Claiming the blues for blacks only:

...African-Americans are "the aesthetic incarnate...

...By seizing the popular image of Pollack as a furious expressionist, Powell disregards the extraordinary control and calculated delicacy (Pollack frequently retouched his drips with a brush) that is the hallmark of his best work...

...It is notable mainly as a replay of Du Bois's Trotskyite emphasis on the political utility of art...

...It was the African, he claimed, who brought distinction to American culture through the vitality of his music...

...Instead, it proposes a "blues aesthetic" that claims to "color a vast and graying ocean of Western tradition...

...The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism" remains on view at the Studio Museum until December 30, the last stop on a tour that began in Washington, D.C...

...Here began promotion of the arts as a necessary means to recognition and power for African-Americans...

...Miller affirms Stephen Henderson's definition of the blues as a collective realization that "we had to give up all to be like THEM" in this "parasitic" and "cannibalistic" country, hi a dextrous bit of doublespeak, Dwight Andrews, ethnomusicologist at Emory University, denies the validity of race as the basis for an aesthetic "while simultaneously asserting the necessity of keeping racism in the paradigm...

...Bearden, who considered himself a Cubist, is similarly narrowed...

...In short, blacks do have rhythm and you better believe it...

...The aesthetic divide has nothing to do with race but much to do with expertise and informed sensibilities...

...The willingness of the Studio Museum in Harlem to use them signals the acceptability of a euphemized racism in which ethnic cultural identity is the ground for prejudices as noxious as the old colonial ones...

...Born in the black community, blues can be played by anyone of any color who feels it: "There's so much history in it, but it's also an American tradition and belongs to all of us...

...This holds true as well for jazz aficionados Stuart Davis and Arthur Dove...

...Du Bois agreed...

...By omitting reference to Bearden's passionate study of the Florentine masters, Rembrandt, Picasso, Mondrian, Miro, and his own contemporary Stuart Davis, Powell obscures the rich wellsprings of Bearden's sophistication...

...Hence, the stress on race as the linchpin of the blues...

...The refinement of his execution once led William Rubin to compare him to Debussy...

...10027...

...Certainly, it has not been the growing number of African-American youth who consider mainstream achievement a "white" thing...

...Overall, the text dogmatizes what was once called the "Negro difference," recalling the poeticized hyperethnicism of 1939 statements by Leopold Senghor, first president of Senegal: "Emotion is Black, just as reason is Hellenic...

...Stretching evidence to fit the polemic, Powell jumbles means with causes and oversimplifies the differences between music and visual art...

...Beyond that, the effort sours with racial one-upmanship and antagonism that contravene the very thing that is the glory of fine blues: its power to communicate across racial lines...

...They are solely the language of oppression in "this belly of racist capitalism...

...The catalogue {The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism, $19.95, 104 pp...

...Used this way, the blues can mean anything at all...

...Opening with a gratuitous jab at "racist Euro-Americans" (inexplicably coupled with "rioting Chinese") and a swipe at white males, he rejects all suggestion that the blues might be the hybrid product of "some transcultural inheritance of racist proportions...

...This, in turn, is a collection of essays commemorating the blues-less as music than as stimulus for a cultural separatism that not only recognizes racial differences but requires them...

...E. Ethelbert Miller, director of Howard University's Afro-American Resource Center, plays to the same grandstand...

...Each in his way testifies that every significant innovation is a function of nourishing gestation in the long continuities of art history and other realities...

...What does this have to do with the art on view...

...His warm witness locates the blues in the oral black tradition and acknowledges their shared qualities with other types of vocal and instrumental music...

...Yet Pollack, an indiscriminate culture enthusiast, listened to everything...

...maintains that black artists and black culture have had a major impact on the modernist tradition...

...There is also plenty of trendy flotsam...

...His achievement is proclaimed " a vehicle that was and is the blues...

...He inspired himself with much more than jazz: Zen calligraphy, Jungian theory, Indian sand painting, El Greco, the example of Arshile Gorky...

...But Powell ignores Lawrence's development to publicize his art as simply "an authentic depiction of blues style...

