When I first saw the drawing, I immediately thought it was another version of a print by Philadelphia artist Julius Bloch. But it couldn’t be. Bloch was a white artist and I was attending an auction of works by African American artists.
I looked for the artist’s signature and saw that the piece was created by African American artist John Biggers. His was a name I knew; I’ve always wanted one of his works, but none have come up at the auctions I attend where they would be affordable.
Biggers’ crayon on paper drawing was for sale at Swann Galleries’ biannual auction of African American Fine Art. It was titled “Prempeh II (Ashanti Royalty),” created by the artist in 1957 during a trip with his wife Hazel to western Africa.
Bloch’s drawing is titled “Negro” from the 1930s, and I picked up a lithograph of it earlier this year. Black angst is prevalent in several of his works, including “The Prisoner” (a lithograph of which he donated to raise money for defense of the Scottsboro Boys, falsely accused in 1931 of raping two white women), “Praying Negro” (1934) and the “Stevedore” (1936).
Biggers enrolled at Hampton Institute (now university) in 1941 to become a plumber, but that all changed when he took an art class taught by a Jewish teacher who had left Austria to escape the Nazis. That teacher urged his students to create art about their own culture. Biggers’ other instructors were African American artists Charles White and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, a married couple at the time.
Later, while attending Pennsylvania State University and student-teaching in Philadelphia, Biggers took note of tenement life in the city. Some of those experiences would find their way into his art.
Instead of going to Europe as many black artists had done, he took the trip to Africa, stopping in Ghana, Nigeria and other countries where he soaked up the color and culture. The result was a collection of drawings, paintings and photographs that were collected in a book titled “Ananse, Web of Life in Africa,” published in 1962.
“I suppose I was like any other American, totally ignorant of Africa,” he said in a 1997 interview in the New York Times. “But I understood early on that this was no Tarzan business. These people were part of a great civilization. And they possessed a great wisdom. I remember one evening going to an outdoor gathering, where the villagers performed a dance that represented the movements of the stars in the sky above us. I had taken astronomy in college, but I had never met people who knew the stars as well as they did.”
Biggers is known for his series of paintings of “shotgun houses” based on his experiences of growing up in North Carolina. These houses – common in the South – were so-named because of their layout: You could shoot a gun right through the front door and it would come out the back door without hitting a wall.
He was born in one of these houses, built by his father in Gastonia, NC. His work “Shotguns” (1987) sold for $216,000 at Swann in 2009. In the painting, he used the geometric quilt patterns that characterized some of his works. Biggers died in 2001.
The work at the Swann auction, “Prempeh II (Ashanti Royalty),” referred to the Ashanti king who led his people in Ghana from 1931 to 1970. His predecessor Prempeh I was toppled by the British in the 1890s when they colonized western Africa. Prempeh II later became king. Ghana gained its independence from the British in 1957, and Kwame Nkrumah became its leader.
Bloch was a social realist painter whose subjects were the common man, black and white. He moved as a boy with his family from Germany to the United States in the 1890s. Bloch studied at the Philadelphia School of the Pennsylvania Museum and Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the Barnes Foundation. He died in 1966.
He participated in the Works Public Administration’s Federal Art Project, which provided employment for artists, many of whom painted murals.
Bloch wrote in an essay about what he tried to convey in his works:
“Most of my work deals with Negroes and their lives. For more than fifteen years I have been observing the Negro population of Philadelphia, attracted by the rich color, rhythmic movement, laughter, and religious fervor so characteristic of the race. Hundreds of notes, made from life in districts where Negroes predominate, fill many of my sketchbooks. These I have frequently used in making compositions for paintings and lithographs. Most of my people have been humble workers, ditch-diggers, hodcarriers, bootblacks, ragpickers, washerwomen, household workers, parkbenchers, preachers, and an occasional tapdancer, boxer, or saxophone player. Each one I selected because I found him or her not only typical of the race, but also revealing in character and bearing the complex problems which are the by-product of life in a large, densely populated city., densely populated city.”
Take a look at these two works, and see how adept both were at capturing pain through art.
