CONTENT
INTRODUCTION BY STÉPHANE MARTIN ………………………………………………
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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION…………………………………………………………………..
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“THE COLOR LINE”: historical context ……………………………………………........
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OVERVIEW OF THE EXHIBITION …………………………………………………………
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1865-1918: From the foundations of segregation to the initial struggles……
p.6
1918-1945: Cultural effervescence and the radicalisation of violence...……..
p.9
1945-1964 On the way to “Civil Rights”…………….………………………..…….
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1964-2014 Contemporaries and African-Americans……………………………..
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EXHIBITION CURATOR ……………………………………………………………………
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ASSOCIATED EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS ……………………………………..……
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INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM……………………………………………………..…….
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© Greg Semu
EDITORIAL BY STÉPHANE MARTIN,
President of the musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
For painter Theo van Doesburg and adherents of Concrete Art,
there was “nothing more concrete, more real than a line, a
color”. African-American artists had to consider these elements
from both a plastic and political perspective. From the
abolition of slavery onwards, American society was
effectively divided by the famous “color line”, a term coined
in 1881 by the black leader Frederick Douglass. The world of
art did not escape this demarcation, which created a
mental, symbolic and institutional dividing line around
which merit was attributed and shameful acts perpetrated.
The primary aim of THE COLOR LINE: African-American
Artists and Segregation is to restore the featured works and
their creators to their rightful place. We cannot fail to be surprised by the relative lack
of awareness – even today – of artists such as Horace Pippin, whose diaries are filled with
sensitivity and poetry, or Jacob Lawrence, whose Migration Series paintings are
masterclasses in composition. Similarly, it is a pity that Elizabeth Catlett’s linocuts, which
offer a powerful insight into her everyday experience as a black woman living in the first
half of the 20th century, are not better known.
However, this exhibition by art critic Daniel Soutif, who in 2009 curated the remarkable
LE SIÈCLE DU JAZZ retrospective for the musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, is also
significant for the way in which it combines artistic and political perspectives. What
does it mean to be an artist if not to claim your irreducible share of freedom and
individuality, something that is fundamental to democracy? From the first struggles
against segregation to world conflicts, Civil Rights and black power, the history of AfricanAmerican artists is inextricably bound up with the political and cultural history of the
United States, making the “color line” both a foil and space for a necessary transgression
and the assertion of emancipation.
The 600 original works and documents featured in the exhibition cover the main
artistic fields (including fine arts, literature, cinema and photography) and help
visitors grasp the inexorable power of artistic creation as a vehicle for rights and
freedoms. The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support and generosity of
the sixty institutions, galleries and collectors who have loaned items. I would like to thank
in particular the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, the Terra Foundation, the
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and the Savannah College of
Art and Design (SCAD), as well as Alvin C. Hudgins and Walter O. Evans, who between
them have loaned some one hundred items. My thanks also go out to the Conny-Maeva
Charitable Foundation for its support in making the exhibition accessible to all visitors.
Finally, I wish to express my heartfelt congratulations to Daniel Soutif for his meticulous
work, sound decisions and intelligent proposals. In its own way, this remarkable
exhibition can help us to climb the “racial mountain” denounced by the poet Langston
Hughes in 1926 and reach the beautiful “mountaintop” evoked by Martin Luther King in
his speech of 3 April 1968, the day before he was assassinated.
Stéphane Martin
President of the musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
3
EXHIBITION
THE COLOR LINE
African-American Artists and Segregation
October 4th 2016 – January 15th 2017
Garden Gallery
Curator : Daniel Soutif, art critic
Over the past thirty years, there has been a growing awareness in the United States of
the rich diversity of work by African-American artists since the abolition of slavery.
However, Europe in general and France more specifically have been slow to recognise
African-American art from this period of US history.
“The Color Line” was the title of an article by
the great black leader Frederick Douglass that
was published in the North American Review
in June 1881. The term refers to the
segregation of black people that began in the
United States in 1877 after the Reconstruction
period that followed the end of the American
Civil War in 1865. The ratification of the 13th
Amendment marked the beginning of a new era
in American history, with slavery giving way to a
century of segregation that finally ended
officially in 1964, following a series of struggles,
with the signing of the Civil Rights Act by
President Lyndon Johnson.
David Hammons,
African American Flag, 1990,
Photo courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York
For the first time, this exhibition brings to France works by preeminent AfricanAmerican artists who remain little known outside of the United States and explores this
period of US history through the eyes of those who had to fight against this
discriminatory “color line”.
Using an extraordinary collection of 600 works and documents, it presents a timeline
that begins in 1865 with the end of the American Civil War, the abolition of slavery
and the beginning of segregation and ends with contemporary works that draw on
this legacy of struggle seen throughout the exhibition. The exhibition also shines a
spotlight on some of the key figures and movements linked to segregation, including
the “Exhibit of American Negroes” presented at the 1900 Universal Exposition in
Paris, black sporting heroes, black cinema from the 1920s to the 1940s, the grim
phenomenon of lynchings and Harlem, New York’s iconic black district.