...Retaining sympathy with "the metaphysical powers of sound (music)," they are the "most creative, culture-building people in America...

...The origins of the quest for a black aesthetic are intimately bound to the crisis of values affecting blacks and whites alike in the wake of World War I. Modernism's unapologetic energy for provocation and experimentation, its schemes for political and cultural renewal, its disillusion with traditional symbols of civilization created the vogue for negritude that animated the Harlem Renaissance...

...In accounting for the work of other white painters strictly in terms of an inspirational blues aesthetic, Powell's arguments are equally truncated...

...This does not jibe with the boast by Kellie Jones, visual arts director at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, New York, that "African-American aesthetics rule popular culture...

...Pollack felt himself kin to Schumann...

...Civil rights activist W.E.B...

...Because the legendary action painter listened to blues while he worked...

...Frankie and Johnny" and related boll weevil ballads, for instance, are a tangle of British, American, and African sources...

...A single piece by Wifredo Lam, the stunning Cuban synthesizer of Afro-Antillean and modernist imagery, would have been more to the point...

...The mawkish portrait of Aretha Franklin, with her ventricles on her chest like the Sacred Heart, is only one reminder of Bearden's old charge against the white philanthropists at the Harmon Foundation: that they encouraged blacks to adopt "artificial and corrupt" standards...

...It is legitimate to ask who benefits by an aesthetic milled from half-truths, dismissiveness toward Western traditions, and the tired, dysfunctional myth of the black artist as an instinctual innocent outside the mainstream and exempt from judgment by it...

...But no matter...

...Since then, these have become dangerous cards in the unsavory game of racial politics...

...In a triumph of cliche over substance, Powell dubs Jackson Pollack a "blues aestheti-cian," spiritual kin to jazz innovator Charlie Parker...

...Or, in the curator's phrase, "the blues as cultural ethos...

...Early on, he embraced Orozco's approach to content and plastic form as well as his compositional rhythms and accents...

...The admitted subject here is "the politics of the blues...

...The paradox of power built on commitment to an irreducible cultural identity is that it cannot avoid mimicking the racism it presumes to combat...

...Since this can be argued more plausibly in popular music than in the visual arts, the text ignores modernism and sidesteps art as soon as it can...

...The real agenda here is pinning the tail on white folks...

...Thank you, Thomas Edison...

...This is not good news to the cultural separatist whose idee fixe is the preservation of exquisite difference...

...Any serious inquiry into modernism and its fragmentations would raise questions about an aesthetic tainted at birth by its ideological correspondence with other grand racial theories of this century...

...In the shadow of Andrews's balancing act lurks the fraudulent assumption that racism is a white phenomenon...

...A modulated effort to mythologize racial differences, it comes uneasily close to a volkisch theorizing that would be discredited if it issued from a white institution...

...Drawn to art by the beauty of classical African sculpture, Lawrence was deeply influenced by the social realism of the Mexican muralists, particularly Orozco...

...The catalogue is available from the museum, 144 W. 125 St., N.Y., N.Y...

...Nevertheless, it is misleading to confuse a useful conceit with the structure and origin of an artwork...

...MAUREEN MULLARKEY is a painter who writes on art and culture...

...There is something "quintessentially black" about the blues...

...From opera and Stravinsky to Bach and Beethoven, if it was music he loved it...

...Neither is it those of us, black and white, who still believe that social justice is mediated upon those things that assert our commonality and prepare us for our shared destiny in a global culture and economy...

...Why Pollack and not the equally innovative Gorky or de Kooning...

...A crossbreeding of African melody and rhythm with harmonically oriented tune and meter (especially as these are present in hymns and marches), the blues have complex roots...

...In 1924, the year after Leon Trotsky published his influential Literature and Revolution, Du Bois published The Gift of Black Folk which declared the Negro "primarily an artist" and insisted that "the blood of the Negro" revealed itself in the arts...

...While Powell voices discomfort with the implications of an aesthetic built on race, the weight of the catalogue tips the other way...

...The rest is typical American Art Industry: regulation outre (see the white dog castrate the black man in Keith Haring's cartoon elegy for Malcolm X), mixed media eruptions or awkward commonplaces chosen for their subject matter...

