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The Minneapolis Tribune Entertainment • Arts • Books Minneapolis, Minn., SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1968 The Black Artist-At Last, Whites Are Looking By MIKE STEELE Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer "Shall I be racial or universal?" This wasn't a question the Negro artist shipped as a slave to the New World asked himself. If he had, there's an outstanding chance all American art would be a great deal different today. It's a question Negro artists have asked in the past, however, and are asking today. It's a question that has often split the Negro art community. INHERENT in this was the question of survival: survival as an artist, survival as a Negro, survival as an American. In a culture dominated by European values - and by white museum directors, white gallery owners and white art patrons - it hasn't been easy for the black artist. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, starting Thursday, is opening an exhibition of 30 contemporary black artists. The 30 work in widely varying ranges from primitivism to contemporary Minimal art. The continuity of the show is the color of the artist's skin, a criterion that only a few years ago would have been considered at best reactionary, at worst racist. But museums, like everything else in modern American culture, are going through a rather self-conscious phase of discovery. The black artist has been virtually ignored in the past (neither the Institute nor Walker Art Center has works by Negroes in its collection) and now there's a very real attempt - almost a stampede - to take a new look at the work of Negro artists. THE HISTORY of the American Negro artist has been long, varied and surprisingly prolific. Coming originally from West Africa where the fine arts were highly developed, he brought with him a tradition of sculpture, crafts, music and dance. The primitive, African influences in music and dance, of course, have ingrained themselves in our culture and become the dominant part of the American idiom. Jazz, blues, folk and the spiritual have become the most important contribution America has made to music. But the art world didn't discover the vitality and emotion of African art forms until, ironically such white European artists as Picasso, Brancusi and Matisse started collecting African art and incorporating it into international style. IF THE American Negro artists of the 17th century had been able to continue their African traditions, the whole history of American art might have shifted just as American music did. But the early Negro artist had to live and his patrons were white masters. His subjects, therefore came from white experience rather than his own. Art has historically defined a people as it reflects visually the experiences of a people. The American Negro at various points in history - stimulated by W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke and now Malcolm X - has asked "Who am I?" These self-identity movements have invariably taken the Negro artist back to African Traditions. MUCH NEGRO art of African influence remains in the South, mostly now in Negro colleges. But the most successful Negro artists were in the North, and African influences in their work are hard to find. Many of the most successful Negro artists studied in Europe, which explains their European influences. Many of them simply stayed there. Since colonial days, therefore, the European influence has been dominant. The hardy Negro artist who survived did so because he used that style and found a patron or abolitionist group willing to pay his way. One in fact, Edward Bannister, took up painting to disprove the published assertion that while Negroes could appreciate art they had no capacity to produce it. THE FIRST Negro-American artist to win international recognition was Henry Tanner, a student of Thomas Eakins. He did it by painting studies of Negro life, which was also unusual. He later expatriated to Paris where he won the Legion of Honor and was elected a member of the National Academy in the United States. Then, around 1910, came the first back-to-Africa movement and an intense, but over-romanticized study of the motherland. The most important thing to come out of this early movement was not great art, but a change in the artist's self-concept. Langston Hughes, then a young poet and part of the movement wrote: "We younger Negro artists intend to express our individual dark - skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temple on the top of the mountain free within our selves." This feeling built Artists Continued on Page Four [[image]] [[image]] [[image]] [[image]] Opening Thursday and continuing through Nov. 24 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will be an exhibition of works by 30 contemporary Negro artists. Pictured, clockwise from upper left, are an untitled 1967 oil by Emelio Cruz; "Freedom Now," a 1965 painting by Reginald Gammon; sculptor Danny Johnson with one of his exhibition works, and "Eulogy," a 1967 oil by Benny Anrdews [[Andrews]]. Artists Continued from Page One into the New Negro Movement of the late 20s where black artists, for the first time, felt free to deal with the Negro experience, not in Africa but in America. In many ways they were comparable to the Ashcan School of white artists then gaining popularity. The biggest influence was the Depression. Realism was the form it took. The era produced sculpture Meta Warrick, who studied with Rodin; Hale Woodruff; Richmond Barthe, the best Negro sculptor history had produced, and Charles White, who became the most popular Negro artist with his blend of Kathe Kollwitz sensitivity and Thomas Hart Benton emotion. The Depression eventually killed the New Negro Movement but did lead to Federal Arts Projects which gave experience and employment to many Negro artists. This period gave birth to today's best known Negro artists, Romare Beardon, Jacob Lawrence, Ernest Crichlow, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis and Horace Pippin. BUT THE fact that the Negro artist worked so closely with the white artist during the Depression and the sudden rise of African-influenced Cubism as the major international mode soon pushed the American Negro back into the mainstream of American art. From then until the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts it was virtually impossible to find African-Negro Influences in Negro art. We do find Negro subjects, but often in works by white artists. Now once again, there is a back-to-Africa sensitivity among young Negro artists. As a consequence, like it or not, there are again two broad genres of Negro art: racial art and mainstream art. The arguments against racial art are well known. Since Negro awareness began social artists have been accused of being sociologists rather than artists. Bad art, the feeling goes, with some validity, is bad protest. BUT ON THE other hand is the feeling that there is a black art separate from the mainstream of American (white) art. It began when Negroes started thinking of themselves as a distinct group and it won't end, they say, until they no longer do. The Negro has come from an environment of poverty, racism and African traditions. Injustice and starvation have been his subject matter. The white artist has come, usually, from a middle-class background with huge opportunities and European traditions. Aesthetics has been his concern even though Pop Art has a satiric-social base as does some New Realism. As a consequence, Negro artists, interested in the black experience in America as it differs from white experience, have not been in the mainstream of international movements and have been ignored by the most important galleries and museums. Only in galleries in Negro colleges have they been amply represented. IGNORANCE of black artists is still a problem. When the Museum of Modern Art put together a print show for American embassies in Africa some years ago, no Negro artists were represented. When Negroes complained, the museum said it didn't think Negroes were working in the print medium. Imagine their surprise when it was pointed out that a number of Negro prints were included in its own collection. Negroes have made their way into an increasing number of college art faculties, but not into the art establishment. More Negro art patrons have come along, but more doesn't mean many. The dilemma for the Negro artist remains: To draw materials and content for his art from experience as an American Negro - and be accused of being a sociologist rather than an artist - or to join the mainstream to gain power and money only to be told he has copped out on the black community and not put distinctive Negro elements in his work. THE INSTITUTE show represents both points of view as well as a few in between. It will show no Negro "movement" but will show that there is a whole realm of American art we haven't been very aware of. Artists in the show will include young and old, painters, sculptors and printmakers. Among the older artists, the most interesting are Romare Beardon, an artist once obsessed with Negro art who has evolved his work into abstract form; Al Hollingsworth with his social oriented work; Richard Hunt and his conceptual works, and Norman Lewis, who has moved from realistic representations of Harlem to abstractions and semi-abstractions. Probably the most interesting works among the younger artists are Danny Johnson's sculptures, Reginald Gammon's social statements, Emelio Cruz and Benny Andrews' pop-oriented paintings. The show will run through Nov. 24.
