Charles White, Mother and Child, 1953
“Black Lives Matter” could be said to have been the motivating proposition behind the art of the black artist Charles (Wilbert) White (April 2, 1918 – October 3, 1979), whose choice of media included drawings, easel paintings, lithographs, and murals. He was a master of portraiture and aptly described as “one of the nation’s most skillful draftsmen,” committed to a style of social realism suffused with spiritual, ethical, and political values, while largely eschewing styles of art in vogue during his adult lifetime. Among the artistic influences on his art we note Mexican and African American muralism, while speculating about the possible impact on his aesthetic sensibilities from the fact that his first wife was Elizabeth Catlett (April 15, 1915 – April 2, 2012). I hope to occasionally post more on White’s life and art over the next several months.
The following is from an oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Charles Wilbert White on March 9, 1965. The interview was conducted at the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles, California by Betty Lochrie Hoag for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The “interview conducted as part of the Archives of American Art’s New Deal and the Arts project, which includes over 400 interviews of artists, administrators, historians, and others involved with the federal government’s art programs and the activities of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and early 1940s.”
“… [B]ooks had been my second greatest passion in life. And by the time I got into high school I’d read all the books of Jack London. I had read Mark Twain, all of his works. I was going to go through the alphabet in the library. I started with the A’s and it didn’t matter what the subject was, fiction or non-fiction, or what it was, I was just going to read right through. So I started and naturally I didn’t even get halfway, but this was the course I took. Somehow in all this exploring of books and different kinds of books on different subjects, I came across quite accidentally in the library one of the most definitive and one of the most important books that had ever been done on the culture of the Negro, which was a book called The New Negro by Dr. Alain Locke who was Professor of Philosophy, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Howard University. Dr. Locke was the authority on American Negro culture, with a particular interest to me because of his own special interest in art, the history of the Negro artist in America.
This book opened my eyes, because I heard names, read names, read of people that I’d never heard of before, like Countee Cullen, the great Negro poet. [I] heard Paul Robeson’s name for the first time. Most of the great literary figures of the early twenties, when it was a period which they called ‘The Negro Renaissance’ when the first blossoming of Negro culture in America really came to a head. And this book dealt specifically with that. Well, once I found this one book, then I began to search for other books on Negroes, which led to Negro historical figures, individuals that played a role in the abolition of slavery, names like Denmark Vesey, who led a slave revolt. Nat Turner who also led a slave revolt. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, all were names that in later years I’ve become quite well read on. For the first time, at 14 years old, these names came to my mind. I became aware the Negroes had a history in America. So, when I went to high school and had to take U.S. History, the first year I got through fine. Then the second year I decided that—I began to question why these names weren’t mentioned in the standard U.S. History which we all studied, which was Beard’s History. The only Negro name that was mentioned in there was Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the American Revolution and there was one sentence on Crispus Attucks. There was nothing else throughout the whole of Beard’s History. So I read this and I remember the first day of class I had in my second year, I raised this question to the teacher and she told me to sit down. She didn’t even bother to be polite about it.”
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