4
5
“THE COLOR LINE”: historical context
The phrase “The Color Line” seems to have been printed for the first time in June 1881 by
The North American Review as the title of an article by the great black leader Frederick
Douglass. In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois, the soon-to-be founder of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, used the expression in the Exhibit of American
Negroes he presented in Paris for the Universal Exposition of 1900. But it was The Soul of
Black Folks, his essential book published in 1903, which consecrated the formula
according to which this “color line” would be “the problem of the 20th century”.
The year 1865 marked the end of the Civil War and slavery. The period of Reconstruction
followed. At its conclusion in 1877, slavery, abolished by law, gave way to segregation.
Decades of grim struggle would be needed before these racial separation laws finally
came to an end in July 1964 – at least officially – with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
signing of the Civil Rights Act outlawing any form of discrimination.
But the “color line” remains a metaphor still pertinent today in the United States and
stands now for nearly 140 years of legalized and illegal racial segregation.
THE COLOR LINE, African-American artists and segregation encompasses this history from
the point of view of artistic creation as practised in all its forms by those who happened to
be on the wrong side of this so-called discriminatory “color line”.
Faith Ringgold, American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding
© Faith Ringgold / ADAGP, Paris,2016
“AFRO-AMERICAN” OR “AFRICAN-AMERICAN”?
Terminological considerations
The term “Afro-American” was dropped in the United States in the late 1980s in favour of
“African-American”, which placed African origins and US nationality on an even footing.
For this reason, curator Daniel Soutif chose to use the term “African-American” in the
exhibition title, despite the fact that in France it remains – wrongly – little used outside the
world of research.
6
OVERVIEW OF THE EXHIBITION
I. 1865-1918: FROM THE FOUNDATIONS OF SEGREGATION TO THE
INITIAL STRUGGLES
With the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865 came a new chapter
in US history known as the “Reconstruction”. This period, which began in 1865 and
ended in 1877, saw the emergence of a new population that, though free, had been
given no place within American society.
Robert Duncanson, Uncle Tom and litle Eva
© Adagp, Paris, 2016
1 - Free, but black... Reconstruction
After the Civil War a period began that American historiography calls “Reconstruction”.
Andrew Johnson, who became President of the United States after the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, proved incapable of imagining Blacks as full citizens of
American society. So he helped install governments controlled by Whites in the Southern
states that promulgated “black codes”, i.e. laws denying former slaves all civil and
political rights. During this period, nonetheless, the federal government made significant
attempts to protect the equality of rights for all. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 – made law
by Congress overriding Johnson’s veto – declared all individuals born in the United
States, except for the Indians, to be citizens of the country. The 14th Amendment of the
Constitution, approved by the Congress in 1866 but ratified two years later, for the first
time granted citizenship and equality before the law and without distinction, to every
person born or naturalised in the United States. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870,
forbade the States from denying the right to vote to any (any man, that is, for female
suffrage did not come until 1920) on grounds such as race, color, or condition of former
servitude.
2 - Minstrels, Blackfaces, and Vaudevilles
As a popular demonstration of racism that was first expressed on the stage in the second
half of the 19th century, the blackface show was played at first by white actors made up
as mock-Blacks. Jim Crow, Zip Coon, or Aunt Jemima were characters invented to ridicule
African-Americans, often called Coons (short for “racoons”) and caricatured on the covers
of music scores for coon songs such as the well-known All Coons Look Alike to Me by the
black artist Ernest Hogan. For African-Americans quickly blacked themselves up too –
in their turn parodying the Whites aping the Blacks…
7
The black actor Bert Williams, unanimously
recognised as one of the most talented comedians of
his time, ennobled the blackface character by
instilling a tragic distance between the supposedly
comic blacking and his real skin. His reappropriation
and reconversion of racist imagery is also exploited by
artists from the 1970s, and more recently by Michael
Ray Charles, who deconstructs these stereotypes...
Alex Rogers (paroles), Bert Williams
(musique), Let it Alone, 1906,
partition, collection particulière
3 - First battles against segregation
After the end of Reconstruction in 1877,
the so-called “Jim Crow” laws generally
promulgated in the South introduced
segregation.
Two
leading
black
intellectual and political figures then
made themselves known: Booker T.
Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. The first
advocated giving up the struggle for
political rights and invited his people to
concentrate on economic emancipation
and pratical education. W.E.B. Du Bois on
the contrary called on Blacks to resume the
struggle for all the rights an American
citizen could claim and to access to a
liberal
education,
indispensable
for
modern life. Unlike Washington, who
argued for a Black movement directed by
the group’s business leaders, Du Bois
advocated the formation of the talented
tenth: “the talented ten percent” of
educated Blacks from many fields as
leaders in the struggle for advancement.
Black American artists reflected these
aspirations. The great painter Henry
Ossawa Tanner, for example, contributed
to these struggles by presenting forcefull
images of Blacks he had known
contradicted
the
wide-flung
racist
stereotypes.
