I’m sure I had seen the drawing somewhere before, but I apparently was so awed by its towering figure that I didn’t read past the title.
This time, I did. I went to see the Charles White retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York this week with my day-trip buddies Delores and Adair, and was humbled by the amazing works of this African American artist. I had seen many of White’s larger-than-life pencil and ink drawings on paper, but this exhibit introduced me to works I had never seen before – many of them paintings in color.
One drawing that struck me – and there were plenty of them – showed a big man commanding attention, speaking forcefully and intently on a subject that no one could hear but that impassioned him. I read the inscription on the wall near the painting and saw that White had used Paul Robeson as the model.
I walked closer to the painting and stared at the face, and I realized that I could see Robeson in the image. I was very familiar with Robeson, his features and his life because I volunteer at the Paul Robeson House & Museum in Philadelphia. I became immersed in the man when I helped curate an exhibit at the house and developed the website.
This painting exuded a strong respect for Robeson and what he stood for. “The friendship I’ve had with Paul Robeson is one of my most cherished friendships,” White is quoted as saying on the MOMA website.
The drawing was titled “Preacher,” and White showed the figure not only as preacher in the biblical sense but as someone who spoke political truths. Robeson became well-known early in his life as a singer and actor, and soon became politicized by the way he and other blacks were treated in the United States. He began to use his art – his singing and speaking voice – as a vehicle to oppose oppression in this country and throughout the world.
The exhibit at MOMA features more than 100 drawings, paintings and prints that cover the artist’s 30 years of expression. White was known for his prints, which made it easy for the ordinary folks he painted to buy them. The exhibit runs until Jan. 13, 2019.
The Whitney Museum of Art bought “Preacher” in 1952, and it was the first of White’s works to be purchased by a major museum, according to the inscription on the wall. In a questionnaire for Whitney, he explained why he painted it: “Too often the Negro minister has been portrayed as a buffoon and not reflecting the dignity, strength, and concern for the basic problems of living that face his congregation.”
White did not tell the museum folks, though, that it was a portrait of Robeson, who in the 1950s was being persecuted by the U.S. government during the McCarthy-era witch hunts. The State Department rescinded the passports of Robeson – and his wife Eslanda, also an activist – crippling his ability to travel abroad for concerts and income. Both were also hauled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to state whether or not they were communists; neither would answer. His phonograph records were removed from stores, and his concerts and TV appearances were banned. Years before, the FBI had put them both under surveillance.
The government tried to literally wipe him out of existence.
White, who also was sympathetic to communism, was called before the committee but was told that he did not have to appear. He also learned that the FBI was keeping an eye on him.
With that, it’s not surprising that the two men found common ground. Both saw art as a means of liberation:
Charles White:
“Art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. It must adapt itself to human needs. It must ally itself with the forces of liberation. The fact is, artists have always been propagandists. I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle.”
Paul Robeson:
Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Their lives also paralleled experiences they encountered while abroad at different times. When Robeson went to Russia in the early 1930s, he said he felt like a human being for the first time. When he returned to the United States, the thrust of his art and how it could effect change had crystallized.
When White and his then-wife artist Elizabeth Catlett spent a year in Mexico in the mid-1940s, he found the same. “Nobody could care what I looked like,” he said. He also saw that Mexican artists had found their theme – ordinary people: “Their studio was in the street, their studios were in the homes of the people, their studio was where life was taking place.”
A few years before, he had found the music of southerners as an influencing element in his art when he joined Catlett in New Orleans to teach at Dillard University.
“The music affected me so perfectly, in a way that touched the heart more directly than any other art, the dignity, the outpouring of tenderness, the social and comradely feelings, and humanity of the people. It is this that has helped in my efforts, in paintings and drawings, to present a feeling of universal humanity within a particular image, so that all people of good will, looking at a particular image would feel that something of themselves was contained there. It is this that the great Paul Robeson expresses in his singing in a marvelous way, so that he becomes the foremost bard of a people, symbolizing their common aspirations.”
The works of both men were aimed at the struggles of black people in a country that didn’t think they mattered, and treated and presented them in the most harshest light. White’s paintings show people as giants with a dignity expressed in their eyes and their demeanor. A worker isn’t just a man carrying lumber on his shoulder; he’s a man with purpose.
White portrayed Robeson in the same way. At the entrance to the MOMA exhibit is a large study for White’s mural “The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America.” The study is owned by the Princeton Museum of Art.
White painted the 17-foot-by-12-foot mural itself while he and Catlett were teachers at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, where it’s still on a wall. It contains images of Robeson, Crispus Atttucks, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Marian Anderson, among others.
Elsewhere in the exhibit is a study for the Robeson image in the mural.
White’s “Preacher” was featured on the front page of Robeson’s weekly newspaper titled Freedom in February 1952. The illustration, whose caption gave it no title, accompanied a column by Robeson about U.S. involvement in Korea. Robeson co-founded the newspaper in 1950, and writer Lorraine Hansberry was its associate editor.
In 1973, White created a magnificent painting titled “Paul Robeson” for the activist’s 75th birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall. Robeson was not able to attend. The image was used as the cover for a celebration of Robeson’s 80th birthday at the Afro-American Museum of Detroit in 1978. Robeson died in Philadelphia in 1976 and White in Los Angeles in 1979.
