Canon and Complexity: Piety, Subversion, Assault

Dr. Richard A. Long

The title that I have selected for this presentation suggests that a canon or officialized body of material represents simplicity in contrast to complexity. It would be more accurate to say that a canon represents the culmination of a quest for purity, the unadulterated, the authoritative. The quest involved in establishing a canon is fraught with hazard and hardly ever results in complete satisfaction for those for whom the canon is constructed.

In the process of compiling the book of writings we designate as the Old Testament, the Hebrew priests accepted and rejected items from a larger body of sacred or sanctified works, editing, correcting and censoring in the process. The end product was what was to be called in Greek the canon. We can only wonder, however, at the process which placed the harsh Code of Deuteronomy in proximity to the erotic Song of Solomon. Exegesis is still bedeviled by that choice today, despite millennia of allegorical interpretation.

Similarly, centuries later the Church Fathers who constructed the New Testament left out of their canon works such as the Gospel of Thomas, which emerges from the shadows to haunt the biographers of Jesus. Their inclusion of the Gospel of John which depicts Jesus in a ministry of one year along with those of Mark, Matthew, and Luke which narrate a ministry of three years provided ample substance for generations of dispute.

Similar canonic histories may be discerned in the sacred writings of Hindus and Buddhists.

The Western idea of a canon for works of art may be thought to be implicit in the chronicle of the Italian chronicler Vasari. At any rate by the eighteenth century the stars of the High Renaissance became the cornerstone of what was taught and esteemed in the art circles of England and France. Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael became objects of piety in the academies and the paragon of collections. By the early nineteenth century, there was already subversion-—the work of the Nazarenes in Germany proclaimed that there was value in the medieval painting tradition. They were followed by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. This subversion grew to the status of an assault upon the canon in France in the work of zealots such as Courbet and the Impressionists’ secession from the Salon.

In Europe the nineteenth century opened with a visual arts canon which the object of piety was the adoration of the High Renaissance; this was subverted by Romanticism with its echoes of the gothic and the exotic; and then came the assault—-the tension of industrial and bourgeois society manifesting itself in new subject matter and novel technique.

The visual arts canon in the United States—-and not incidentally in the other Americas--was essentially that of Europe. It underwent the same transformations, though with suitable provincial or colonial manifestations, New World piety being greater and resistence to subversion and assault stronger.

It is against this background of the American visual art experience that we come to the question of canonicity in African American Art. The primary canon maker of African American Art was Alain Locke and the founding document is his essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” as it appears in The New Negro. It contains both analytic and polemic features. Locke laments the fact that no School of Negro Art had yet developed.

We ought and must have a school of Negro art, a local and racially representative tradition. And that we have not, explains why the generation of Negro artists succeeding Mr. Tanner had only the inspiration of his great success to fire their ambitions, but not the guidance of a distinctive tradition to focus and direct their talents. Consequently, they fumbled and fell short of his international stride and reach. The work of W. E. Scott, E. A. Harleston, W. Braxton, W. Farrow, and Laura Wheeler in painting, and of Meta Warrick Fuller and May Howard Jackson in sculpture, competent as it has been, has nevertheless felt this handicap and has wavered between abstract expression which was imitative and not highly original, and racial expression which was only experimental. Lacking group leadership and concentration, they were wandering amateurs in the very field that might have given them concerted mastery.

In this founding document Locke calls for young African American artists to establish communion with African art, thereby bringing themselves into the circuit of modernist art, in other words subverting their immediate ancestors. He identifies three young artists as moving “in the direct of a racial school of art,” namely Archibald Motley, Aaron Douglas, and Albert Smith.

. . . . By 1931 in his major article “The American Negro Artist” (The American Magazine of Art 23:210-220), this list had expanded to include the following artists: W. J. Johnson (1901-1970), Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), James L. Wells (1902-1993), Malvin Gray Johnson (1896-1934), Richmond Barthe (1901-1989), and Sargent Johnson (1887-1964).

In many ways Aaron Douglas was the archetypal artist of the Locke canon.

Douglas had attended the University of Nebraska from which he had graduated in 1922 with a degree in Fine Arts. After a year or so of teaching in Kansas City, Missouri, he came to New York City just in time as it were to contribute illustrations, along with his teacher Winold Reiss, to The New Negro. In 1925, also, he contributed illustrations to both Opportunity and Crisis, the two monthlies which were the leading vehicle for the writers and spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance. He thus came to the attention not only of Alain Locke, but also to that of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson. In the March 1927 issue of Crisis, Douglas was listed as “art critic,” but this does not appear to have meant much. In 1926 Douglas collaborated with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and others in the production of the single issue of Fire! His contribution consisted of cubistic cover designs and three somewhat comic nervous line drawings,these quite different from the characteristic cubistic work of his illustrations for the following books in 1927:

Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk,
James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones,
Plays of Negro Life, edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory.

In 1928 Douglas did the book jacket for Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem. In 1927 he had also done his first mural, for Club Ebony in Harlem. He embarked on an ambitious mural project for the library at Fisk University in 1929, calling the older painter Edwin Harleston to his aid. During the course of the collaboration the painters each did portraits of the other. In 1931 Douglas who had spent 1928 in scholarship study at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, left the country for a year’s study in Paris, . . .

We can assume, however, that there were reservations-—subversions in our lexicon—-in respect to the Locke Canon.

The presence of Alain Locke as a member of the faculty of the University in the Art Department did not weigh as heavily as some have supposed in the development of the art program at Howard. Not all black artists had responded to the “Negro art” program propounded by the scholarly Dr. Locke, and his point of view was not particularly relished at Howard. James A. Porter in Modern Negro Art devotes a chapter to “The New Negro Movement” in which he provides a balanced overview of Locke’s view and reactions to it by artists and others. Porter notes:

It is evident that all the propagandistic criticism of the New Negro Movement failed to formulate an aesthetic program for the Negro artist. The admonition to imitate the “ancestral arts” could only foster academicism, and tended, moreover, to confuse the special geometric forms of African sculpture with specific racial feeling.