8
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Young Sabot
Maker © The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,
Kansas City, Missouri
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Portrait
of Booker T. Washington, State
of Iowa Historical Museum © DR
Henry Ossawa Tanner studied at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts under the great portrait
painter Thomas Eakins before travelling to Paris
for the first time in 1891, where he would spend
most of his career. Tanner first made a name for
himself with his realist and intimate genre
paintings, with postimpressionist elements that
uniquely reflect the humanity and dignity of the
African-American people they portray. His
paintings of religious and allegorical subjects,
bathed in a mystical light, subsequently met with
success. His exhibitions at the Paris Salon resulted
in him winning first prize in 1897 for “The
Resurrection of Lazarus”, a painting that was
bought by the French State and is today held at
the Musée d’Orsay. His trips to Jerusalem, Cairo
and Tangier gave his paintings an Orientalist
flavour. He was the first African-American artist to
earn an international reputation and his success in
France (where he was made a Knight of the Legion
of Honour in 1923) and the United States (where
he was elected as a member of the National
Academy of Design in New York in 1927)
encouraged many of his peers to follow in his
footsteps across the Atlantic.
4 - W.E.B. Du Bois at the 1900 Paris Exposition
The Paris Exposition in 1900 was the occasion for an impressive demonstration of
black social and cultural pride.
Coordinated by the African-American Thomas J. Calloway, the huge Paris event’s Exhibit
of American Negroes was presented in the Palace of Social Economy on the right bank of
the Seine at a stone’s throw from the Pont de l’Alma. This Exhibit of American Negroes
allowed W.E.B. Du Bois, then a professor at the University of Atlanta, to team up with
Daniel Murray, the librarian of the Library of Congress responsible for collecting all
publications by black authors, to display a vast collection of books, periodicals,
pamphlets, archives, music scores, and sociological studies by African-Americans as well
as 500 photographs and even a diorama illustrating the history and life of Blacks in the
United States since their emancipation.
These images therefore revealed another America, a highly complex and highly
variegated black America. Instead of denunciations of racial and social violence, only
illustrations bearing the expression “equal but separate” quietly spoke the effects of
America’s color line. The Calloway/Du Bois/Murray exhibit’s spectacular array of
materials offered such new perspectives on African-Americans that the Exposition’s
judges awarded it numerous prizes.
9
5 - Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and other sports champions
When the black heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson knocked out white James Jeffries on 4
July 1910, Johnson had stepped across the color line to assert black mastery in a very
public manner.
Like music, sports – and boxing especially – offered significant venues in which the
black community could produce popular heroes able to express its defiance and pride
along with athletic excellence. Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and
Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) – to mention only the male boxers – are a few of these
world-famous athletes who contributed greatly to giving African-Americans images of
themselves different from those so aggressively asserted by American racism.
A number of artists wanted, in their own way, in sculpture and in painting, to emphasize
the renown of these black victories – not without sometimes underscoring the other side
of the picture. Thus, in the eyes of a David Hammons, boxing or basket-ball may offer
only illusory satisfactions. Does the flat inner chamber of his Air Jordan not point to the
superficial nature of sporting success when compared with other more decisive areas of
professional endeavour still inaccessible by the black community?
II. 1918-1945: CULTURAL EFFERVESCENCE AND THE RADICALISATION
OF VIOLENCE
1 - The Great War 1914-1918
More than 200,000 African-American
soldiers crossed the Atlantic during the
First World War. Their uniforms,
however, did not shield them from the
American color line. In 1914, The Birth of
a Nation, the technically innovative film
of D. W. Griffith, overtly helped promote
racism by celebrating the Klu Kux Klan
as heroes. Many black soldiers were
restricted to menial tasks behind the
Great War’s front line. Only the 93rd
infantry division under French command
escaped this limitation. The bravery of its
369th regiment earned it the French Croix
de guerre and the nickname of the
Hellfighters. Jim Reese Europe, who with
Whitfield Lovell, Autour du monde, 2008
his musicians led this legendary
©Whitfield Lovell. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery,
regiment, took advantage of this time
New York
overseas to introduce Europeans to black
music. The future painter Horace Pippin returned from the war with a quite serious
wound, but also with the inspiration of a moving autobiographical sketchbook and a
substantial portfolio of future works.
Once back home, far from being rewarded for their participation in the war with the
equal rights, the African-American soldiers – despite a triumphal parade in Harlem –
came home to race riots and arbitrary killings. Many black vets were lynched wearing
their wartime uniforms.
10
Horace Pippin (1888-1946)
A self-taught artist whose work
was
initially
described
as
“primitive”, Pippin is now
categorised – not without some
controversy – as an “outsider
artist”. The themes of his oil
paintings on wood panels –
scenes of war, genre paintings,
portraits and religious subjects –
were inspired by his personal
memories. He fought in France
during the First World War and
recorded his experiences in four
handwritten diaries, one of
Horace Pippin’s Memoir of his experiences in
which is illustrated. Four of his
World War I, vers 1921 © Washington,
paintings featured in the touring
Archives of American Art
exhibition “Masters of Popular
Painting” organised by MoMA in 1938 and met with significant critical acclaim. The
collector Albert C. Barnes described him as “the first important Negro painter to appear
on the American scene”.
