Intriguing History Hits a Sour Note

WALL STREET JOURNAL, March 17, 2020

Intriguing History Hits a Sour Note

This exhibition’s thematic presentation burdens a fascinating historical subject with middling contemporary work.

A review of ‘Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition’ at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

‘Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition” is the title of the new exhibition at the Phillips Collection. “Razzes” might seem more like it. The show of 53 artists is front-loaded with contemporary work designed to “call out the canon,” according to one wall label, through loud statements and sour notes. Too bad, because, past the shrill opening gallery, this exhibition has something worthwhile to say.

Yes, in the opening room it’s hard not to pass judgment on “Judgment of Paris,” a 2018 photograph by Ayana V. Jackson. Here the artist in period clothing inserts herself into an ensemble that updates Edouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe)” of 1863. According to the wall labels, Ms. Jackson’s image is meant to suggest a “counternarrative to historical readings that have interpreted the black body as colonized, enslaved, or impoverished.” Nearby, Renee Cox, Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems all offer their own sendups of Manet’s picnic lunch. Yet up against Pablo Picasso’s “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, after Manet I” (1962), a still electrifying composition here on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these contemporary photographic retakes seem more like derivative politicized statements.

Next up, “Pushing Back the Light,” a 2012 painting by Titus Kaphar, reproduces Claude Monet’s “Woman With a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son” (1875), but with canvas now ripped and smeared in tar. This time the actual offending work has been hauled over from the National Gallery of Art to face its accuser. “While we are talking and thinking about color,” Mr. Kaphar declares in his wall label’s opening arguments, “there are people on the other side of the world who are suffering because of their color.” Of course, there are people suffering here and now for having to consider this ham-fisted painting.

Ayana V. Jackson’s ‘Judgment of Paris’ (2018) PHOTO: AYANA V. JACKSON/MARIANA IBRAHIM GALLERY, CHICAGO

“Riff” is a term originally from jazz that means a repeated, elaborated or improvised phrase. “Relations” means kinship, but also retelling and comparison. The history of modern art has indeed resounded with a complexity of syncopations both riffed and related. Through a layering of old and new, modern art has pushed and pulled a wide body of influence into a new global movement.

As modernism drew from African sources, black artists were especially attuned to its formal inheritance. Alain Locke, the Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of the formative anthology “The New Negro” (to which he contributed the title essay), seized on modernism’s turn to African aesthetics as a path to liberation. The peripheral galleries of “Riffs and Relations” give a sense of the excitement this all engendered. In the 1920s, the early black modernist Hale Woodruff went to Paris to study African art and its influence on Cézanne and Picasso. His paintings “The Card Players” (1930) and “Africa and the Bull” (1958) engage with both European and African sources. At the same time, the German-born artist Winold Reiss came to New York and helped to illustrate Locke’s anthology with “African Phantasy: Awakening” (c. 1925) while influencing the pan-African aesthetics of his student Aaron Douglas, who is also on view. In the 1940s, sculptor Ossip Zadkine—born in what is today Belarus and seen here with his 1918 work “Forms and Light (Mother and Child)”—taught Harold Cousins, on view with the abstract, welded steel “Le Matador” (1955), and the always extraordinary Elizabeth Catlett, here with her mahogany figure of “Ife” (2002).

Hale Woodruff’s ‘The Card Players’ (1930) PHOTO: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

In certain works, such modernist interplay continues to the present day. Martin Puryear’s enigmatic sculpture “Face Down” (2008) owes a self-acknowledged debt to Constantin Brancusi. The black, wooden wall reliefs of Leonardo Drew remap the grids of Piet Mondrian. With examples from the “European Modernist Tradition” right next to the “African American Artists” of the title, the works ultimately speak for themselves about just who is out to riff, relate, or razz. A “Nude” (c. 1939) by William H. Johnson is a powerhouse of modernist figuration. “Xpect” (2018) by Mequitta Ahuja, however, a self-portrait that remakes Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” forgoes invention for another “intervention into the canon of art history.”

Organized by guest curator Adrienne L. Childs and the Phillips Collection, “Riffs and Relations” relies too much on a thematic presentation that burdens a fascinating historical subject with middling contemporary work. The Phillips Collection bills itself as “America’s first museum of modern art”—it opened nearly a decade before New York’s Museum of Modern Art—but this largely postmodern show often misses out on the deeper history of modernism and the Phillips’s own relations with black artists. To better understand that story and its characters—Horace Pippin, Richmond Barthé, Sam Gilliam and many others—visitors should explore the museum’s permanent collection. While the Phillips is temporarily closed, the exhibition’s scholarly catalog also offers a good place to linger.

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Finding a Legacy or Losing the Thread?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Finding a Legacy or Losing the Thread?

A review of “Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art” at the Baltimore Museum of Art and “Afrocosmologies: American Reflections” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Look around and just about every museum suddenly seems interested in artists “on the margins.” When it comes to the rich history of American abstraction by black artists, there is much to be said for these acts of rediscovery. Recent exhibitions of black abstractionists have traced a line of influence that once developed on the periphery of art history. A vein that starts in mid-century modernism with Norman Lewis and Alma Thomas runs through the post-minimalist constructions of Jack Whitten, Martin Puryear and Howardena Pindell, on through the expansive visions of Julie Mehretu and Mark Bradford today.

“Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art,” on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, tells this story through a well paced and at times awe-inspiring exhibition. Mainly drawing on the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection but supplemented by the BMA’s own holdings, the show curated by Christopher Bedford and Katy Siegel presents nearly 80 works by 28 artists from the 1940s to the present. The exhibition begins with a bang, with colossal works—such as Mr. Bradford’s “My Grandmother Felt the Color” (2016), Mr. Whitten’s “9.11.01” (2006) and Mr. Puryear’s “Lever #2” (1988-89)—covering the walls, hanging from the ceiling, and sprawling across the floor of the opening gallery.

Black abstractionists faced unique obstacles within their own creative community as well as among white audiences who expected them to restrict themselves to chronicling black experience. Could, and should, the language of abstraction, with its emphasis on aesthetic values over reportage, speak for them as well? It turned out that it could, and this tension between cultural expectations and pictorial freedom energized their compositions, with the personal and the political mixing with the purely pictorial. And so we will see such universal forms as circles and triangles coalescing around reminders of time and place.

Romare Bearden’s ‘The Lamp’ (1984) PHOTO: ROMARE BEARDEN FOUNDATION/LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY/ THE AMISTAD CENTER FOR ART & CULTURE, HARTFORD, CT.

“Generations” presents this journey through parallel gallery bays that feel like rungs on a ladder. The arrangement reveals a selection of artists in depth and in cross-conversation. In such works as “Autumn Flight” (1956) and “Afternoon” (1969), Lewis conceals as he reveals. In “Evening Glow” (1972), Thomas similarly clouds over shapes of red and yellow with a camouflage of blue squares. These screens then lead on to the conceptual systems of Glenn Ligon, Jennie C. Jones and Charles Gaines —who superimposes a grid of leaves onto winter trees. Melvin Edwards and Leonardo Drew complete the section with powerful works that do not easily settle into categories of painting, sculpture, or relief. Mr. Drew’s “Number 52S” (2015), a black-and-white tour-de-force of painted wood that seems to grow out of the wall, recalls the Whitten from the start in its stark abstract complexities.

While “abstract art” appears in the title of this exhibition, the term here is too loosely applied. Yet the wide perspective also elevates the more abstract elements of representational artists such as Lorna Simpson and Gary Simmons —and the “abstract” materials that we find in Mr. Ligon’s illegible coal-dust letters in “Stranger #68” (2012).

Lorna Simpson’s ‘Gold Head K1’ (2011) PHOTO: LORNA SIMPSON/HAUSER & WIRTH, NEW YORK

A final room brings the remaining artists together and makes the case for shared affinities. The swirling circles of William T. Williams’s “Eastern Star” (1971) connect the dots of Ms. Pindell’s “Autobiography: Japan (Tombo No Hane)” (1982-83). The hanging forms of Sam Gilliam’s “Stand” (1973) and Al Loving’s “Brownie, Sunny, Dave, and Al” (1972, later revised) reach out to the levitating strips of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s “Well of the Concubine Pearl” (1967). The language of abstraction speaks in a uniquely liberating voice across the generations.

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The expansion of the canon may be welcome news, but just because art has gone unseen does not mean it deserves to be shown. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., has been collecting significant work by black artists longer than most institutions. Messrs. Gilliam, Williams and Edwards all showed there in the 1970s. Ms. Pindell, Ms. Simpson, Mr. Ligon and Mr. Bradford were brought into the collection while still mid-career.

Yet the Wadsworth’s exhibition “Afrocosmologies: American Reflections” now mostly makes a muddle of their achievements through an overhung and underdetermined selection of work. Connected, as the museum put it in a press release, by “African philosophical, ritual, and cultural systems that migrated here in memory,” an amorphous thesis that seems crafted after the fact, “Afrocosmologies” presents over a hundred works by nearly as many artists packed across two museum floors. The one-of-each approach offers a wide selection of black artists but only a superficial treatment of black work.

Carl Joe Williams’s ‘Waiting’ (2016) PHOTO: CARL JOE WILLIAMS/THE PETRUCCI FAMILY FOUNDATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART, ASBURY, NJ.

The Wadsworth’s own collection here includes important Puryear, Whitten, Pindell, Thomas and Edwards pieces along with those by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney, Kerry James Marshall and Bob Thompson. Yet with a majority of objects on loan from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art, minor works and middling artists come to dominate, with far too many small prints and drawings to navigate.

“Afrocosmologies” does suggest some interesting redirections: the meaning of the circle in works by Mr. Puryear, Ms. Pindell and Berrisford Boothe ; the connections of black figurative sculpture from Richmond Barthé, William Artis, Elizabeth Catlett and Artis Lane on through Vanessa German and Nick Cave. But, packed as it now is, you could almost miss the powerful Lawrence cycle on “The Legend of John Brown” (1977) at the very end.

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” asks Ralph Ellison in “Invisible Man.” The great achievement of black American art is work that speaks to a fuller range of the human experience. The challenge is to tell these stories coherently, and for all to see.