Black Art

We had a fortuitous 30-hour immersion in Black culture: the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of art from the collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz B; Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys musical on Broadway; and Harlem Renaissance at the Met. I reviewed the play elsewhere, but the two art shows were an interesting complement to each other.

First, a shout-out to Keys-Swizz. The show was appropriately called “Giants,” because so many of their works were large, even monumental in size. They don’t collect to hang things in their living room; they collect, and even better commission, to support minority artists, both well known and “undiscovered” (at least by me). They had works by the names that are showing up at auction these days–Hendricks, Wiley, Sherald, et al.–but Black artists from, or at least born in, Europe and Africa, including an entire room mural by a woman from Botswana. There was a heavy dose of social consciousness and consideration of what it means to be Black. What intrigued me, and related this to the Met show, was the style of art on display. There was a variety, of course, but there was a heavy dose of what I’d describe as intentional primitivism. We’re not going to paint like Raphael or Titian or Andrew Wyeth, the artists seemed to say. Our experience is more raw, more authentic, more ghetto. Our colors are bold, our shapes are flat, our modeling crude. Henry Taylor, who had a show at the Whitney last fall, is the archetype here, but the line goes back through Kerry James Marshall, Bob Thompson, Jacob Lawrence, just to mention some prominent names. It’s a different vocabulary, less art school, more in-your-face. There are others in the Western canon, most prominently Kehinde Wiley, who paints beautiful images in academic style as a way of highlighting his Black subjects. In between, and represented here with companion portraits of riders on dirt bikes instead of rearing stallions, is Amy Sherald, who uses flat planes and bold colors but steers clear of naive styling.

This contrast, between salon and street, was very much present in the Harlem Renaissance. William Henry Johnson appeared throughout with flat cut-out figures in awkward poses. (I had seen an entire gallery of his work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in March.) Archibald Motley Jr. was the second most represented artist, and although he could paint with calm realism his more typical works were cartoon-like illustrations with bold bright colors. Jacob Lawrence was there with his painting that looks like cut-outs, and Romare Bearden (out of time but included) who actually used cut-outs. The revelation of the show, however, was an artist who painted as elegantly as any White salon representational artist: Laura Wheeler Waring. Then, interestingly, the most accessible paintings in the show were portraits of Black heroes by the only White artist, Winold Reiss.

Both shows did an excellent job of capturing a time, place and culture. And I should add that there were photographs salted in: principally Gordon Parks in Brooklyn and James Van der Zee at the Met.