The Phillips Collection along with Dr. Adrienne L. Childs, an independent scholar, art historian and curator, organized the exhibition “Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition”.  It presents 72 works by 53 artists, leaning heavily on contemporary work juxtaposed with distinguished early 20th century European Modernists such as George Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and noteworthy African-Americans as Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Alma Thomas.

This show took three years to produce along with a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue that offers significant information, especially the interview with Valerie Cassel Oliver and Childs, which is the most articulate and informative section of the volume.  However, despite the good intention of Childs to mount this exhibition in order to “enhance the narrative of modern and contemporary art in America,” it is a display overtly influenced by a specific ideology. Underlying this exhibition appears to be a curatorial claim that African-American artists needed to comprehend Modernism through the perspective of European Colonialism. According to Child’s “There’s still a little magic, if you will, about people like Picasso and Matisse that carry that panache with them,” says Childs. “But we’re de-centering them… They’re here and they should be here, but they’re not the whole show.”

This idea becomes evident in the first gallery that seems to scream at the viewer with a confrontational dialogue with Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (Luncheon on the Grass).  This is especially apparent in the appropriated compositions of Robert Colescott’s “Sunday Afternoon with Joaquin” and Mickalene Thomas’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires” who have replaced Manet’s white bodies with black ones.  Colescott’s image positions the scene in the American West with his Black nude female in cowboy boots and pink undergarments on the ground among two Latino resistance fighters.  Thomas’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires evinces ‘attitude’ among the three seated female figures.

Out of the 72 works on display, 35 pieces are figurative, in which black bodies inform the lineage of Modernism.  When one reflects of Modernism in the visual arts, figurative art does not dominate even though Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, late Cubism, German Expressionism, and Surrealism are part of it. Undeniably, works of Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Matisse and Picasso were instrumental to its evolution. Nevertheless, the abstract painters, George Braque, Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, advanced it.

It is necessary to recall the evolution of Modernism in Europe within a complex social context. Contributing to its rise was the growth of industrial societies in Germany, France and England and the fast expansion of cities, following the horrors of World War I.  The radical invention of new transportation, with the railroad, the steam engine, and the subway, altered the way people lived, worked, and traveled.

The opening up of international trade with Japan in the early 1850s moreover contributed to the shifting of aesthetic values among artists.  However, more importantly Europe colonized much of Africa in the late 19th century with imperial nations like Belgium and France taking enormous areas of Africa so to obtain natural resources such as copper and diamonds.  They brought back African arts and crafts as colonial ‘loot.’  It was the uniqueness of Primitive art that gained popularity in the 20th century European because it was NEW, and NEW was a favorite word of Modernism.  Furthermore by the close of the 19th century, the influx of ethnic arts of Africa, Aboriginal, Oceania, and even Native Americans into Europe gave artists new ways to explore and critique the stagnant traditions of European Art. The profound influence of Primitive art among diverse modern artists in many countries was suitable because they were looking to distant cultures for new artistic sources.  The art from these cultures were far simpler and abstract in contrast to traditional European representation. 

Thriving amid 1900 and 1930s, at its base Modernism was the rejection of Western European life and culture because many felt that it was complacent, corrupt and too concerned with the status quo and materialism. This discontent with the bankruptcy of European values led progressive creators and thinkers to investigate alternatives and many found inspiration in primitive cultures free of bourgeois and restrictive dominant values.  Modernism intended to rejuvenate civilization across the arts, science, politics and life.  In the visual arts, artists energetically experimented, dismissed the past and began breaking all of the established methods.  They aspired to be part of the moment and to keep pace with theoretical and technological advances that rapidly were changing all facets of society.  Modernist ideals saturated, art, architecture, literature, religion, social science and daily life attitudes.   Artists changed as they gained access to new ideas.

It is essential to keep in mind that America too was undergoing a Modernist transformation because of industrialization, urbanization and a huge wave of immigration that occurred between the 1890s and 1920s.  By 1920, the US Census documented that the urban population increased massively compared to rural America. Moreover approximately 23 million immigrants from Southern Europe immigrated to the USA from 1890 through the 1920s, and, this contributed essentially to altering its existing Northern European face.  What is dramatically important is the difference between American and European Modernism—in America people were not anchored to the status of their birth. Although race was a huge factor, and segregation in this era was the law of the land nonetheless African American artists still flourished.

What is incomprehensible about this exhibition is the curator’s presentation of African-American artists working through European colonial eyes that considered Africans as ‘primitives’.  This goes against the grain of Alain Locke, the Father of the Harlem Renaissance, who wrote in 1925, The New Negro—an anthology of poetry, essays, plays, music and portraiture by white and black artists (left), who rejected the Euro idea of African primitivism vis-à-vis European civilization.  Even though Locke urged African-American artists to examine works by European modernists, he argued that the primary responsibility of the artist is to express his own individuality, and in doing that express something of ‘universal human appeal’ portraying an emerging modern, urban America that celebrated the uniqueness of African American life.

