Two Centuries of Stereotypes

By ROBERT HUGHES

Obviously, the meanings of art are not confined to masterpieces. A piece of kitsch can tell us as much about its time as a Mondrian, which does not mean that it ceases to be kitsch. Mediocre or rotten art carries all sorts of social data -- messages that may have been overt or subliminal, but in either case work their way out (with a final tweak from their interpreters) over the years.

So it is with most of the art in "Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940," the new exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (on view through March 25). Anyone who visits the exhibition with hopes of high aesthetic pleasure will be disappointed. There are a few paintings in it, and one small sculpture, of real substance and beauty: work by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson and William Harnett, and a bronze study of a black soldier's head done for the Shaw Memorial in Boston, his greatest public work of art, by Augustus Saint- Gaudens. And there is a great deal of poor to average American 19th century art -- clumsy, cliche ridden, provincial, earnest. But the show's point lies elsewhere: in the subject matter and how it is treated.

As curated by Guy C. McElroy, this is a highly polemical exhibition. Its main aim is to show how white American artists (and a few black ones) depicted black American people -- to argue against the notion that art is color-blind. Most American painters, in McElroy's view, put racial stereotypes in their work. These were usually negative. "Prosperous collectors created a demand for depictions that fulfilled their own ideas of blacks as grotesque buffoons, servile menials, comic entertainers, or threatening subhumans," McElroy writes in the catalog. "This vicious cycle of supply and demand sustained images that denied the inherent humanity of black people by reinforcing their limited role in American society."

Before the abolition of slavery, whites felt superior to blacks. After abolition, they kept right on feeling superior -- for what other race could make such a noble gesture as abolition? When blacks appeared on monuments after abolition, they continued to kneel, looking up at their white liberators. To unpick such stereotypes and "subtexts" -- the prejudicial stories behind the images -- is the purpose of this show.

In the main McElroy succeeds very well, though he sometimes overstrains his argument and has not been able to borrow all the paintings he needed. A book hovers behind this exhibition, a multivolume work by various authors that is one of the great scholarly efforts of the 1980s: The Image of the Black in Western Art, published by the Menil Foundation and Harvard University Press.

The first important figure of a black in American art is in Copley's Watson and the Shark, 1778. The black has just thrown a line, without avail, to naked Watson, who wallows helplessly in the green waters of Havana Harbor as the shark charges in to bite his leg off. As McElroy observes, the outstretched arms of Watson and the black "mirror each other," and it may even be that Copley meant Watson's presence in the water to remind us, by reversal as it were, of the slavers' practice of dumping dead Africans into the sea.

Not until Homer's Dressing for the Carnival, 1877 -- beyond comparison the most moving and solidly imagined painting in the show -- were the subtlety, sympathy and fullness of Copley's rendering repeated. Nevertheless, there are times when McElroy's prosecutorial zeal gets away from him. Samuel Jennings' Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, 1792, may be a naive image, but no one could doubt that its heart is in the right place. It shows the Goddess of Freedom in her temple offering the emblems of civilization -- books, an artist's palette, a lyre, a globe and, most important of all, a broken chain -- to a group of grateful freed slaves, while in the background more blacks celebrate a liberty pole. McElroy complains that the artist "avoids presenting images that describe individual black people": none of the black figures is a portrait. But so what? There is no individual white person in the painting either, except for a bronze bust of the abolitionist Henry Thornton; the goddess Liberty, far from being "a white noblewoman," is a standard allegorical figure.

Likewise, McElroy notes with disapproval that in Eakins' Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting (Rail Shooting), 1876, the hunter with the gun in the boat is named while the black guide with the pole is not. But a title is not a picture, and in the painting itself Eakins has taken scrupulous care with the guide's face, posture, attentiveness -- all that describes a skilled man at work. If we think Eakins meant "Blackman" as a cipher, we are off the mark.

Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Alexandre Dumas in France boasted of their African ancestry; one cannot imagine an American writer or artist having done so. But the relative poverty of images of blacks in American painting was also largely caused by different conditions of work. Patronage in the U.S. was thin. Artists had to scramble for portrait commissions, which few blacks could afford to give them. But there were perfectly dignified, solid, objective portraits by white artists of black clients such as the Pennsylvania clergyman Absolom Jones by Raphaelle Peale before 1810, or Elisha Hammond's 1844 portrait of the young Frederick Douglass, neither of which is in this show. On the other hand, unlike France or even England, young America had no real market for "philosophical" pictures in which blacks might figure -- allegories of freedom, brotherhood and the like.

What the American market mainly wanted before the Civil War was genre scenes of American life, which might or might not include blacks. Most American genre painting before Homer and Eakins was lowbrow stuff, in which blacks tended to get the roles played by the fiddling boors and carousing peasants in Dutch genre. They become lazy Sambos with watermelons, fiddling clowns, butts of practical jokes. But not all the time. "Sambo is not my man and brother," snorted William Makepeace Thackeray during his lecture tour of America in 1852-53. Yet when his secretary, Eyre Crowe, painted a group of black women and a field hand waiting to be auctioned in Virginia, the image was all sympathy and respect, without a trace of his employer's bigotry.

Except for one noxious painting of a minstrel chorus from the 1830s, this show contains nothing to rival the virulence launched against blacks by popular art after the Civil War: illustration, advertising and political cartooning. The collapse of Reconstruction released a swarm of derogatory images, as hysterical and all-pervading as anything aimed at Jews by Joseph % Goebbels. Those figures of shiftless Jim Crow and servile, hustling Zip Coon should have been put on the walls of the exhibition, not just reproduced in the catalog.

The coarser and more hackish the art, the more offensive the attitudes. But the reverse was also true. Quite a number of artists, from Homer and Thomas Anshutz to the little-known Joseph Decker -- whose Our Gang, 1886, is a sharp and scary image of a small African-American boy backed against a poster- covered wall by white street kids -- were reaching for understanding, for a sense of shared humanity and common decency. Can it be only a coincidence that their work is also, in aesthetic terms, the best in the show?