Hilton Kramer and Two Centuries of African American Art
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June 26, 1977
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HILTON KRAMER
The exhibition of "Two Centuries of Black American Art," which opened yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum and remains there for the summertime flavor (through Sept. 5), is a difficult show to review, and this difficulty ought to be acknowledged at the offset. At to the lowest degree for a critic whose chief interest lies in assessing creative merit and who remains unpersuaded that he is performing a useful public service if he allows actress‐artistic standards to obscure the departure between superior creative accomplishment and its absence, this exhibition presents bug that ought to be more openly discussed than they usually are nowadays.
Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art by Professor David C. Driskell of the University of Maryland, with Leonard Simon every bit research assistant, "Two Centuries Black American Art" consists of some 200 works by 63 artists. (Sponsored by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Philip Morris Inc., the prove has already been seen in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas.) Although it includes work produced since 1950 by artists who were active before that engagement, information technology excludes artists who were born after the 1920's. Thus, the younger generations of black artists in America are not represented.
Prof. Driskell's purpose, then, is to requite u.s.a. a more comprehensive account of the accomplishments of the black artist in America, up until about the mid‐20th century, than nosotros traditionally have had. This, I think, he has succeeded doing. Only the need to be comprehensive has obliged him include a great bargain of mediocre work. This oft happens large, general surveys of American art, and Professor Driskell cannot be said to accept avoided the problem. The result a show that is often more interesting as social history than for its esthetic revelations. We practice not experience the presence in thisexhibition of any stringent esthetic criteria in its selection.
This is one of the difficulties with "Two Centuries Black American Art." Another is the very term "black art." 1 section of the text that Prof. Driskell has written for the catalogue of the show is entitled "The Development of a Black Esthetic, 1920‐1950." But this text merely confirms what the show itself reveals: that blackness artists in America, like their white counterparts in this menstruum, have allied their work with a variety of esthetic doctrines, ranging from neo‐primitivism to social realism to various forms of modernism and abstraction. Some of these are practical in ways that have a direct relation to black experience; others are non. If there is something that can legitimately be described as a "black esthetic" in the visual arts in this country, Prof. Driskell has yet to tell u.s.a. or show what it is.
• • •
More often than not, the show observes a more consequent esthetic standard in its 19th‐century selections than in the more problematic 20th‐century choices. The portraits of Joshua Johnston (1765‐1830), which prefer the folk conventions their menstruum with a delightful charm and an axiomatic skill, ought to have a permanent identify in any history of American fine art. And then should the more sophisticated and achieved paintings of Robert South. Duncanson (1821‐1872), Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828‐1901) and Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859‐1937), though I recall the effort that is fabricated in the catalogue entry to establish some sort of comparison between Tanner, on the 1 hand, and Van Gogh and Vuillard, on the other, is completely misdirected. Tanner was a student of Eakins, and his art is best understood in other terms—terms appropriate an American artist who, though a successful expatriate Paris, specifically did not become a catechumen to Parisian modernism in its heyday. There are other practiced things in the 19thand early on 20th‐century sections of the show, but the paintings of Johnston, Duncanson, Bannister and Tanner certainly stand for their high points.
In the selection of 20th‐century artists, nosotros observe an eclecticism, not to say a chaos, of standards that is sometimes extremely disspiriting. There is merely besides much hither that does not belong in a serious museum exhibition. The solid achievements in this surface area are those of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Alma W. Thomas, among the fine artists, and David Butler, William Edmundson and Horace Pippin, among the "archaic" or folk artists. In that location is as well good work by Palmer Hayden (particularly his 1964 watercolor "Blue Nile'), Sargent Johnson, James A. Porter, Charles H. Alston, Unhurt Woodruff, Norman Lewis and Richard Mayhew, and the show would have been considerably strengthened more of their work had been included and much else had been omitted.
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There is a curious baloney in esthetic chronology, by the way, in the determination to include Alma Thomas's paintings of the 1970's while excluding the paintings of Sam Gilliam, who, though much younger and therefore unqualified on grounds of age, comes out of exactly the same "schoolhouse"—the Washington School of color abstraction. By observing this rule—what was the point of information technology, anyhow?—of excluding artists born afterward the 1920'south, Prof. Driskell has also anyway?— of excluding artists born afterwards the 1920's, Prof. Driskell has also been obliged to leave out the abstruse sculpture of Richard Hunt, who is far more accomplished than any black sculptor represented in the exhibition, and the realist portraits Bartley L. Hendricks, who has lately given u.s. a pictorial chronicle of contemporary blackness life that is esthetically more compelling than much that is included hither.
But there are shortcomings to exist noted even in the mode the best artists have been selected. I suppose it could only have been a lack of available work for loan that has led Jacob Lawren€due east existence represented in this show non by one his complete narrative serial but by a group of isolated pictures that do not begin to convey his true ability. The narrative element in Mr. Lawrence's work is not incidental to his accomplishment, only central to it. A show of this sort should have been able to comprehend what is unique in his piece of work. Romare Bearden fares somewhat better, but the single instance of his abstruse painting of the 50's—the splendid "Gardens Babylon"—suggests that more of his piece of work from this period would too accept strengthened the exhibition.
But these, alas, are judgments of an esthetic nature, and "Two Centuries of Blackness American Art" is not an exhibition that has been organized primarily on esthetic principles. remains, by and large, a social documentary about the black American creative person in America rather than an anthology of his highest achievements. It shares, as well, the weakness of many survey exhibitions of American art—the refusal to discriminate betwixt what is truly accomplished and what is only the documentation of an unfulfilled aspiration. ■
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/26/archives/art-view-black-art-or-merely-social-history.html
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