Introduction

Charles White (1918–1979) is one of the most significant African American artists of the 20th Century. White depicted both the depth of pain and the indomitable power inherent in the lives of African Americans. This special exhibition features 44 works of art - drawings, prints and paintings, spanning the late 1930’s -1970’s. Some of Whites most important works are represented in this exhibition. Included are 10 original works originally commissioned by the Johnson Publishing Company, illustrating major figures in Black History.

The exhibition is curated by Charlotte Sherman of the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles which has been a champion of White’s work since the 1960’s.

Charles W. White (1918–1979)

Excerpt from
THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN ART
Introduction and texts by P. Stephan Hardy and Charlotte Sherman

Charles W. White’s contribution to American art practice is immense. Indeed it would be difficult to think of an artist who more completely merged presentations of distinct individuals with the presence and unmitigated weight of truth. These images are icons of White’s strength, resilience, tenderness, vulnerability, honesty, and passionate love for his people. He is arguably America’s greatest visual critic in the realms of social justice and race relations. His career spanned some fifty years, as both teacher and artist who lived and worked on both the East and West Coasts.

Forty-four works of art in this collection exhibit not only his superb draftsmanship, but also the inner fire that fueled his practice. White, amazingly, depicted both the depth of pain and the indomitable power inherent in the lives of Black folk. Some of his most important works are represented in the Primas Collection.

Charles White was born in 1918 in Chicago, where the family had migrated from the South. After his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he was able to work professionally with otherartists with the WPA, one of many federal programs that provided Americans with sustaining work during the depression. In 1939 under the auspices of the WPA, he painted the mural Five Great American Negroes for the Cleveland Branch of the Chicago Public Library. These same years he exhibited at Howard University and received a commission from the Associate Negro Press to do the mural History of the Press for the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. Now the artist was able to speak about Negro heroes of American history and their contribution to American life. Under the WPA White depicted Booker T. Washington, educator; Frederick Douglass, statesman; George Washington Carver, scientist; and Marian Anderson, singer, on the same mural.

The Fisk School (now Fisk University) Jubilee Singers were the first to blaze a trail of appreciation of the artistic gifts of African Americans to receptive American and European audiences in the early 1870s. The Jubilee Singers’ seven-year tour raised money to save Fisk from closing and paid for new buildings on campus. They sang Negro spirituals, the secret songs that breathedstrength and hope into the lives of enslaved Americans. The Jubilee Singers revalued the contributions of African Americans for a world that thought Blacks had given nothing of value to world culture.

Eighty years later, Charles White’s painting Gospel Singers (fig. 33) pointed to the enduring importance of church music in shoring up the spirit and strength of an embattled race. In this work, the performers are not playing towards the viewer as an audience. Rather, they are playing in a church, for themselves. The man and woman face, play, and sing to each other. In other words, the liberating force of gospel music is not strictly for those who witness the act, but also is especially sustaining for those whose gift is song. White reminds that this spiritual uplift, this soul music is the gift of the Black man and woman.

This extraordinary painting is an early painting of musicians, a subject that White returns to frequently. Set in a church with the brilliant stained glass window framing the figures, the painting’s intense colors burst forth as though accompanying the singing of the figures. White masterfully incorporated a deep understanding of line and shape as well as the effects of juxtaposing primary colors. Those holding guitars appear to extend forward from the picture frame to warmly embrace the viewer.

An earlier drawing of Boy with the Accordion (fig. 34) demonstrates White’s long-held interest in music as well as his ability to create powerful, larger-than-life expression from a simple activity portrayed in black and white.

For many American artists, as it was for Spain’s brilliant Francisco Goya and France’s Jean-François Millet, Social Realism provided a readily accessible platform to speak directly to the public about the injustices and needs of the day. White’s dynamic print Our War (fig. 35), for example, pointed out that the war for freedom overseas hijacked attention away from freedom battlefronts here at home. Compare his treatment of figures of the war era––large, blocky forms that expand outward and fill the pictorial space––with the studied realism of White’s later years.

