The Negro Portrayed as "a Beast"

This is the first of a series of posts highlighting important folk art pieces that will be featured in our traveling exhibition Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art opening at the New York State Museum in Albany on September 8. This exhibition, curated by Dr. Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies, explores the depictions of African Americans in 19th- and 20th-century American art created by white artists. A section of the exhibition also contrasts these images with works by African American artists dealing with the issues of race and identity.

The subject of this post is one of our most famous pieces, a sculpture of a dancing black man created about 1830-50 by an unidentified, almost certainly white, artist. This carving, which is 44 1/4" tall, was originally found in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1930s by the pioneering museum director and curator Holger Cahill. Cahill mounted some of the earliest folk art exhibitions at the Newark Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in the early 30s. At the time of its discovery, tradition held that this sculpture was originally a tavern sign. From Cahill it found its way into the collection of the modernist sculptor and folk art collector Elie Nadelman. After Nadelman’s death in 1947, it was purchased by Stephen C. Clark for the folk art collection at the Fenimore Art Museum. Its title at the time was “Dancing Negro.”

The sculpture certainly has seen the ravages of time and the elements. It was originally brightly painted and would have been an eye-catching image on a streetscape. It also would have been a familiar image, as the figure is a stereotypical Jim Crow character of the kind popularized in the minstrel music of Thomas Dartmouth Rice, seen below in a 19th-century engraving.

The amazing thing about our sculpture is how its racial caricature eluded so many knowledgable viewers over the years. In fact,the stereotyping of the figure’s dilapidated clothing and exaggerated facial features seems to have been, for most viewers, invisible. Cahill and Nadelman obviously admired it for its vitality and sense of physical movement. The art deco sculptor Paul Manship once called it “the greatest piece of American sculpture made before 1850.” And I distinctly recall scholars in the 1980s wondering aloud if this might be a portrait. Dr. Sorin’s label redresses this imbalance by stating: “The sculpture’s small stature and animal-like appearance reinforced ideas about black people as subhuman and beast-like.” The piece, now titled “Stereotypical Carving of an African American Man,” appears in the section of the exhibition that she entitled “The Negro Portrayed as 'a Beast.'”

Through the Eyes of Others is full of these provocative images of African Americans, juxtaposed with dynamic works exploring racial identity by such prominent African american artists as Lorna Simpson, Faith Ringgold, and Kyra Hicks. The exhibition shows how much of our nation’s history is bound up in considerations of race. It stands to reason that this great national dilemma would be reflected in our art as well, at all levels of society. Through the Eyes of Others will be on view at the State Museum through January 6, 2010.

Abraham Lincoln: The Kitchen Companion

I roughed him out with a double bitted axe and then started carving. Took me almost a month to hollow out the chair and leave the rungs. I’ve got him sitting on a kitchen chair – figured he was a poor cuss, like me, and he’d feel right at home.

Visitors to the Bakersfield, Vermont home of woodcarver Frank Moran would, it is said, often have to take a second glance before realizing that the “person” they saw sitting in the kitchen was actually a life-size wooden figure of Abraham Lincoln. Placed next to the coal stove in a simple, dignified manner, “Old Abe” was fulfilling the only purpose his maker envisioned – keeping him company.

Frank Moran (1877-1967) was a Vermont farmer, carpenter, and woodcarver who, sometime around 1940, transformed a single pine log into his personal vision of an American hero without the help of power tools or even a picture of Lincoln to use as a model (although the influence of Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln Memorial Statue, below, is apparent). It is interesting that Moran depicted the clean-shaven, youthful Lincoln rather than the bearded figure we all know so well. After finding the log on a friend’s farm and dragging it to his home, he seasoned the wood for three years and then carved the figure from memory over a period of another two years. The result was an astonishing likeness, a monumental piece of folk sculpture, and most importantly for the artist, a suitable companion.

Moran had grown up in Bakersfield working on local farms, married in 1895, and worked in Massachusetts as a woodcarver, carpenter, and cabinetmaker. When he moved back to Vermont in 1917 he also took up carriage making. After his father died, Moran moved to his family farm – alone – and lived there in solitude for the last forty years of his life. There was no electricity, no central heating, and no other modern conveniences. The sign above his door read simply “Frank Moran – Woodcarver.”