2 - Harlem Renaissance: the "New Negro"
When Malvin Gray Johnson painted his Self-portrait in
1934, he stressed his origins by means of the African
masks seen over his shoulder. This work was created
at a time when the great black cultural efflorescence,
which included all the arts and which a subsequent
historian would christen the Harlem Renaissance, was
dying out. After the war, the black community
witnessed the rise of a new generation of talented
Blacks the philosopher Alain Locke named New
Negroes. Out to conquer the whole world these poets,
novelists, painters, sculptors, and filmmakers marched
to the sound of jazz as they put their names on the
map. In this way, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay
in literature, Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, or
Archibald Motley in painting, Richmond Barthé and
Augusta Savage in sculpture, made Harlem the world
capital of black culture. With his notoriously entitled
novel Nigger Heaven Carl Van Vechten offered in 1926
his own widely read celebration of Harlem as a
cultural capital. In 1928 Claude McKay’s novel Home
to Harlem was another praise-song of Black
Manhattan.
The echo of this black renaissance was heard as far
away as Paris, where a number of its protagonists had
come to stay.
11
Malvin Gray Johnson, Self portrait
© Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Gift of the Harmon
Foundation
Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)
Douglas’ style as an artist is most often
associated with that of the Harlem
Renaissance. He moved to New York in
1925 where he studied under the German
modernist Winold Reiss and went on to
develop African themes and motifs inspired
by Art Deco. He soon became the leading
light of the Harlem Renaissance movement,
with art cover regulary published in The
Crisis, Opportunity and Fire!! journals. He
was the only African-American artist to
feature in Alain Locke’s anthology The New
Negro and illustrated a number of key
literary works of the time, including God’s
Trombones by James Weldon Johnson. In
the early 1930s, he spent a year in Paris
studying at the Académie de la Grande
Chaumière and the Académie Scandinave
Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage
and met Palmer Hayden and Henry O.
© Adagp, Paris, 2016
Tanner, who encouraged him to pursue his
career as an artist. Upon his return to the United States, he painted murals depicting
heroic and allegorical scenes from black history and culture for the New York Public
Library and Fisk University. He later founded the Fisk University art department, where
he worked as professor of art and taught for 29 years until 1966. He was closely
involved in the discussions and debates among intellectuals associated with the Harlem
Renaissance and his paper “The Negro in American Culture”, which he presented at the
first American Artists Congress held in 1936, was a seminal work in the movement.
Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891-1981)
Motley was a graduate of the Art Institute of
Chicago and, unlike the other major artists
associated with the Harlem Renaissance,
spent most of his life in Chicago. He first
came to attention for his sensitive portraits,
with their outstanding rendering of light and
nuances in skin color, and in 1928 became
the first African-American artist to have a
solo exhibition at the New Gallery, a major
commercial gallery in New York. That same
year, he also won the Harmon Foundation
gold medal and was subsequently awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled him to
spend two years studying in Paris, where he
excelled in depicting scenes of street and
night life that revolved around jazz music. He
returned to Chicago at the start of the Great
Depression, where his complex, realist and at
times satirical works perfectly captured
aspects of life among the black community’s
most privileged circles
12
Tongues (Holy Rollers), 1929, Motley Jr.,
Archibald J. (1891-1981), Private
Collection © Valerie Gerrard Browne,
Chicago History Museum, Bridgeman
Images
3 - A "separate" cinema
As talent was not enough to abolish segregation, black film production – of which Within
Our Gates of Oscar Micheaux in 1920 was certainly one of the first fruits – was therefore
long confined to what could be called race cinema, just as audio recordings for the
African-American public were christened race records. All the movie genres, from western
to thriller and not forgetting romantic comedy, were represented in these all colored cast
productions, according to the terms on most of the posters that advertised them. After
the Second World War, this type of production gradually dried up while Hollywood
gradually opened its doors to black actors playing more than mere bit parts as
chambermaids or butlers. However, not until the end of the 20th century did black
directors, like Spike Lee for example, finally succeed in winning a real place in the film
industry.
4 - Strange Fruit: The legacy of the lynchings
Several thousands of Blacks were lynched in the
United States between 1880 and 1980.
Sometimes announced in advance by the
newspapers, these crimes – often accompanied
by monstrous tortures – drew crowds of which
dozens of postcards have preserved a frightful
memory. From its creation in 1910, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, fought,
especially in the columns of the magazine The
Crisis, against lynching – without much success.
For their part, many artists – from Hale Woodruff
or Charles Alston to Robert Thompson as well as
Loïs Mailou Jones – also made their contributions
to this struggle. In 1935, two exhibitions were
even dedicated to the theme of lynchings. The
first, entitled An Art Commentary on Lynching,
was organised by the N.A.A.C.P., while the
second, Struggle for the Negro Rights, was
sponsored by the John Reed Club, close to the
American Communist Party. Composed in 1936
by Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit, a song evoking
the “strange fruit” too often “hanging from
poplar trees” (as the song says), became one of
Billie Holiday’s most celebrated performances.
