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Lifestyle 15 MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2020
Philip Kennicott
THE WASHINGTON POST - The
idea of in luence is so broad, so
ubiquitous and so often misused
that it may be the most misleading
concept with which we try to make
sense of art and art history.
Artists may be in luenced by
things they love, and by things
they hate; they may be deeply in-
luenced by precursors with whom
they share no identi iable af inities
of content or style; and they may
produce work that seems super-
icially identical to that of another
artist even when there was no con-
tact, no intent to imitate, and no
similarity of purpose or message.
The Phillips Collection has cho-
sen two different words - riffs and
relations - for the title of a new ex-
hibition that traces the in luence of
modernism on African American
artists in the 20th and 21st centuries.
"Riffs" suggests something that
is spontaneously inspirational, a
jumping-off point for elaboration or
development of a modernist idea
or image; “relations”, a wide-open
term full of ambiguity, gets at the
deeper problem of tracing in lu-
ence, both negative and positive.
The emotions inspired by the
absorbing exhibition, Riffs and Re-
lations: African American Artists
and the European Modernist Tradi-
tion, are both deeply negative and
positive. Curator Adrienne L Childs
tells a story dating back to the be-
ginning of the 20th Century, when
such artists as Picasso, Braque and
Matisse turned to African art for
new ideas about how to represent
the world, creating igures with
masklike faces, lattened forms and
backgrounds of vibrant patterning.
They weren't just borrowing vi-
sual ideas, however.
Many of them believed in a con-
nection between what they saw as
primitive culture and the deeper
wellsprings of psychological life,
a way to reference and represent
urges and emotional drives that
had been suppressed by “civilisa-
tion”. But they also were appropri-
ating wholesale the visual material
of people who were suffering colo-
nial oppression, taking sacred ob-
jects out of context and imputing
to them European-derived ideas
about their purpose and meaning.
It was theft and homage, with all
the damage of the theft incurring
to those who were often powerless,
and the homage paid not to any art-
ist or culture in particular, but gen-
erally to an idea of Africa that was
invented to serve European needs.
The story becomes complicated
right from the start, in part because
the initial appropriation of African
ideas was so successful, visually,
within the context of European art.
It led to an explosion of ideas
and forms, in luential across almost
the whole spectrum of Western
creativity. And it happened at a mo-
ment when African American artists
were beginning to assert their pres-
ence within that milieu, and looking
for ways to consolidate a sense of
identity in an art world that largely
rejected them.
So the initial appropriation
led to re-appropriation, as African
American artists repurposed what
the European artists had initially
borrowed. In 1925, Alain Locke, the
"dean" of the Harlem Renaissance,
published a volume of essays called
The New Negro, which encouraged
African American artists to look to
newly invigorated European mod-
ernist artists, the same ones who
were making hay with "primitivism,"
for inspiration.
Herein were possible sources
for a new African American idiom,
connected both to contemporary
art currents and authentic African
culture. It was an exhortation that
paralleled what European countries
had done over the past century
- raiding their own folk culture to
invent new national identities - but
the idea that African visual ideas
processed by European artists was
a route to authentic African culture
was questionable.
Still, it was a way forward, and
artists, especially those struggling
against larger cultural forces, are
mainly looking for just that, a way
forward. One sees that frequently
throughout this exhibition.
Artists ind what they need, and
what they need can come from un-
likely places. In 1921, several years
before Locke's in luential treatise,
Hale Woodruff, one of the great-
est 20th-century African American
artists, laid his hands on a book
about African sculpture published
in Germany. That book, Afrikanis-
che Plastik, included black and
white plates of African ceremonial
igures, sculpted heads and stools,
and a long essay in German that
Woodruff couldn't read.
