Charles White: A Retrospective showcases 100 paintings, prints, and photographs that exemplify the span of the career of Charles White (ANA 1971; NA 1974) as he moved from Chicago to New York to Los Angeles. White presented the lives of Black men and women, their culture, and allies in heroic terms. Throughout the exhibition, White displays his figures dynamically and full of vivacious energy. Even the figures that seem to stand still move throughout the picture plane.
Many of the heroes White depicts are presented as their iconic selves, emphasizing their roles as characters from legends. White believed his work had universal appeal. Even though he almost exclusively portrayed Black subjects, the themes of courage, hope, love, and a desire for freedom could be understood by anyone. He had the ability to unearth universal truths from very specific narratives.
The portraits of Abraham Lincoln (1952), Harriet Tubman (1965), and John Brown (1949) show White’s desire to present these storied figures in their idealized forms. Lincoln and Brown were the only two white men White portrayed during his career. Perhaps this is because of the work both men did to fight slavery. Lincoln did so through his words, when he declared that all enslaved people in America should be free in the Emancipation Proclamation, and Brown through his actions, when he led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in order to arm slaves with munitions. All of White’s legendary figures are statuesque in the sense that even though they are hung at eye level on the wall, I found myself still looking up to them.
White’s depiction of Harriet Tubman in General Moses (Harriet Tubman), 1965 shows the slave runner and Underground Railroad conductor as monumental as stone. She sits with her bare feet firmly on the ground; her eyes stare directly at the viewer. Like a bridge across time, many of White’s portraits return the viewer’s gaze directly. The intensity of Tubman’s stare is emphasized by the deep blacks of the ink, making her eyes appear hot white. Even though Tubman is long dead, her legacy remains, and the cairn of stones upon which Tubman sits underscores her place in White’s canon. His choice of subject matter provides an example of how artists can amend and create their own canons. White did not just focus on the deeds of great Americans, but also those of regular people.
As a political leftist, White also depicted the themes of everyday life, such as in the image of Untitled (Fight for Freedom), 1945, a small egg tempera painting which shows a Black man at his factory job. On the brick wall behind him is a propaganda poster that shows a white hand clenching a wrench. The words “fight” and “freedom” are partially visible behind the worker, whose hands are pressed to his body, with a sack strung over his shoulder. The juxtaposition of the worker’s huddled posture against the raised white hand complicates the narrative of solidarity and freedom for all Americans during the wartime era.
Even in the scenes of less iconic figures, like a group of men playing cards in a smoky room, or farmers sharpening a scythe before the harvest, all are unified in their muscular and innervated forms. Their large hands and oaken forearms remind us that these bodies are powerful and present.
The ability of White’s works to speak to universal themes even though his subject matter is specific reminds me of the idiomatic phrase, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” meaning, “the more things change, the more things stay the same.”
It is certainly a political choice to tell stories centered around Black bodies, Black voices, and Black experiences, and expect audiences from anywhere in America to engage with them as seriously as they would works by any other great author. Simply portraying underrepresented groups in the arts by representing people along a spectrum of ability, class, gender, race, or religion is not enough under today’s standards of inclusion. When I see the work of Charles White in the age of Trump, and at the same time that TV shows like Issa Rae’s Insecure or Donald Glover’s Atlanta, or films like Crazy Rich Asians, fill screens everywhere with complicated characters that any audience can devour, I humbly remember that the first few steps are often just about getting a foothold in order to carve out space for future groups. The value of diversity, of subject matter, and the choice of the Art Institute and MoMA to present this show (Sarah Kelly Oehler, Field McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art, and Esther Adler, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA, co-curated the exhibition) lies in its ability to expose audiences to different perspectives and engage with new ideas.
Seeing the work of Charles White reminded me of the conversations held about antifa—a group President Trump said was partially responsible for the violence in Charlottesville after the Unite the Right rally—and if the work of the left-leaning anti-racist groups is counterproductive. These conversations are distant, but not dissimilar to the questions John Brown and Abraham Lincoln may have asked themselves during their own era about slavery and the looming Civil War. Change is slow. The sepia tones and chiaroscuro in White’s paintings and drawings gives them an old feeling, but his artwork transcends the past and continues to emit signals in the present. I think that the ability of his work to continue to exhale in 2018 serves as a bittersweet reminder that progress curves like a sine wave with peaks and valleys. The show closed in Chicago on Labor Day, a fitting reminder that we still have work to do as a nation.
Following its debut at the Art Institute of Chicago (June 8 – September 3, 2018), Charles White: A Retrospective is presented at MoMA (October 7, 2018 – January 13, 2019) and LACMA (February 17 – June 9, 2019).
Solomon Salim Moore grew up in Southern California. He is a visual artist whose work primarily focuses on the ways fantasies become reality. He is a graduate of Reed College and the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently he lives in Chicago.