Loïs Mailou Jones,
Mob Victim (Meditation) © DR
13
Robert Thompson (1937-1966)
A painter, Thompson spent much of his time with Beat Generation writers and
musicians in the Lower East Side. He travelled to Paris, Ibiza and Rome in the 1960s
and drew inspiration from works by Goya, Poussin and Piero della Francesca. His
expressive landscape paintings incorporate stylised figures, blocks of color and intense
tones, depicting idyllic or biblical scenes that are often transformed into allegorical
nightmares. Thompson was relatively isolated on the artistic scene for his appropriation
– unusual at that time – of ancient works and his relationship with painting remained
supremely cathartic throughout his life. He died suddenly in Rome at the age of 28.
Bob Thompson, The Execution © Estate of Bob Thompson;
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York NY
5 - The Great Migration and the WWII
Subjected to strict segregation and many other
adverse living conditions, Southern AfricanAmericans of the 1910s began a massive migration
towards the North, where the burden of racism was
lighter and where work was easier to find,
especially in industrial cities such as Chicago or
Detroit. This massive social phenomenon involving
nearly two million people was superbly depicted by
the sixty marvellous small paintings composing The
Migration Series (1940-1941) by the painter Jacob
Lawrence.
The Second World War did not interrupt this mass
migration any more than it terminated racism. Just
as in the first worldwide conflict, the Blacks were
recruited for military service – nearly a million of
them serving under the Star-Spangled Banner.
Once again segregation was maintained in the
army and – except for a small number including
the pilots trained after considerable resistance at
Tuskegee (Alabama) – most African-American
soldiers were again confined to subaltern tasks.
14
Horace Pippin, Mr Prejudice © DR
None of these circumstances stopped artists such as William H. Johnson or Claude Clark
from making Black WWII soldiers the subjects of attractive evocations.
1 - Harlem on Their Minds
Everything – and its opposite – is said about Harlem. Considered as the world capital of black
culture during the 1920s, Harlem became the Dark Ghetto in 1965 according to the title of
sociologist Kenneth Clark groundbreaking study. Two years beforehand, an essay by Chester
Himes had called Harlem America’s cancer. As for Ralph Ellison, the great writer soon to be
famous for his novel Invisible Man, as early as 1948 had decreed that Harlem was “nowhere”
(“Harlem is Nowhere”). In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of New York inaugurated
Harlem on My Mind, an exhibition that was immediately strongly contested – quite rightly – for
its quasi-ethnographic approach that purely and simply excluded the African-American artists.
However, most of these artists – such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, or Norman Lewis –
hardly stopped having Harlem on their minds or, maybe even more so, in their hearts.
Taking its title from an Irving Berlin song, the exhibition Harlem on My Mind was in any case
quite insufficient to calm the militant reactions of many black artists. Indeed, their objections
to that Met show were such that subsequently nothing in the museum world was as before,
with major museums finally opening their doors to them, albeit timidly at first.
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)
Lawrence settled in Harlem in 1930. His style, which
remained unchanged throughout his career, was unique
from the outset and soon brought him to the attention
of Charles Alston and Augusta Savage, who encouraged
him to pursue his artistic training at the Harlem Art
Workshop and Harlem Community Art Center. Lawrence
quickly developed a new genre of history painting:
pictorial series depicting key episodes or characters
from African-American history made up of several
dozen small narrative pictures. From 1939, on the
initiative of Alain Locke and the Harmon Foundation,
his Toussaint L’Ouverture series was exhibited at the
Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1941, his Migration Series
was immediately bought by the Phillips Memorial
Gallery and MoMA, making him the United States’ most
promising artist at just 23. He became the first AfricanAmerican artist to be represented by a New York gallery
(Downtown Gallery). He won many awards during his
career and was the first black artist to be elected to the
National
Institute of Arts and Letters. During his
Jacob Lawrence, Pool
lifetime,
he
was also the subject of several major touring
Players, 1938 © Collection
retrospectives
organised by, among others, the Whitney
of AXA US /© Adagp, Paris,
Museum.
He
gradually
devoted more of his time and
2016
energy to teaching (he was appointed emeritus
professor at the University of Washington in Seattle) and his work became increasingly
complex and fragmented. His “dynamic cubism” was unlike anything that had come
before it, documenting in images the history and everyday life of the African-American
community and making Lawrence a major artist.
15
Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
After his birth in North Carolina, Bearden’s family moved to Harlem during the Great
Migration and he became closely involved in the Harlem Renaissance movement. He
studied at a number of institutions, including the Art Students League under George
Grosz, and mixed with a number of leading black intellectuals and political activists at
Studio 306. In 1935, he published the manifesto “The Negro Artist and Modern Art” in
the journal Opportunity. During the 1940s, his work was influenced by cubism and
social realism and depicted biblical subjects, the composition reminiscent of stainedglass windows. After studying philosophy for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he
returned to the United States, where he met a calligraphy teacher who taught him how
to layer strips of colored paper, a technique that would become a hallmark of his later
career. From the mid-1950s, he devoted himself entirely to his work and addressed
African-American themes through a unique collage style. He drew his inspiration in
large part from the day-to-day lives of the Southern and Harlem communities, black
literature and history and jazz music. In 1963, together with Norman Lewis and Charles
Alston, he cofounded Spiral, a collective linked to the Civil Rights movement, and later
the Cinque Gallery. In 1969, he was involved in setting up the Studio Museum in
Harlem. He also wrote several important works, including A History of African-American
Artists: From 1792 to the Present, which he coauthored with Harry Henderson and was
published posthumously in 1993.