Child references Locke in her essay yet the works she selected for “Riffs and Relations” appear to rely heavily on an argument with White European Modernists instead of presenting the rich historical evolution of African American artists throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first who benefited from rejecting norms of the past.

Surveying this exhibition, the excellent show ”Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists 1925-1945” curated by Lowery Sims (publ. 2003, right), at the time executive director of the Studio Museum, came to mind.  She cohesively explored the impact of Modernism on the art of African-Americans across disciplines. En masse demonstrated the dissimilar influences that contributed to the shaping of 20th-century aesthetics in African-American visual, literary and performing arts. “Modernism for African-American artists”, still outsiders in the white milieu, was something else: a ”multifaceted phenomenon,” Sims, wrote in the catalog.  Among the elements involved in this phenomenon were the belated engagement with African art (long after European whites had pre-empted; the image of the ”New Negro,” whose militant behavior broke from traditional conformity to white expectations; performance, sexuality and the black body, as exemplified by idols like Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker and Joe Louis; and the revised black self-imagery that was an important result of the great migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North between 1913 and 1946.”[1]

By the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of Black artists favored Abstraction over figurative art.  Sam Gilliam, a color field painter associated with the Washington School who was influenced by German Expressionism, is perhaps one of the most innovative artists of this period whose draped canvas paintings challenged the established concept of Modern art.  I ask, why isn’t Gilliam’s work in this exhibition? Another serious omission in this display is the art of Mark Bradford who uses the language of Modernism in his abstract works to confront issues about racism, gender discrimination and inequality.  His expansive mural “Pickett’s Charge’” is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum through 2021.

Unquestionably there are highlights in this exhibit, including Beauford Delaney’s “Untitled”, 1958 (right), a bursting abstract composition of yellow, orange and red with under tones of blue.  Delaney spent time in Paris in 1950s and as a result became changed after seeing Claude Monet’s installation of his waterlily paintings at the Musee de’ l Orangerie as well as the vivid painting of Vincent van Gogh.  Seeing Delaney’s work in an adjoining gallery to van Goghs, “The Road Menders, 1889” demonstrates how this work was transformative.

In Gallery 7, that does not have a thematic title, are the strongest collection of both paintings and sculptures rooted in the language and concepts of Modernism.  Piet Mondrian’s “Painting No. 9,” 1939-42 influenced by improvisational jazz sets the tone for this setting.   Leonardo Drew’s “Number 192,” 2016 an oxidized and burnt construction comprised of cotton, timber, rope, and steel affirms how Mondrian’s dialogue with the grid system provided him with a poetic structure to address Civil Rights.

Wangechi Mutu’s “Mwotaji” (The Dreamer), 2016 (right), a polished bronze head on a hand-cut Carrara Marble pillow evinces Constantin Brancusi’s “Sleeping Muse” while demonstrating her reframing of an old Master’s influence within an African portrayal.  Additionally Martin Puryear’s “Face Down” (2008) a minimalist head made of white bronze against a white base reveals his acknowledged recognition to Constantin Brancusi elegant forms.   

The direct dialogue of Hank Willis Thomas with Henri Matisse’s colorful cutout is evident in his “Icarus”, 2016 (left).  Several plates from Matisse’s book Jazz, 1947 hang in the same space as Thomas’s, evoking a close relationship between these works.  The colorful piece by Alma Thomas titled “Watusi,” 1963 additionally pays homage to Matisse’s cut gouaches yet she imbues her composition with lively colors capturing the essence of Watusi dancing popular in the 1960.  Jennie C. Jones celebrates African-American musicians, especially Elvin Jones in her vivid abstract constructions.  “Recording Red, Gray Distortion, (for Elvin Jones),” 2016 is a commanding abstract composition in gray, black and bright red.

Each of the artists in this successful room reveals what Locke urged African-American artists to do—look to the Modernist masters—but find your own voice so to depict a new and unique example of modern life through the lens of the “new negro, and his or hers experiences.”  Admirably the artists in Gallery 7 have accomplished this in their distinct use of color, materials, patterns and grid-like forms.   Indisputably all artists draw inspiration from works from the past—successful ones integrate such influences with their own aesthetics and move beyond ideological restraints!

By: Elaine A. King, Contributing Writer

Freelance art critic/curator living in the DC area

“Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition”

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., USA

Through 24 May 2020
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[1]  Grace Gluek, Art Review; What Modernism Meant in Black Artists’ World, New York Times, Grace Gluek, Art Review; What Modernism Meant in Black Artists’ World, New York Times, Section E, Page 38, Feb. 7, 2003.

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