrait of William Friday by Edward Bruce, and William Sherwood
McCall's 1935 oil An American Family.
I came away from "Legacy" feeling something akin to having been generously
remembered in someone's will, but better, since the bounty of "To Conserve a
Legacy" can never be spent.