Romare Bearden, The Block II, Walter O. Evans Foundation © Adagp, Paris, 2016
III. 1945-1964 ON THE WAY TO « CIVIL RIGHTS »
1 - On the way to “Civil Rights”
The two decades after the war were marked more and more by the forthright struggles by
Black American for fundamental Civil Rights. Still shaken by racist assassinations such as
that of the young Emmett Till in 1955, and by striking heroic actions such as that of Rosa
Parks who, at the end of the same year, sat down in a place reserved for Whites in a bus
in Montgomery (Alabama), this long march toward freedom reached its climax in August
1963 with the great demonstration in Washington where Martin Luther King gave his
celebrated “I have a dream” speech.
16
Elizabeth Catlett, 12. I have special
reservetions, Courtesy of the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Philadelphia. Art by Women Collection,
Gift of Linda Lee Alter, Art © Catlett
Mora Family Trust/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY © Adagp, Paris, 2016
Reginald A. Gammon,
Jr, Martin Luther King Jr
Photo Kent Pell © Adagp, Paris, 2016
Rich in political events such as school desegregation in May 1954, the Black movement
for Civil Rights sparked numerous responses from black artists such as Romare Bearden,
Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Reginald Gammon, and Emma Amos (the only woman in
the group), who came together at the beginning of the 1960s as an artists’ collective they
called Spiral. They were preceded by artists like Elizabeth Catlett, who in the late 1940s
had created the powerful series of fifteen engravings entitled The Negro Woman.
Norman Lewis (1909-1979)
Lewis was born in New York and was a student of Augusta
Savage, as well as studying at Columbia University. He taught
as part of the Federal Art Project during the Great
Depression. He was greatly influenced by social realism until
the early 1940s, after which his style became more abstract
and he became the only African-American artist in the first
generation of abstract expressionists, where he remained an
isolated figure for some time. Lewis’ work was inspired by
music, African art and calligraphy and he never entirely
abandoned all references to the real world, which were
sometimes suggested in the titles of his works. He remained
firmly committed to the fight for Civil Rights throughout his
life and, in 1963, became a founding member of the Spiral
collective and subsequently the Cinque Gallery (with Romare
Bearden and Ernest Crichlow), which was set up to support
young artists from minority communities.
Norman Lewis, Night Walk #2, 1956
© Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld
Gallery LLC, New York, NY
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2 - Black is Beautiful: Black Power, Black Muslims, Black
Panthers
As the battle for Civil Rights
intensified, a new period began. This
new phase was no less complicated
than those that preceded it: no less
marked by struggles against the color
line, though illegal since 1964.
During this period, Black activist
groups multiplied, some of them
like the Black Panthers advocating
that their members provide armed
protection of black communities.
The assassination of Malcolm X in
February 1965 and the imprisonment
of Angela Davis in 1970 – two
Bob Thompson, Stairway to the Stars, 1962
names that travelled around the
© Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Courtesy of Michael
world – set the stage for many
Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
forms of Black political rebellion
and for the many forms of “white backlash” against these rebellions. This was also a
period rich in Black artistic activity, much of it directly echoing the political struggles.
In this context arose Emory Douglas’s explicitly militant graphics, Free Jazz, and the
poetry and other writings of LeRoi Jones (who would rename himself Amiri Baraka).
Black painters and sculptors, of course, came just as much to the fore, and offered
their own often politically committed visions, now part of a larger art scene that
started to be called “contemporary” – “modern” having had its day.
Glenn Ligon, Condition report
© Glenn Ligon, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine,
New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles,
and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
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IV. 1964-2014 CONTEMPORARIES AND AFRICAN-AMERICANS
During the last two decades of the 20th century, the term “African-Americans” became
established for referring to the Blacks of the United States. Today, it has completely
supplanted all those terms that were once in use, from Negro to Black or Afro-American,
including colored (or, in racist slang, nigger). More numerous than ever, black
contemporary artists are no longer New Negroes like Langston Hughes or Aaron Douglas
in the 1920s in Harlem, or Negroes as the great writer Ralph Ellison asserted; neither are
they Afro-Americans or Blacks as were Romare Bearden or Norman Lewis according to the
words of their contemporary militants in the 1960s; just like Barack Obama at his
inauguration as President of the United States, they tick the box African-American when
they have to fill in an administrative form and, as such today, they are taking
possession of an ever wider space on the American and international artistic scene.