But he adds:

While unsound in its basic premise, the Negro art propaganda did serve to confirm Negro writers and artists in their search for local atmosphere and one of its most valuable results came from the suggestion that the Negro artists in all fields, look for those facets of life that had hitherto escaped the understanding interest of the artist.

In 1940, Alain Locke published The Negro in Art--A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art which provided an academic summation of the theme of African American art which had begun development in the mid-twenties under his tutelage. The book—-really an album in portfolio—-has three sections:

Part I The Negro As Artist
Part II The Negro in Art
Part III The Ancestral Arts

It is Part I, “The Negro As Artist,” which is most pertinent to a discussion of the canon.

In the preface to Part I, Locke after noting the presence of isolated African American artists in the nineteenth century-—he names several including the painter Bannister of New England, the sculptor Edmonia Lewis who ended her days in Rome, and the painter Duncanson, he deals more particularly with the paradox of the career of Henry Ossawa Tanner. After his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he was a pupil of Thomas Eakins, and indeed in the judgment of current art history, the most illustrious of that artist’s students, Tanner went to Paris. And he remained in France for the rest of his life.

Locke observes:

Recognition from Paris, at the time the world capitol of art, provided the vindication the Negro artist wanted and needed. But this gain involved the heavy price of the academic mould and the cosmopolitan outlook, both of which proved as great a handicap to the development of a racially representative art as they did, in the case of American artists generally, to the development of a native American art.

This phrase “racially representative art” is the template which Locke had used in his 1925 charge to young African American artists as he had deplored the failure of their elders to demonstrate racial consciousness.

Now in his 1940 Preface he says,
For a racial dilemma, a racial solution was necessary. It came in the mid-twenties from the inspiration of the New Negro Movement and its crusade of folk expression in all the arts . . .

By 1940 Locke had added to his canonic spectrum social analysis leading to a depiction of “religion, labor, housing, lynching, unemployment, social reconstruction . . . .” This, because during the thirties social realism-—inspired by the depression and international populism—-had exploded on the American art scene and had engulfed most of the young African American artists, to a greater or lesser degree.

At this juncture I should cite a recent study Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 (2004) by Stacy I. Morgan.

Visual artists who receive extended treatment in Morgan’s study include Charles Alston, Hale Woodruff, John Biggers, John Wilson, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett.

The expanded Locke Canon—-comprising modernist Africanity, folk expression and social realism was by the late forties subverted-—if not assaulted by those artists who turned to various mainstream or individual currents such as surrealism and abstraction. These would include in some degree or other, Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee Smith, Charles Sebree, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden.

But it is remarkable that the majority of African American artists down to the Black Arts Movement of the sixties observed the pieties of the expanded Locke canon. A full account of the Black Arts Movement I leave to others, but it is important to observe that in spite of its revolutionary garb its rhetoric hardly differed from that of Alain Locke and it emphatically disparaged those deviations toward surrealism and abstraction that I was citing as subversions or assaults upon the Locke canon.

The Black Arts Movement also opened up the African diaspora question which was a part of the Locke legacy.

I will now turn to an interesting example of canon construction on the African continent as provided in a book of Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995, published by the Duke University Press in 2004. Harney describes the cultural scene in Dakar in the period following independence in which the president, the esteemed poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was the primary theorist of negritude, sought to make use of the visual arts to define his new nation. Senghor and his aides encouraged the development of an “Ecole de Dakar”. The section in the book devoted to this endeavor is fittingly subtitled “A Restricted Field of Production”. Two young Senegalese artists, both trained, as was to be expected, in France were chosen as the exemplars of the new ”Ecole”—-Iba N’Diaye and Papa Ibra Tall, the latter, in particular, being intellectually an exponent of the philosophy of negritude. A visual language of negritude emerged as characteristic of the school. A distinctive medium, tapestry, was developed as a particular exponent of this style. The tapestries, Harney observes:

. . . . featured scenes of daily life and the market place . . . documented indigenous flora and fauna, memorialized the masks and sculptures of ‘traditional’ Africa, celebrated the heroes of pre-colonial history, and chronicled local myths. (p. 68)

She goes on to note:

Senghor’s system, which provided artists with significant amounts of fame and fortune, had invented not only an artistic canon, but also a new social category with its own rhetoric, forms of capital, and power relations. (p. 81)

But, as Harney shows, subversion lurked off-stage. In a chapter entitled “Laboratories of Avant-Gardism,” she depicts several groups and movements, of which I will mention only “Agit-Art” whose “members strove to find a means through which to produce and interpret art outside the boundaries of government control” (p. 108) Their activities involved performance, re-cycling of urban cast-offs, and large-scale outdoor assemblage. Eventually many denizens of the movement were congregated in an artists’ squatter village which became a venue for much of their work. Not unsurprisingly a species of urban renewal demolished the village.

In the chapter “After the Avant-Garde,” Harney observed that other artists took up many of the Agit-Art practices and, in effect, subversion became assault. She goes on to note the insurgence of local art practices, such as glass painting, which had not been admitted to the earlier canon and the impact of globalization.

The scenario depicted in Harney’s book could well provide an investigative model for examining the art history of other contemporary African communities and we can expect that such investigations will ensue.

Suffice it to say that the Locke canon in the United States and its corollary in the Black Arts Movement are equally under assault.

I leave the tracing of such matters as Black Romance and post-Black to others.