...The turning point in Parker's musical development came when he began studying and memorizing the recorded improvisations of Lester Young...

...Later, at Black Mountain College, cradle of the avant garde, came the great shaping influence of Josef Alber's Bauhaus design principles...

...Blues musician John Cephas is virtually alone in transcending the Nationalkultur bias that dominates the text...

...It was funded by the Ford Motor Company...

...The centrifugal forces of the modernist temper yielded the era and its works...

...The racial preening, disdain for whites, and reductionist view of culture implicit in Johnson's theorem provided just the right frisson for the affluent white "Negrotarians" (Zora Neale Hurston's sly coinage) who encouraged and helped finance the Harlem Renaissance...

...Reviving a grievance buried in the Jazz Age, Stewart complains that "black expressiveness must be covered over with white icing" to be acceptable...

...What is good and enduring here is almost exclusively by older artists who had the good luck to be spared the dispensations of the contemporary market...

...Consistent with the prevailing posture of intellectuals in his day, Du Bois announced himself a Bolshevik and asserted his contempt for any art not used for propaganda...

...Up to a point, it offers a legitimate celebration of black artistry...

...Powell subverts his own concern by contending that black style (the hairdos, the duds) is power...

...Each of these technically articulate, gifted men transcended a separate-but-equal black aesthetic...

...But modernism in this context is just a word, like art and the blues, for hanging claims on...

...The other essays are closer to Langston Hughes's lament, quoted by Miller, that whites had taken the blues and "fixed 'em/so they don't sound like me...

...There are some lovely pieces in this show by both black and white artists: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, George Luks, Aaron Douglas, Artheur Dove, and Miguel Covarrubias...

...For artists as artists, the first great syncopator, chromatic poet of dislocation and fragmentation, and riff improvisor was Paul Cezanne...

...The crucial significance of the blues, lingua franca for the pain of living, lies in its testimony to the inevitable reciprocity of cultures beneath the surface of political events...

...CLAIMING THE BLUES FOR BLACKS ONLY OR, PINNING THE TAIL ON WHITE FOLKS MAUREEN MULLARKEY In a 1920 address to the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson, Afro-America's senior statesman at the time, announced that although the white race excelled in gathering and applying knowledge, "it has never contributed one single element of what goes into modern civilization...

...The vocabulary of music-color, tempo, rhythm-provides analogies for talk about painting...

...He calls blues the African-American's "first line of defense" and tips his hat to Public Enemy, the rap group whose anti-Semitism has raised alarms...

...Perhaps the only beneficiary is the black mandarinate, the small middle-class subgroup of academics and bureaucrats who define and administer their own apparatus of racial division...

...Curated by Richard Powell, a Yale graduate with degrees in Afro-American studies and art history, the exhibit is a prop for the accompanying catalogue...

...The museum's current exhibition, "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," is slender and lackluster...

...He chooses not to grapple with the hard fact that every Western artist, black or white, is heir to pictorial possibilities that are rooted in the precedents set by the granddaddies of modernist art: Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and later Picasso...

...But the curator is not that interested in art, so Lam is unwisely excluded...

...the blues as social condition...

...The social content of their art is the more compelling because it is expressed through luminous mastery of form and materials and empowered by rigorous understanding of the longue duree of pictorial traditions...

...The scholarly veneer comes unglued in the bad-ass set piece by Jeffrey Stewart, teacher of history at George Mason University...

...Hobbled by the equation of ethnic with primitive, the show as a whole does not withstand comparison with the work of Bearden and Lawrence...

...There are parallels and prototypes in British folk tradition, in the mountain music of Appalachia and the Scottish Highlands...

...And he studied the moderns in depth...

...With the modesty of an artist loyal to his craft ("Musicians seldom speak of an aesthetic as such"), Cephas resists bending his art into a triggering device for the politics of blame...

...It keeps the audience from noticing that the black imprint on the visual arts is considerably less than the impact of modernism on black culture...

...Powell's facile appropriation misses the subtler but truer link between Pollack and Parker...