Mickalene Thomas (Born in 1971)
Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe I
© Adagp, Paris, 2016
Thomas’ paintings and photographs
offer a new take on the canons of
western art and popular visual
culture by revisiting the concept of
femininity. The body of the AfricanAmerican woman – a black body for
so long invisible – is celebrated and
takes centre stage in her work. The
th
poses, taken from the 19 century
pictorial tradition, are transposed
into a carefully staged retro
environment inspired by the vital
soul aesthetic of the Black Power
years. Her work is highly complex,
both in its composition and
materials, contrasting paint with
enamel, textiles and rhinestone.
She lives and works in New York.
Ellen Gallagher (Born in 1965)
Drawing on a series of images from the
vaudeville and blackface tradition,
science fiction and advertisements from
popular black magazines such as Ebony
and Sepia, Gallagher’s work revolves
around the relationship between
abstraction and representation. She
works in a wide variety of media
including painting, drawing, collage,
sculpture and film. In her most recent
work, she appropriates adverts fostering
a certain ideal of black beauty by
embellishing them with Plasticine. She
divides her time between New York and
Rotterdam.
Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2005
© Ellen Gallagher and Two Palms Press
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David Hammons (Born in 1943)
Hammons trained at the Chouinard Art
and Otis Art Institutes in Los Angeles. It
was there he met Charles W. White, who
taught there and would prove a
determining influence in his career.
Hammons was involved in the West Coast
African-American art and jazz scene,
before settling permanently in Harlem in
1975. He belongs to the generation that
lived through the transition from
segregation to integration and his early
works celebrate his black identity, while
David Hammons,
stopping short of making an overtly
African American Flag, 1990,
political statement. He drew inspiration
Photo courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York
from Dada and later in particular from
the Arte Povera movement, incorporating
found materials and objects relating to African-American culture into the creative
process, such as grease-stained paper bags and hair. He continues to kick against the
art establishment, favouring the use of urban space, the anonymity of the street and
temporary installations. Paradoxically, he first made a name for himself on the
international scene in 1983 selling snowballs to passers-by in the street. Since then, he
has undoubtedly been the African-American artist whose international reputation has
been equalled only by his carefully cultivated physical invisibility.
Artists showcased in the exhibition
- Charles H. Alston (1907-1977)
- Emma Amos (born in 1938)
- Richmond Barthé (1901-1989)
- Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
- Romare Bearden (1911-1988)
- Dawoud Bey (born in 1953)
- Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)
- Michael Ray Charles (born in 1967)
- Barbara Chase-Riboud (born in 1939)
- Claude Clark (1915-2001)
- Robert Colescott (1925-2009)
- David Drake (Dave the Potter) (c.18011870s)
- Frank DeBose (born in 1946)
- Beauford Delaney (1901-1979)
- Thornton Dial (1928-2016)
- Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)
- Emory Douglas (born in 1943)
- David Driskell (born in 1931)
- Robert Duncanson (1821-1872)
- Reginald Gammon, Jr. (1921-2005)
- David Hammons (born in 1943)
- Ollie Harrington (1912-1995)
- David Hartt (born in 1967)
- Palmer Hayden (1890-1973)
- Ellen Gallagher (born in 1965)
- Malvin Gray Johnson (1896-1934)
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- William H. Johnson (1901-1970)
- Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998)
- Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)
- Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907)
- Norman Lewis (1909-1979)
- Glenn Ligon (born in 1960)
- Whitfield Lovell (born in 1959)
- Kerry James Marshall (born in 1955)
- Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951)
- Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891-1981)
- Horace Pippin (1888-1946)
- Faith Ringgold (born in 1930)
- Betye Saar (born in 1926)
- Augusta Savage (1892-1962)
- Albert Alexander Smith (1896-1940)
- Mary T. Smith (1904-1995)
- Joe Overstreet (born in 1933)
- Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
- Alma Thomas (1891-1978)
- Hank Willis Thomas (born in 1976)
- Mickalene Thomas (born in 1971)
- Robert Thompson (1937-1966)
- Dox Thrash (1893-1965)
- James Lesesne Wells (1902-1993)
- Charles White (1918-1979)
- Bert Williams (1874-1922)
- Hale Woodruff (1900-1980)
EXHIBITION CURATOR
Daniel Soutif
Philosophy lecturer and art critic Daniel Soutif has addressed a broad range of subjects
over the course of his varied career, particularly during his time as editor of the review
Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne (1990-1994), director of cultural development at
the Pompidou Centre (1993-2001) and head of the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi
Pecci in Prato, Italy.
Daniel has worked as a freelance curator since 2006 and has curated a number of
exhibitions, including Le Temps, Vite at the Pompidou Centre (2000) and Le Siècle du Jazz
(The Jazz Century) at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (2009).
He is the author of many prefaces for exhibition catalogues and edited Nelson Goodman
et les langages de l'art (Paris, Pompidou Centre, 1991) and L’Art du XXe siècle 1939-2002.
De l’art moderne à l’art contemporain (Paris, Citadelles & Mazenod, 2005). He has also
written and produced several documentaries.
Assisted by Diane Turquety, Art Historian.
Exhibition design
The exhibition has been designed by Laurence Fontaine.
