Art of social justice: Charles White at MoMA
insula, about three blocks south of W.
14th St.
In the course of White’s artistic career,
which spanned a half-century, he also
portrayed struggling workers, unionists
and civil-rights trailblazers, such as
Abraham Lincoln. While focused on
inequality and the resulting suffering he
knew fi rst-hand, White produced work
criticizing policies implemented by the
same government that employed him
through the W.P.A.
He cultivated friendships with other
art luminaries who were outspoken on
racial injustice, who are also featured
in the exhibit, such as poet Langston
Hughes, singers Paul Robeson and Harry
Belafonte, the latter whose album covers
and record jackets he designed, and are
displayed in this exhibition.
“Charles White: A Retrospective,” at
the Museum of Modern, 11 W. 53rd St.,
until Jan. 13.
BY SANTE SCARDILLO
Manhattan currently has an
unusual “Christmas crop” of
museum exhibitions showcasing
work loaded with social concerns and
artistic orientations not frequently examined
by major museum institutions. All
continue into the New Year, and fi ttingly,
they can all be seen for free.
I recently visited one of these, “Charles
White: A Retrospective,” at the Museum
of Modern Art (free on Fridays after 4
p.m.).
Previously, this major exhibit was at the
Art Institute of Chicago, where it opened
on April 12, White’s 100th birthday. He
died in 1979. MoMA co-organized the
show, which will travel to the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art in February,
where it will be on view until next June.
This is a homecoming, as LACMA (in
response to societal pressures) had also
organized “Two Centuries of Black Art”
in 1976 — to date the broadest scope
(and most remarkable) survey of work
produced by black American artists — in
which White, then living and teaching
in Los Angeles, featured prominently.
White is a giant of 20th-century painting,
but until the centenary of his birth,
he’s been almost completely hidden in
plain sight. The 1982 retrospective at the
Studio Museum in Harlem did not have
a comparable resonance outside the art
world.
The powerful works in this anthological
show at MoMA display White’s
masterful hand and ease in merging the
teachings of Renaissance drawings with
modern representation as championed
by the Mexican muralists and Picasso’s
works of the 1930s.
White forges these infl uences and
many others (his colleagues from the
federal Works Progress Administration
come to mind), into a quintessentially
personal style. Yet his work is deeply interpretative
of the pain and suffering of
the black American experience — which
wasn’t an abstract notion to him and in
the communities in which he lived —
almost palpable in the faces and visual
tales of his subjects.
“Soldier” (1944) is a silent political
“General Moses (Harriet Tubman),” by Charles White, mixed media on
paper, 47 inches by 68 inches, 1965. The Charles White Archives.
statement. It portrays an American
citizen who, at that point in time, had to
drink from separate water fountains and
sit in the back of the bus — yet was good
enough to die on the front lines to defend
the state that enforced the discrimination
he suffered.
That same year, White was drafted
into the Army and got tuberculosis while
serving. His mission was shoring up the
Mississippi River during a fl ood and he
suffered from breathing diffi culties for
the rest of his life. This ailment interfered
with his practice, which was gravitating
toward Chicago and New York. He eventually
moved to Los Angeles in search of
a better climate for his condition. There,
he taught at the Otis Art Institute, the
fi rst public art school in California (now
called Otis College of Art and Design)
for almost two decades. Two of his students
are now recognized as major contemporary
artists, David Hammons and
Kerry James Marshal.
Locally, Hammons is the artist behind
“Day’s End,” a project sponsored
by the Whitney Museum of American
Art, which will see a “ghost pier” of Pier
52 recreated south of Gansevoort Pen-
PHOTO COURTESY OF SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES
“Soldier,” by Charles White, tempera on masonite, 1944. The Huntington
Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.
Gift of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra.
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Beltsville/Rockville Part 1:
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December 27 - Jan 13
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