In a diminutive battle scene drawing (fig. 36), he brought back his painful experiences from World War II. White portrayed the Black soldier with the weight of war and the further burden of being Black in the trenches.

A stirring image of the Buffalo Soldier (fig. 37) is from another era, the post-Civil War period. Buffalo soldiers originally were members of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments of the U.S. Army, and later came to include the Thirty-eighth and Forty-first Infantry Regiments as well. The Black soldiers were given the designation “Buffalo” by the Cheyenne during the American Indian Wars of the late 1860s. With an air of quiet dignity, this soldier represents a free man, a contributor to the forming of America. White’s 1965 drawing stands as a reminder of the challenges Blacks faced in the 1960s, one hundred years after the formation of those historic army units, to gain recognition of the position of African American men in American society.

Examine White’s oeuvre and you see heroes. Some are readily recognized: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Robert Smalls, Blanche K. Bruce, Richard Allen, Paul Cuffee, Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Sammy Davis Jr., and more. Others can only be known through close scrutiny over time, then the realization dawns that they are we ordinary folk, engaged in our daily, heroic struggles to learn, advance, and improve our lives. Through White’s vision we glimpse the noble, indomitable spirit in each of us, masterfully rendered in tempera, graphite, charcoal, and ink.

White’s penetrating portrait of Abraham Lincoln (fig. 38) evokes the spirit and vitality of the man. The artist chose not the gaunt, haunted depiction so commonly seen, but a virile, focused leader whose frank and expressive eyes engage openly with the viewer. White presents Lincoln as a living, breathing being, rather than the cold, distant icon we are accustomed to seeing on coins, in books, and in statuary. In White’s hands, Lincoln appears to speak directly to us the words from his annual message to Congress in late 1862:

“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free–– honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just––a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

Charles White always insisted upon the dignity of the individual and respect for the human being. As a spiritual product of his race and environment, he reflected the fact that his grandfather lived slaved in Mississippi and his mother lived most of her life in the South, where little had changed from her father’s day.

In this context, White’s drawing Emancipation Proclamation takes on added significance (fig. 39). He used this illustration for Four Took Freedom, a book by Philip Sterling and Rayford Logan, about four American Negroes who escaped from slavery and dedicated themselves to equality.

The exhibition includes work from one of White’s most acclaimed series, J’accuse, French for I accuse (figs. 40, 41). The series formed a poignant intersection between an internationally famous case of wrongdoing, ethnic scapegoating, and official cover-up in 1894 in France and conditions for African Americans. In an open letter to the French president (“J’accuse…”) in a Paris newspaper, French novelist Émile Zola exposed the blatant injustice in the wrongful imprisonment of a Jewish officer in the French military. The incident was instantly famous and garnered international attention. Zola had exposed the French military and the nation’s dirty secret of anti-Semitism that ran contrary to their national motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Many famous quotes come from Zola’s beautifully written prose, but perhaps the most significant is “truth is on the march and nothing can stop it.”

That phrase resonated powerfully from White’s series and, indeed, was a sentiment that permeated the Civil Rights Movement, a national issue while the artist worked on his drawings. He depicted Blacks of different ages engaged in securing full freedom in American society through education, self-uplift, and self-empowerment in the face of opposition. The inference was, of course, the reality behind the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “all men are created equal.” White spoke through galvanizing images about the legacy of the determined effort necessary to wring opportunity from an inhospitable power.

J’accuse #2 (fig. 41) is a haunting work that depicts heads only, arranged in a rising, twisting column. The heads stare out in a silent, monumental denunciation of the systems of slavery and Jim Crow that took their lives. White forces the viewer to recognize the individuality and distinctly human qualities of the millions who lost their lives, without redress, through the faces of nine contemporary individuals. Those millions of lost souls were not faceless to White. Like Émile Zola, White used his talents to call attention to the irony and to sway public opinion so that justice could be rendered for those living today.

Charles White happened upon slavery-era “wanted” posters that depicted runaway slaves and offered a reward for their capture.