ASSOCIATED EVENTS AND PUBLICATIONS
* INTERACTIVE AREA
At the heart of the exhibition is an interactive area where visitors can listen to audio
recordings of fictional works and poems. Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright
and Claude McKay each tell, in their own way, the story and situation of AfricanAmericans. These audio recordings are juxtaposed with four tactile representations of
works by African-American artists, some of which feature in the exhibition.
* PUBLICATIONS
•
A catalogue is available for this exhibition (400 pages, 700
illustrations, €49, musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac /
Flammarion co-edition).
•
A special issue of Beaux Arts Magazine will also be
dedicated to the exhibition (52 pages, €9).
* EVENTS
*BEFORE Color Line
Friday 4 November 2016, 7.00 p.m. - midnight
BEFORE evening events are based on the themes addressed by exhibitions currently being
held at the museum and invite visitors to explore the museum in a new way that
combines tradition and contemporary creativity and to take part in a wide range of
activities, from tours to performances, workshops and DJ sets.
*The Color Line WEEKEND
Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 October 2016
Visitors are invited to explore the exhibition during this weekend of unique free events
for all ages (including performances, interviews, introductory classes and screenings).
*Opposing the “color line”: a musical journey (CONCERT)
Harrison Kennedy and Sebastian Danchin (United States)
Sunday 16 October 2016, 5.00 p.m.
Claude Lévi-Strauss Theatre
From spirituals to the blues, soul, hip-hop and Obama-era R&B, African-American music
tells a story of resistance, pride and endurance in the face of the brutality of slavery,
segregation and discrimination.
In conjunction with the exhibition The Color Line: African-American Artists and
Segregation, Sebastian Danchin, an historian specialising in black American culture,
recounts the episodes of this musical journey with the help of Harrison Kennedy,
bluesman and former vocalist of Chairmen of the Board, one of the biggest soul groups of
the 1970s.
*Interviews in the Jacques Kerchache Reading Room
To complement the exhibition, a varied programme of interviews and readings with
historians, art historians and sociologists will be hosted in the Jacques Kerchache Reading
Room, exploring the themes developed in the exhibition, such as jazz, cinema and the
Harlem Renaissance.
The full programme is available online at www.quaibranly.fr.
Supported by
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INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
African-American artists and the “color line”: stories, genealogy, forms and acts
Friday 13 and Saturday 14 January 2017
Claude Lévi-Strauss Theatre
From the late 19th century to the present day, the prevalence of a paradoxical cultural
climate in which plurality signified both community and isolation has culminated in an
inequality in art criticism, ignorance of the consequences of the trauma caused by slavery,
the emergence of a space used by artists to create art that draws on a dual AfricanEuropean heritage and links with the worlds of media and publishing. Within these
contradictions, and drawing on their unique experience that combines an awareness of
the world, political engagement, artistic creativity and understanding of their local area,
African-American artists have consistently produced art that is conscious of the confines
to which it has been subject, while at the same time highlighting its capacity to escape
the straitjacket imposed upon it by means of specific forms of expression. Such artistic
expression goes hand in hand with militant activity, as well as with ancestral spiritual
spaces and, by transforming their radicalism into form, their silence into sound and their
invisibility into something visual, gives these artists the freedom to create pieces that are
unique in the history of art.
This symposium will explore the practices of African-American artists from the 19th to the
21st century through the prism of historical, aesthetic and political considerations, with
the aim of rethinking the history of art from the perspective of the latest research, as well
as investigating the way in which various official cultural policies have sought to support
African-American creativity by producing disparities and distinctions regarding the
possibility of offering a “mainstream” interpretation of the art produced by these artists.
Art historians, curators, theorists, critics and artists will consider the confines and
isolation to which African-American art has long been subject, as well as how these
obstacles can be overcome.
Scientific Committee:
Sarah Frioux-Salgas (Head of Archives and Collection Documentation, musée du quai
Branly – Jacques Chirac), Gilles Mouëllic (Professor, Rennes 2 University), Daniel Soutif
(art critic and curator of the THE COLOR LINE exhibition), Elvan Zabunyan (Professor,
Rennes 2 University).
This international symposium has been jointly organised by the musée du quai Branly –
Jacques Chirac and Rennes 2 University (“Art History and Criticism” and “Arts, Practices
and Poetics” research units).
Supported by
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PATRONS
Accessibility to the exhibition is enabled thanks to the support of The ConnyMaeva Charitable Foundation
USEFUL INFORMATION
THE COLOR LINE, Arfrican-American Artists and segregation
From october 4th 2016 to 15 january 15th 2017
Garden Gallery
#TheColorLine
Visuals available to the press http://ymago.quaibranly.fr
Access provided on request.
PRESS CONTACTS
Agence Alambret Communication
Leïla Neirijnck, Sabine Vergez, Sarah Chiesa
01 48 87 70 77
[email protected]
www.alambret.com
Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
[email protected]
www.quaibranly.fr
Nathalie MERCIER
Communication manager
33 (0)1 56 61 70 20
[email protected]
Thibaud GIRAUDEAU
Media relations officer
33 (0)1 56 61 70 52
[email protected]
Anaelle BLED LABAERE
Media relations officer
[email protected]
MEDIA PARTNERS
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