Above: Romare Bearden | Heart of Autumn, c. 1961 | Oil and graphite on canvas |
67 x 70 inches
Abstract art is expansive. As an intervention by Black artists, Black abstraction has transcended conceptions about the boundlessness of Black creative expression and the diversity of Black identity. Black abstraction’s sonic, speculative and historical improvisations exemplify a creative genius liberated from unchanging representational figuration.
Romare Bearden understood the power of abstract art early on. Though his early career as an illustrator and his first solo exhibition in 1940 prominently focused on figuration, by the late 1940s-50s, he was wholly engrossed in experiments with abstract expressionism. He describes the works he created in this era as being:
Austere in color, a very flat plane, a shallow space, and in some aspects near the old Chinese paintings, but without representational elements. I am naturally very interested in form and structure—in a personal way of expression which can perhaps be called new. (Cedric Dover, 1970)
In 1959, Bearden premiered a selection of these abstract works at the Michael Warren Gallery. Wine Star was one of the most iconic works in this collection. In Wine Star, an oil on linen canvas, Bearden used the oil as if it were a wash, overlaying muted tones of blue, gray and white in broad gestural strokes that suggest butterfly wings. Intermittent splashes of red bled from the edges of the canvas and dripped in chorus with the discordant composition.
The work Bearden engaged in this era is starkly different from the representational art he is perhaps best known for, but no less expressive of Black culture. Even before this era, we can see the ways abstraction always has influenced his approach to figuration; The Passion of Christ (1945), Poor Thirsty Souls (1946) and The Death of the Bullfighter (Lorca) (1941)are seminal examples.
Bearden was not alone in his expressionist pursuit. Many artists in his renowned collective, the Spiral Group, officially founded in 1963 as a critical response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, identified themselves primarily with the practice and process of abstract expressionism. Such artists included Norman Lewis, Richard Mayhew and Hale Woodruff. Ironically, in this group, Bearden activated collage as a critical approach to material within his practice. By the mid-1960s and for the rest of his career, Bearden implemented collaging as a rigorous and radical process to push the conventions of figurative, representational forms.
Despite the Spiral Group’s advocating that art in all its forms could be used to forward the mission of civil rights, thought leaders in the Black Arts Movement, including Jeff Donaldson, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Melvin Dixon, doubted the viability of abstraction to progress a self-determined Black visual culture that was accessible to working-class Black communities. In 1971, in response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition held at the Whitney Museum, which prominently featured abstraction, the group penned a small zine (Tom Lloyd, 1971) outlining their position on what they believed the role of Black artists and Black art should serve. Dixon’s analysis was particularly influential:
Black Art, by definition, exists primarily for Black people. It is an art which combines the social and political pulse of the Black community into an artistic reflection of that emotion, that spirit, that energy of American art which has enclosed and smothered any previous expression of Blackness … Black art reflects the activities of Black people. It unlocks the ideological barriers of the slave-nigger-negro-Black mentality in us to foster a greater express of the free creative consciousness. (M. Dixon, 1971)
Donaldson furthered this claim:
Black image makers are creating forms that define, glorify, and direct Black people—an art for the people’s sake. Those of us who call ourselves artists realize that we can no longer afford the luxury of “art for art’s sake.” (Jeff Donaldson, 1971)
Their unyielding argument proclaimed that Black art could only be accessible to Black people if it applied traditional figurative approaches that overtly ideated identity through platforms and methods that they believed spoke to Black people: public works, the Kool-Aid colors of AfriCOBRA, bold typographic proclamations and affirming representational figurative forms. They hoped that establishing a criterion for Black creative expression would advance a mass sociocultural and political awakening.
Ironically, many of the harshest disparagers of abstraction passionately endorsed other forms of radical creative practice, including Black classical music (jazz), experimental theater and avant-garde film. By attempting to suppress diverse expressions of Black creative genius rather than amplify the extensive and unique interventions of that generation’s vanguard, contentious, intergenerational rifts formed between artists and their practices that shaped the devaluation of Black abstraction in America for decades.
Artists like Joe Overstreet, who worked alongside Baraka as the art director for the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, were among the few artists who were able to tread the line, with little skepticism, between abstract expressionism and figuration. Many other die-hard abstractionists, including Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jack Whitten and Melvin Edwards, found more early success in Europe than in America.
Alongside them and into the next generation of creatives, a cadre of unflinching conceptual and expressionist artists, including Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Frank Bowling, William T. Williams, Ed Love and Martha Jackson Jarvis created practices that solidified the urgency and power of unencumbered applications of color, materiality and form.
The contemplative gestures of Ed Clark, manifested through his push-brush technique on shaped canvases, signified a subtle but no less audacious iteration of art as a catalyst for transformative conceptions about Black identity and creative practice more broadly. Clark’s aim clearly was aligned with the aims of Black liberation projects: to obtain the freedom to express oneself without limitations.
In 1969, Al Loving became the first African American to exhibit a significant solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition featured a substantial collection of his geometric, hard-edged paintings, many of which recurred at his Studio Museum of Harlem retrospective in 1977. Years later, Loving would recall the optimism and camaraderie shared by the small community of Black painters who shared his inclination to probe new possibilities through abstraction.
When we showed together at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the early 1970s, we could see that we all had arrived at a kind of abstraction that emphasized materials … We didn’t talk about it, didn’t write it down, but it was a common link, and it was there. (Richard J. Powell, 2021)
Then and now, the works iterated by the pioneers of Black abstraction, as well as new interventions prompted by emerging artists, push us to break our linear perception and attune our vantage point to a multidimensional and ancient relation to space, form and color. Black abstraction’s defiance against reduction, prescribed procedural practice, process or material application offers an exhaustive example of liberated Black creative genius.
A longer version of this essay was published in the print issue of the Summer 2024 Pigment International Magazine.
References
1. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3 no. 3, 2003, p. 257-337. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
2.Dover, Cedric. American Negro Art. Studio Books, Studio Vista LTD., 1970
3. Lloyd, Tom. Black Art Notes, Primary Information, 1971
4. Dixon, M. (1971). “White Critic – Black Art???” In Black Art Notes. Essay. Primary Information, 2020
5. Donaldson, Jeff. (1971) “The Role We Want For Black Art,” Black Art Notes. Essay. Primary Information, 2020
6. Powell, Richard J. Black Art: A Cultural History. Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2021