But it was the visual stimulus he
needed, and it helped him move
forward on a brilliant path. Among
the most exciting works on view
in the Phillips exhibition is Wood-
ruff's circa 1958 Africa and the Bull,
which reimagines a well-used Euro-
pean trope - the Rape of Europa - in
African terms, with a black igure
riding a white bull. The complex-
ity of Woodruff's representation of
the bull, in a de Kooning palette of
grays, is a magni icent foil to the
black and white loral igures that
envelope the image of Africa.
The exhibition traces the com-
plex back-and-forth between art-
ists up to the current moment,
in which artists are engaged in
much more direct critique of the
modernist inheritance.
Titus Kaphar uses thick ields of
black tar to encroach on the moral-
ly obtuse prettiness of Impression-
ism, forcing viewers to confront the
cost of European wealth and luxury
- in large measure derived from
global exploitation.
What is missing from these
colourful Impressionist paintings
that are so beloved by museum au-
diences? Not just African igures,
but also the history of Africa, trans-
piring with substantial misery so far
away at the same time that Monet
was painting women with parasols
in green ields speckled with low-
ers. The history of African Ameri-
can engagement with modernism
also includes internal arguments
and complications.
By the 1960s and '70s, an older
generation of artists who found
much to admire in abstraction - in-
cluding the freedom to say just as
much or as little as they wanted
about the so-called real world -
were being confronted by more po-
litically active younger artists.
Artists who favoured muted
colours, or grid-like forms, or all-
over ields of pattern and colour,
didn't seem suf iciently engaged
with what was happening on the
streets. Groups like the Black Arts
Movement were looking for new
forms and new ideas that weren't
constrained by the aesthetic dic-
tates of the still white-dominated
ine arts world.
The argument wasn't new, and it
continues today in different forms,
across all kinds of creative media.
One of the most arresting im-
ages in the exhibition, an untitled
circa 1958 abstraction by Beauford
Delaney, is a burst of yellow, orange
and red, with subtle blue tones in
the interstices of a vibrant ield of
brush work.
It was made after Delaney, a
black man, moved to Paris, where
he changed from making igurative
work to mostly abstract composi-
tions. It is placed close to one of
the Phillips' prized van Goghs, the
1889 The Road Menders, with which
it shares a similar colour scheme.
In 1945, before Delaney went
to France, while he was still living
a dual life as an artist in Green-
wich Village and a black artist in
Harlem, he was the subject of a
rapturous pro ile by Henry Miller,
in Miller's trademark freely asso-
ciative, subjective and sometimes
self-indulgent style.
Miller admired Delaney, and to
express that admiration he noted
how much more dif icult it was for
a black artist, a product of the Jim
Crow South, to take the chances,
with colour and form, that Delaney
was taking. By avoiding cliches, by
aspiring to greatness, by challeng-
ing white audiences, he would in-
evitably be neglected, ostracised
or forgotten.
Delaney was mostly forgotten
for a long time. He died poor and
con ined to a mental hospital in
Paris in 1979. Fifteen years later, an
African American artists embraced modernism,
but the art world didn’t embrace them
article in Art in America was titled
Whatever Happened to Beauford
Delaney?
Miller's article is full of admira-
tion, both for Delaney, and self-ad-
miration, for his own ability to ap-
preciate Delaney's genius.
Delaney, he argued, transcend-
ed the world in which he struggled:
"There was no black and white, no
master or slave; there was just the
endless stretch of vision in which
the imagination of all men dwells."
Miller got that wrong in so many
ways. Standing in the Phillips Col-
lection, looking at Delaney's paint-
ing, I wonder not just how one
makes amends for the world Dela-
ney lived in, but also for the myriad
ways in which even seemingly inno-
cent forms of admiration are chan-
neled through social structures that
warp and corrupt it into yet more
forms of oppression.
Absorbing exhibition at the Phillips Collection, Riffs and Relations: African
American Artists and the European Modernist Traditions, inspires deeply
positive and negative emotions.
‘Pushing Back the Light’ (2012) by Titus Kaphar.
PHOTOS: THE WASHINGTON POST
‘Icarus’ (2016) by Hank Willis Thomas