Two antilynching art exhibitions: Politicized viewpoints, racial perspectives, gendered constraints

American Art

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 11-39

  Langa, Helen ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449213612     PISSN: 10739300     EISSN: 15496503     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/424334     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. See Marlene Park, "Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s," Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 18 (Cambridge University Press, 1993): 31-65. My own work on these shows has certainly benefited from Park's expert research and her continuation of Kristie Jayne's efforts to locate artworks from the exhibitions. In this article I focus on three new areas of investiga-tion: the organization of the Struggle for Negro Rights exhibition and the differences between images shown there and in the NAACP show; patterns of racial as well as political affiliation suggested by artists' iconographic choices
2. and the paucity of works by women in both exhibitions. Statistics on numbers of lynchings are not consistent in historical sources. The numbers here are taken from Robert Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), pp. 98-99
3. For the social effects of lynching, see Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence. An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 19-26
4. Angelo Herndon, "Pictures Can Fight!," Struggle for Negro Rights, 1935, Anton Refregier Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C
5. For more on the leftist viewpoint, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 100
6. see also Zangrando, p. 114
7. Naison, p. 75. Herndon published an autobiographical account of his experiences. See Herndon, Let Me Live (1937; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1964)
8. For Van Vechten's influence, see Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 100
9. and Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty. Mongel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp. 287-291
10. see Carl Zigrosser, "Modern American Etching," Print Collectors' Quiarterly (1929): 385
11. For the comment about "spiritual fear," see "Angele Watson's View," The Art Digest (1 November 1937): 16. For more on the 1941 show
12. see "American Negro Art Given Full Length Review in New York Show," The Art Digest (15 December 1941): 5, 16. Similar references to African Americans' inherent sense of modernist/primitivist visual rhythm and abstract pattern were made in well-intentioned speeches by Federal Art Project officials. See Jonathan Harris, "Nationalizing Art: The Community Art Centre Programme of the Federal Art Project 1935-1943," Art History 14: 2 (June 1991): 257, 267 nn. 28, 29
13. see David C. Driskell, "The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920-1950" in David C. Driskell, Two Centttries of Black American Art (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 59-79
14. and Mary Schmidt Campbell, "Introduction" in Harlem Renaissance. Art of Black America (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Harry N. Abrams, 1987), p. 50
15. For more on Charles Alston's experience at Columbia University, see Francine Tyler, "Artists Respond to the Great Depression and the Threat of Fascism: The New York Artists' Union and Its Magazine Art Front (1934-1937)" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1991), p. 211ff. n. 19
16. Angelo Herndon asserted in "Pictures Can Fight!" that "a lot of fine artists, both white and Negro, refused the N.A.A.C.P. invitation and sent their work to the United Anti-Lynch Exhibit." Sources documenting the careers of African-American artists that were published shortly after the exhibitions include Alain Locke, The Negro in Art (Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940) and The New Negro Comes of Age. A National Survey of Contemporary Artists (Albany, New York: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1945)
17. and James Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden Press, 1943; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969). None of the artists named in the Struggle for Negro Rights catalogue are included in any of these sources
18. M. M. [sic], "An Art Commentary on Lynching," Art News 33 (23 February 1935): 13; cited in Park, p. 330 n. 83
19. For the Parnassus review, see J. W. L. [sic], "Current Exhibitions," Parnassus7 (March 1935): 22; cited in Park, p. 330 nn. 83, 84. White Americans have had difficulty accepting that representations of people of color can express universal human meanings. Two important studies of nineteenth-century American sculpture have focused on this issue
20. See Michael Hatt, "'Making a Man of Him': Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Sculp-ture," The Oxford Art Journal 15:1 (1992): 21-35
21. and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 8-15
22. Diego Rivera also used the same figure in a detail of murals he painted for the New Workers' School in New York in 1933. Orozco's lithograph was included in one of the two portfolios of prints published by the Contemporary Artists Group in New York in 1933-34. Sternberg's comments are quoted in James Moore, Harry Sternberg. A Catalog Raisonné of His Graphic Work with Annotations by Harry Sternberg (Wichita: Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State Univer-sity, 1976); see no. 117
23. For more on the psychological as well as physical violence done to lynch victims, see Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness. Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 5-23
24. See also Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence. An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, pp. 19-23. Marsh's portrayal of women's avid response to a lynching should not be seen as a "carnivalesque" subversion of dominant social practices, because rather than challenging the social hierarchy, lynching reinforced white authority. It functioned as a form of communal terrorism directed towards an already oppressed minority population
25. Hatrris, Exorcising Blackness, p. x. Neal was lynched by a mob suppos-edly numbering 4,000 people. His body was castrated and fingers and toes were cut off as souvenirs by lynch mob participants. Local law enforcement made no effort to stop the lynching or dismemberment. For an account of Neal's murder
26. For the photograph, see The Crisis (November 1934): 5. I thank Corrinne Jennings, curator of Kenkeleba Gallery in New York, for bringing Charles Alston's recently located drawing to my attention. Alston was invited to participate in the NAACP show but refused. Ms. Jennings recounted that her father, artist Wilmer Jennings, remembered that Alston intended to place the work in the Negro Rights exhibition, and that he was upset by its rejection. Telephone conversation with author, 25 March 1998
27. see also bell hooks, "Representing the Black Male Body," Art on My Mind. Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 202-205
28. Campbell's I Passed Along This Way was reproduced in The Crisis 32:3 (March 1935): 1. Hughes and Taylor founded Golden Stair Press together. Christ in Alabamawas one of four illustrations Taylor made for Hughes's book Scottsboro Limited, which they published in 1932
29. See Ingrid Rose and Roderick S. Quiroz, The Lithographs of Prentiss Taylor (Bronx, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), pp. 11-17.I thank Liza Kirwin of the Archives of American Art for bringing this catalogue raisonné to my attention. Hughes's involvement with the Communist party later in the decade led him to vilify Christian beliefs in his late 1930s works. Two other images that referred to the Crucifixion in their titles were Malvin Grey Johnson's The Crucifixion and Fred Buchholz's We Too Knew Calvary
30. J. T. [sic], "Lynching Art Show Lauded," New York Amsterdam News, 23 February 1935; cited by Park, p. 332 n. 89
31. Stephen Alexander, "Art," New Masses(19 March 1935): 29; also cited by Park, pp. 343-44
32. Elizabeth Alexander, "'Can you be BLACK and look at this?' Reading the Rodney King Video(s)," in The Black Male. Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 92
33. On Wells, see Gail Bederman, "Civiliza-tion, the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Well's Anti-Lynching Campaign (1882-94)" in Gender and American History Since 1890 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 218. For women's rejection of lynch terrorism as protective
34. see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence," Southern ExρosureXII:6 (November/December 1984): 64-65. Numerous scholars have discussed emasculation as the intended message of lynching; see, for example, Harris, Exorcising Blackness, pp. x-xiii and 189, and Hall, p. 62
35. On the Art Student's League, see Christian Buckheit, "I Knew the League When-," The League (Winter 1931-32): 16. Women's experiences with the Federal Art Project are discussed in Helen Langa, "Egalitarian Vision, Gendered Experience: Women Printmakers and the WPA/FAP Graphic Arts Project," eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Harper Collins, Icon Editions 1992), pp. 409-423
36. On women's gaze, see Tamar Garb, "The Forbidden Gaze: Women Artists and the Male Nude in Late Nineteenth-Century France," in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, eds. Kathleen Adler and MaΓcia Pointon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 33-42