Art:
O'Brien, Tom
PIGMENTS OF THE IMAGINATION 'FACING HISTORY' IN BROOKLYN Facing History: the Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940" is an exciting exhibit for several reasons. The show, now at the Brooklyn...
...Well and good-especially if they also make clear their own agenda...
...In fact, the best items in the show have the least taint of racism...
...Asia serene but inscrutable...
...he had no choice but to depict a hierarchy...
...Even works with good intentions, such as Samuel Jenning's, "Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences" (1792), reveal the subtle racism of benign condescension...
...s stereotypical racism: Europe is aging and wary...
...Most blacks pictured are slaves, entertainers, preachers, or, in early Kentucky Derby paintings, athletes...
...Saint-Gaudens's model of a bust of a member of the Massachusetts 54th-the regiment in Glory-rivets attention, as does its final sculpture across from the Boston statehouse...
...This is half-true, but misleading...
...As a result of these inclusions and exclusions, McElroy-lacking the real villains-tends to interpret overin-geniously...
...McElroy has saved this material for the catalogue, some comments on labels, and a thirty-minute video on racist caricatures in film and TV...
...if so, Homer may be protesting against the way a black might be punished more severely than a white...
...the boys are either playing hooky or are on their way home from school...
...As McElroy notes, post-Civil War America was poisoned by caricature in dolls, cartoons, and sheet music illustrated with big-toothed, bug-eyed blacks mindlessly munching watermelons...
...The critic's ideology is a subtext too, and his critic's as well...
...For sculpture, stroll by the old Customs House in lower Manhattan where four female statues representing the continents depict the U.S...
...Liberty" is symbolized as a gracious young white lady dressed in delicate muslin holding out books to eager, submissive blacks...
...Why damn all our ancestors if we still fail to realize the best visions of the best of them...
...According to his catalogue essay, McElroy sees the show as an artistic record of America's limited imagination of black identity...
...Blacks (undeniably) have been victims, even of art...
...The black occupies the central position, is intelligent, and is treated with no condescension...
...Works of art are human creations...
...Where he had a choice, in his tone, he undercuts hierarchy by suggesting the common absorption of both men in the hunt...
...There are many items in the show, but the eye is attracted to the works of the more famous artists around which the current critical and journalistic controversy swirls...
...These express a surprising and affecting appeal for racial harmony from a bygone era...
...McElroy notes the pair's coldness, joined only by a business link, with the "blackman" clearly in the subordinate role...
...McElroy sees the work as "conservative" and claims that it symbolizes English fear of loss of empire...
...For example, Homer's "Watermelon Boys" (1876) depicts three boys (two white, one black) enjoying a summer afternoon in a field...
...In both its fine and troubling aspects, the show is mostly the work of Guy McElroy, a black art historian and consultant at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, where the show opened earlier this year...
...still, the exaggeration is characteristic of our times...
...McElroy's work is intelligent, innovative, educational, and on the whole balanced: he does not deny the aesthetic beauty of those paintings he questions...
...The show, in this view, reveals that artists saw blacks as foolish servants, clownish entertainers, or simian subhumans...
...Still, his periodic mistakes in judgment exemplify two wider tendencies: the relentless pursuit of the sense of victimization that mars so many justified protests and the trendy radical McCarthyism keen to find oppressors under every bed, play, novel, and work of art...
...His alertness may have to do with his wariness of being caught (either at hooky or munching on the fruit...
...TOM O'BRIEN Tom O'Brien chairs the humanities department at Manhattan School of Music...
...But the show has another side-its catalogue, wall labels, and the assertive publicity that have accompanied it...
...others depict black dignity and individuality with great sensitivity...
...America young and perky...
...many blacks were limited to such roles...
...School of Music...
...For all its beauty, art is not sacred, and its mythic aura sometimes needs debunking...
...but this doesn't mean nearly every white artist is guilty of their victimization...
...the servant is simply part of the story...
...But it would be more fair to say that the picture contradicts it entirely: it portrays interracial harmony...
...There is no problem with a critic uncovering an artist's hidden agenda-except when it serves to mask the critic's own...
...Overstating victimization obscures the real issue-not how some artists were racist, but why some of their implied images of racial equality were abandoned...
...Watson's black servant is at the top of the canvas, holding a line out for rescue, leading some art critics to claim he occupies a position of honor...
...But gross caricatures that go beyond documentary to insult are also there...
...McElroy is right in arguing that similar images dominate other media...
...For the show proper, he has chosen paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, John Singleton Copley, and genre-master William Sidney Mount...
...Its curators, who have done an excellent job gathering materials, have also burdened the show with some excessive claims...
...Some of this is historical fact...
...This may only be Eakins's realism and his documentary treatment...
...None of this is to deny racial stereotyping or to argue that works of art are above deconstruction...
...You can go to "Facing History" and emerge with a conclusion which is opposite to but equally radical as McElroy's: why hasn't America come to see what Homer, Eakins, and others did...
...Or take Eakins's 1876 painting, "Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting (Rail Shooting)," in which the black man stands out...
...Facing History" isn't just an exhibit, but an example of the current, often abrasive clash of art criticism and ideology: politically astute art historians want to inspect the subtexts of an artwork, its hidden agenda...
...All artists have worldviews: none comes to a canvas without a background, a family, a society, and the assumptions from each that they either define themselves by or against...
...Remington's paintings of black cavalry after the Civil War-"buffalo soldiers" the Indians called them-have all the gritty heroism of his white troopers...
...As a black, he has reason to be disturbed by many of their images...
...Africa, sound asleep...
...The show, now at the Brooklyn Museum, contains many fine paint-ings by well-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American artists, some of whom sadly resort to racial stereotypes...
...Some books lie in the grass...
...The black aide is as involved as Schuster...
...Watson" opposes men and nature, not man and man...
...Or take Copley's "Watson and the Shark" (1778...
...McElroy openly says that the painting doesn't foster the watermelon stereotype, which came later...
...He underrates some obvious positive images while finding negative ones that don't seem to be there...
...The painting was based on an actual event, an adventure of the mayor of London, when, as a young man, he narrowly escaped being eaten in Havana harbor...
...What this reading omits is the larger context for this early Jaws, images of "nature red in tooth and claw" in many paintings (George Stubbs) and poems (James Thomson) of the period...
...Others say his handling of the rope is naive...
...With one key proviso, it helps to read visual texts for their class, racial, and sexual subtexts...
...as a white, I don't see with his eyes...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
