A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present

A History of African Artists from 1792 to the Present is a landmark work, lavishly illustrated and definitive in its treatment. While giving a conspectus of more than fifty signal African American artists born before 1925, it treats the relation of their work to the prevailing artistic, social, and political atmosphere both in the United States and abroad. This approach is extremely effective, for Black art, like any other, does not exist in a vacuum or even a ghetto. Beginning with a radical revaluation of Joshua Johnson, an eighteenth-century portrait painter, the book ends significantly with Alma W. Thomas, the most prominent and influential abstract expressionist of the American school - the style that catapulted American art of the fifties and sixties into worldwide recognition as the major international school.

Himself a significant twentieth-century American painter, Bearden is particularly sensitive to the myriad problems faced by any African American artist working in the United States under such devastating preconceptions, prejudices, and contempt that it is a miracle that any significant works survived at all. Especially cogent are Bearden's chapters on Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both of whom faced at the turn of the century every question still confronting contemporary African American artists: What does race have to do with subject matter? What is "Negro" art? Should Black artists paint only Black subjects? Should one ignore radical prejudice in the United States and devote one's life to "Art"? Should the artist escape such a stifling atmosphere? What is "Art" for an African American in the light of the problems faced by his or her people? Do the aesthetic problems of artists who are considered "Black" by the predominant society differ from those of artists who are considered "white"? What connection do artists who are "Black" have to Egyptian, North African, or sub-Saharan tribal art in the light of the planetary history of art and civilization? Should race be an element of style - and why? Should this be the decision of the artist him- or herself, or of the society in which the artist works and in which there exists a dominant artistic judgment and measuring stick? How much can an artist preserve or use from an oppressive, dominant society?

Bearden and Henderson offer no answers to these questions. Instead they recount each artist's personal history. Edmonia Lewis died in obscurity in Rome, never having resolved her relationship to the prevailing style, Neoclassicism, in the light of individual expression, and thus was left behind when Auguste Rodin led the Romantic art movement away from the sterility of Neoclassicism. Tanner lived most of his life in Paris, where his international success provided him with a unique situation of influence that he never asserted to any great degree. He was subsequently accused by the Black bourgeoisie of failing to establish a "Negro school" of art. But just what would a "Negro movement" of art have been? And Tanner was not even sure he wanted to be identified by "race." Tanner had horrible burdens and traumas that haunted him.

One incident related in the Tanner chapter could have been and usually was repeated with variations in every other artist's biography (I am thinking now of Edmonia Lewis's brutal beating by townspeople in Oberlin). According to a fellow student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Joseph Pennell, "at first Tanner was quiet and modest . . . unnoticed," but this attitude did not last. Titling his racist account "The Advent of the Nigger," Pennel wrote that he "could hardly explain" the change in attitude except that Tanner "seemed to want things" and "began to assert himself." Not only did Tanner draw, Pennell remarked, but he "also painted." That a Black person dared to paint was too much for Pennell and his racist friends: "One night his easel was carried out in the middle of Broad Street and though not painfully crucified he was firmly tied to it and left there."

Many of the artists in Bearden and Henderson's history are the subjects of no monograph or detailed studies of their lives. For the first time this work puts their careers in historic, socio-economic, and intellectual perspective, an effort absolutely necessary to evaluate their artistic achievements or lack of them. For the barriers raised against the African American artist were monumental. Information or means of communication concerning their own historical and psychological situation was so lacking that these nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists were like blind men, each groping in solitude for his or her voice, path, instruction, mentor, and accommodation to the prevailing culture and its demands. It was a culture that they should have been a part of.

What is tragically striking in this study is the total absence of any reference to every single major international art movement from French Romanticism to Fauvism, to Impressionism, to German Expressionism, to Cubism, Surrealism, and Italian Constructivism. It is as if these early artists lived in a terrible vacuum, isolated, cut off from most world movements, with no points of reference, except perhaps the Mexican muralists. Tanner in the late 1890s rejected Impressionism for symbolic and religious painting. Palmer Hayden in the 1930s felt that African art, though "fine," had no relation to Black American artists. No one understood the importance of the African treatment of form and motif, its freedom from time and space and gravity and narrative; i.e., its quality as "pure" art in relationship to Klee, Picasso, Modigliani, and Brancusi, who had been desperately searching for this very freedom in order to move into the realm of "flat space," "pure form." It was as if, with Tanner's rejection of the modern movement, art by African Americans missed the train, not catching up until the late fifties and sixties. Edmonia Lewis, although she lived until at least 1911, remained mired in an anachronistic Neoclassic style.