If you enjoy the sound of a broken record, try calling a score of curators of American art at museums around the country and ask them what art they’re seeking for their collections these days. I guarantee you’ll hear the same thing over and over – “works by artists of color.”
African-Americans have been part of American art making since before the Revolution. Many of them were enslaved artisans and craftspeople – ceramicists, basket-makers, carvers, and the like – rented out by their owners. With luck, they might be able to keep part of their earnings for themselves, eventually purchase or otherwise obtain their freedom, and become like Joshua Johnson (c. 1763 – c. 1824), a Maryland portrait painter who became the first African-American known to make his living as an artist.
In the 19th century, the painter Robert Duncanson and the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, living north of the Mason-Dixon line and aided by Abolitionist patrons, were able to achieve significant reputations, though Lewis, like many subsequent African-American artists, found that working in Europe afforded her a much more congenial way of life. Henry Ossawa Tanner achieved an international reputation but had to spend most of his working life in France to do so.
Such artists, however, were outliers seldom mentioned in American art history. When I was in grad school, I can’t remember a single African-American artist being discussed. Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and a host of other major African-American artists who came of artistic age in the second quarter of the 20th century – they might as well have been working on Mars, as far as white art historians were concerned. Part of this neglect was the result of racism, and part of it came from African-American art as being perceived as essentially figurative, and thus outside the prevailing modernist paradigm. That perception was not limited to white critics – the painter Howardena Pindell graduated from the MFA program at Yale but found her abstract art questioned from both sides of the racial divide. “Within the African-American community in the 1970s, if you were an abstract artist you were considered the enemy pandering to the white world,” she has said. “But white dealers would say that African-Americans who did abstract work were inauthentic.”
By the time I became an art dealer, artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Romaire Bearden were being included in general American art sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but they were rare exceptions to the overwhelming percentage of white (and usually male) artists whose works were being sold. African-American art was most often offered in specialty sales of the kind that are still being held by smaller auction houses such as Swann Galleries in New York.
How times have changed. Collectors, both black and white, have taken an interest in the African-American market, and that interest has been heightened not only by retrospective exhibitions of major African-American artists, but also by important survey exhibitions such as Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, which has introduced general museum audiences to artists hitherto unknown to them.
Major auction houses follow the money – they may not create a market, but they will certainly jump in when an artist or movement is hot. Owners of an important Catlett sculpture or an Abstract Expressionist painting by Norman Lewis can take them to any of the big auction houses today and will find the specialist in contemporary art eager for a consignment.
In any hot new market, questions of the quality can sometimes go unasked in the midst of general enthusiasm. As with white artists, some African-American artists are more important than the majority of their contemporaries, and within an artist’s work, some periods may be more in favor with knowledgeable collectors than others. A good advisor can help you make wise purchases.
Speaking of African-American art, I’ve currently got an important oil and collage work by Benny Andrews (1930-2006). Andrews was born in Plainview, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers. He became the first member of his family to graduate from high school. Andrews’s father had been a self-taught painter, which may have influenced Andrews’s decision to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago following three years in the Air Force. As Andrews’s obituary in the New York Times put it, “He was one of very few black students there. He was trained as an abstract expressionist, but at night went to jazz clubs to draw. He also earned fees illustrating Polish polka record covers.” (Ah, Chicago!)
The obituary continued, “In 1958, Mr. Andrews moved to New York, where his friends included the artists Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, Mimi Gross and Raphael Soyer. His first New York solo exhibition, at Forum Gallery in 1962, was reviewed favorably in The New York Times. It was during this period that he began to produce collages, which some critics consider his strongest work.”
“Mirror, Mirror,” done in 1964, is one of the works done in this important period of Andrews’s career. It’s an enigmatic piece. The title obviously refers to the wicked queen in the fairy tale “Snow White,” who seeks confirmation of her beauty in a magic mirror. Was Andrews reading such stories to his children, who were young at the time? The woman in the picture doesn’t look particularly evil, but she seems distressed at what the mirror has revealed. Is the picture a contemporary vanitas, in this case a meditation on the transience of human beauty?
Andrews would have a long career of teaching and service in addition to making art. From 1968-1997, he taught at Queens College, where he was an important mentor to many students and an advocate for young African-American artists. In 1969 he was a founder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, formed to protest a Metropolitan Museum exhibition of African-American works that had been organized without the input of African-American artists. His art program for New York City prisons became a national model. Andrews’s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum, and many others.
I would welcome the chance to discuss this work and African-American art in general with you. Call me.
