‘Facing History’: Insights Into Racism : Exhibit on the image of blacks in American art throws critics into arguments over the place of ideology in curatorship

The exhibition “Facing History” at the Corcoran Gallery has become the focal point of an unusually large spate of shows around the country concerning black America. They have stretched from Los Angeles’ “Celebrations” at USC to Dallas’ “Black Art: Ancestral Legacy” to several in New York. Most look at the cultural contribution of contemporary black painters and sculptors.

Their numbers seem too noticeable to be accounted for by public events such as Black History Month. There is something almost mystical about their materialization. They coincide with events in the Soviet Union and Central Europe as if participating in a world-wide impulse impelling peoples who feel oppressed or disenfranchised to cry out for equality.

The Corcoran show (to March 25) distinguishes itself both in its content and the quality of the attention it has attracted. “Facing History,” according to its subtitle, surveys the black image in American art from 1710 to 1940. Most of the work was done by white artists--about 77 of them. It is a big show of some 100 works that will travel to the Brooklyn Museum this spring but will not head for Los Angeles.

Visitors who wander in innocently off the street are liable to find the show compelling because there has never been a historical American art survey exhibition of this magnitude focused on black people. A stroll through the galleries finds them depicted by artists as famous as John Singleton Copley, as obscure as John Antrobus. If this makes the general texture aesthetically uneven it also lets in very solid, rarely seen period artists such as Edward Lamson Henry, whose “Kept In” is a charmingly aw-shucks anecdote about a bored child forbidden to take recess with her school chums. Casual viewing appears to find blacks depicted across the scale of humanity from Thomas Sully’s dignified portrait of Edward James Royce to Frederic Remington’s stirring “Captain Dodge’s Colored Troopers to the Rescue” and Reginald Marsh’s vibrant “Negros on Rockaway Beach.”

It is not really the exhibition itself that has drawn exceptionally broad critical and public attention but the thesis of its organizer, black art scholar Guy C. McElroy, who contends that this art confirms “ideas of blacks as grotesque buffoons, servile menials, comic entertainers or threatening subhumans.”

Racism has been a deplorable reality in American life and that reality has too often reflected itself in vulgar vintage caricatures of grimacing minstrels, sly zip coons or simpering Uncle Toms. There have been exhibitions of such blatantly prejudicial images. What is new in McElroy’s thesis is linking racism to hallowed fine art. The notion is so provocative that the respected “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” interviewed McElroy about his ideas.

Critical reaction to “Facing History” has been slightly schizophrenic. Critics accustomed to basing their judgement largely on aesthetic issues suddenly found themselves contemplating a pressing sociological question and clearly did not want either to be unsympathetic or to relax their standards, a bit of a balancing act for a notoriously liberal lot. Michael Kilian writing in the Chicago Tribune, while applauding the effort, found the show “an obvious polemic, accusatory and condemning,” and went on to say it found racism where it did not exist. He said McElroy was “holding a modern mirror to reflect some very backward times.”

Paul Richard of the Washington Post found the exhibition “troubling, instructive and oddly timely,” but said: “It’s not that he (McElroy) is wrong. It is just that he is one-sided.”

New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman praised the show for exposing the “casualness of the cruelty” found in some pictures but concluded that the exposure of racism is no revelation. The show, for him, left too many unanswered questions.

In reality, “Facing History” is but the latest and most pointed example of a wide trend to place art in the wider context of economics, politics and sociology and to press it into service as a tool of advocacy for a cause or for a curatorial point of view. A radical departure from the old detached, scholarly art-for-its-own-sake religion, it not uncommonly produces interesting thematic shows and revelatory insights. But for the first time it places viewers in a spot where they must be wary of being cajoled into adopting a point of view that is not necessarily their own. It tends to a kind of polite propaganda.

Having an ax to grind is as American as fast food but forging one’s blade against the soft soapstone of art may not be the most appropriate use of objects made for aesthetic delectation.

No work of art is ever really complete. Varnished, framed and hung on the wall, a painting is repeatedly completed by every single viewer who encounters it. The fascination of art is in its open-endedness and the chance it offers the viewer to participate in creative dialogue.

There is no reason to doubt that McElroy sees racism in these works. He is looking for it because the tragic reality of black experience in America has taught him it exists.

But trying to demonstrate it with works of fine art may be hopeless, not because all artist are high-minded, tolerant and above the failings of their times, but because the nature of what they do carries such a heavy load of paradox and ambiguity. What to us might look like this or that sort of portrayal of a black subject may reflect little more than the artist’s fascination with the problem of rendering black skin.

Anyone can see the stupid racism in such ham-handed examples as Nicolino Calyo’s “Negro Dancer and Banjo Player” but it is scarcely better than a popular broadsheet. There is something telling about the fact that there is a general equation here between quality art and proper treatment of black subjects.

When we move to work that is fundamentally worthy of consideration as art things get considerably more complex.

One of the undeniable masterpieces here is John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark,” the great proto-romantic allegory that depicts a group of sailors in a rowboat desperately attempting to save a nude man who is about to be devoured by a shark that makes Jaws look like a goldfish. At the top of the pyramid formed by the group stands a black sailor who reaches out symbolically while remaining somewhat detached from the action. He is the moral and spiritual hub of the picture. One can scarely imagine a more dignified and humane role.

By contrast, Samuel Jennings’ “Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences” shows a Caucasian woman offering the fruits of knowledge and culture to a group of grovelingly grateful blacks. Today the picture looks unbearably condescending but it was painted with good intentions as an Abolitionist tract. So much for fixed meaning.

McElroy, to be fair, often admits depictions of blacks treat them as perfectly human. In the range of characterization here there is, however, a noticeable tendency to show blacks as poor working people and to view them with an eye to the sentimental and picturesque. In art historical terms this is less traceable to prejudice than to the fact most of these pictures were painted in the 19th Century when anecdotal realism was immensely popular and nothing was favored more by the middle class patron than a touching, slightly exotic down-at-the-heels subject of whatever color.

William Sidney Mount’s “The Bone Player” shows a handsome, raffish youth clattering his instruments. While McElroy finds a vague taint of racism in the picture it is easy to imagine Baudelaire responding to it enthusiastically as an exotic symbol of la vie de boheme. Why not indeed identify it as an early acknowledgement of the immense and original contributions to American music by blacks? It is more in the nature of art to show us the complexities and shadings of the human condition than any fixed ideology. Thus one is free to see the black kid in John George Brown’s “The Card Trick” as either the demeaned clown or the guy whose charm and skill hold his white audience in thrall.

Someone may see Thomas Waterman Wood’s “Moses, the Baltimore News Vendor” as cow-towing but he plays just a believably as a brave chap enduring a hard life with grace and humor.

Thomas Eakins’ wonderful “Will Schuster and the Blackman Going Shooting” may not identify the other guy by name but the black boatman is clearly somebody in the picture, competent, strong and alert. Personally I am a little down on Will Schuster.

Don’t like guns.