These inspired one of his most sought after and subsequently difficult to acquire sets of works, The Wanted Series. Wanted Poster #5 (fig. 42) does not simply recount the painful past, it brings that past forward to the present. Three female heads grace this image. One in the center stares boldly at the viewer through narrowed eyes: proud, accusing, challenging. Two at the right and l left face each other and there is a date above each of their heads. On the left is printed “1619,” on the right “19??.” We could gather from this that there are those whose business it is to recapture the escaped. And further, that no matter how far Blacks run across distance or time, the slave catcher would still try to shackle them to some form of slavery.

For the most part, Social Realists pointed to problems in society acting as objective observers, to bring the public’s attention to important issues. Charles White went beyond reporting and presaged the backlash sentiment of the 1960s Black Power movement. His imagery called for self-reliant action. White’s drawing Freeport Columbia (fig. 43) exemplified that new, strident stance in visual imagery that would reach a crescendo in the 1960s with the rise of the Black Arts Movement, a sibling to the Black Power political movement.

Cat’s cradle is a game that involves creation and transformation of figures formed by crossing strings stretched between two hands. Some version of it exists in indigenous cultures in virtually every corner of the world. The game requires at least two players who, through a series of manipulations, move the strings through a series of forms, one of which is the game’s title, cat’s cradle. When successfully played, the players end up back at the starting figure. The title may be a variation of the phrase “cratch cradle,” which relates to the French word crèche meaning manger. The manger refers to the calf’s manger that held the baby Jesus in the barn where he was born.

In White’s 1972 etching Cat’s Cradle (fig. 44), only one player is visible. The strings are wrapped around not just his hands but also his feet and toes. In effect, the young boy, seated on the ground with his back against the wall, is tied up, trapped where he is in the middle of a game of shifting shapes he can’t get out of. The other player is somewhere above, out of the picture frame. The image also calls to mind marionette strings. The boy’s gaze directly confronts the viewer. His expression suggests that not only is he not amused, but he also has grown quite tired of this game. It should be noted that cat’s cradle is a game of cooperation with both players moving toward a common goal. Not so here. Inextricably tangled, the child is left to play alone and extricatehimself alone. By his frank gaze we understand that he knows this is not how the game was intended, or, one could say this is not what the Christian savior intended by his advent into the world. White’s images demonstrate not only his incredible mastery of form and modeling but also a keen intellect behind his choices and references (fig. 45).

While celebrated personages such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and Gwendolyn Davis are included in the works gathered here, the overwhelming thrust is a focus on the lives of everyday people. It appears to be a conscious collecting choice not to hold up examples above the people but rather to honor what every person has to contribute.

Charles White -
Collection of Johnson Publishing Company

In 1974, the Johnson Publishing Company of Ebony magazine commissioned Charles White to present them with a collection of major drawings tracing the history of Black people in America. These important drawings represent the movement in a timeline, to tell the story of slavery and liberation. Historically of great significance, the drawings (figs. 46–57) reflect the striving and unrest in the Black community in 1974. Only Charles White, with his technical virtuosity and power, could have achieved this task. In these twelve drawings, one learns of history and of soul of the artist. At the same time, White’s emphasized the sense of humanity of each individual. White’s mother, Etheline Gary, was a domestic who was so supportive of her son’s education and nourished his talent. In his lineage were Native Americans; hence the oppression of both peoples is recognized in this series. Employment with the government-sponsored WPA shaped White’s sense of humanity and, along with the Mexican muralists, he revealed his social consciousness in his art. In Mexico, he lived with David Alfaro Siqueiros sharing the goals of struggling against oppression. White had engaged with the revolutionary social process. The drawings commissioned by the Johnson Publishing Company express graphically the artist’s invitation to enter into the lives of his people. In this series White utilized quasi, post-Cubist forms that he had developed. His unique draftsmanship brings each drawing into the light, while tones of ocher, black, and white further emphasize the brilliance of his technical virtuosity and power.