Moran became well known locally as a “friendly hermit” and despite his need for privacy he greatly enjoyed entertaining visitors with banjo, fiddle, and storytelling. He kept carving too, embellishing useful items like chests, cabinets, and gun stocks, and also making sculpture busts of political figures (Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler, as well as this small standing figure of George Washington, also in our collection). Some of his finest carvings were made for his local church, St. Anthony’s in East Fairfield.

But the life-size seated figure of Lincoln was Moran’s greatest achievement, and one he vowed never to part with. When offered sizeable sums of money for the piece, he would reply that Old Abe “would never stand up – or leave here.” And so Old Abe remained next to the coal stove in Moran’s kitchen until his maker’s death in 1967, after which it found a new permanent home here at the Fenimore Art Museum.

We have never cleaned off the dark stains left by the proximity to the coal stove, since they are so much a part of the sculpture’s history. It’s nice to think that this might be a comfort to the artist, as well as Old Abe’s continued ability to startle the occasional night watchman.

The Folk Stylists

Warren Kimble is often touted as “America’s best known contemporary folk artist” and is the subject of an exhibit in the Lighthouse Galleries at the Shelburne Museum on view through October. I saw this exhibit on my recent trip to the museum and thought it would be useful to use the occasion to introduce my readers to the world of trained artists who paint in a folk art style. In the past, these artists have been referred to as “faux naives” or “folk stylists,” but as you can tell from the tag line above, people often confuse the issue and call them folk artists in order to market exhibitions or products relating to this artwork. It is important to know the difference between their work and the folk art that is the primary subject of this blog and the folk art galleries at the Fenimore Art Museum.

Warren Kimble is a fine artist; no question about it. He received his training at Syracuse University and joined the art faculty at Castleton State College in Castleton, Vermont. This training shows in the works displayed on the second floor of the Lighthouse, which deal with themes of war and its human toll and hope for the future (see "Widows of War" installation below). His abstract compositions and object installations are quite good and much more substantive than his stylized folk pieces in the first floor galleries.

The latter feature his trademark style of exaggerated proportions and nostalgic themes that take some of the common attributes of folk art and generalize them for broad audience appeal (the cow, below, is perhaps his best known example). They are basically folk décor – which is fine, if you enjoy that – but they are not folk art in any real sense.

Kimble is by no means the only artist to appropriate folk art style into a commercially viable genre – Charles Wysocki comes to mind – but he may be the most successful. Vermont Living claims his licensing contracts bring in more than $100 million annually.

While there’s nothing wrong with consciously and deliberately painting in a folk art style even after years of artistic training, and nothing wrong with decorating one’s home with this type of art, it’s better not to confuse this output with folk artists who learned to create art informally or through community traditions, and who make art because of an inescapable desire to communicate something important about their lives and the world as they see it. In my mind, nothing trumps the aesthetics of meaning.

Trash Becomes Electra

There are only a few places in the United States where you can see large collections of classic American folk art. I mean the folk art that was collected in the early decades of the 20th century, when Americana enthusiasts were just beginning to realize how broad and diverse the country’s heritage really was. I spent last Friday at one of these destinations: the Shelburne Museum, in Shelburne, Vermont.

Founded by Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), an heiress to the Havemeyer fortune, the museum includes much more than folk art. In her lifetime, Mrs. Webb acquired more than 150,000 pieces and relocated 25 historic buildings to her property in Shelburne. The result is a fascinating and wide-ranging romp through American material culture and architecture, not as a cohesive historic village like our own Farmers’ Museum, but as a collection of experiences, each very different from the one before.

Mrs. Webb started collecting folk art early by Americana standards, acquiring her first piece, a cigar store figure purchased for $15, in 1907. Her mother, Louisine Havemeyer, a collector of European and Asian art, saw the trade signs and cigar store figures that Electra had at her Long Island home and asked her: “How can you, Electra, you who have been brought up with Rembrandts and Manets, live with such American trash?”

Talk about the glorious results of a misspent youth. The Shelburne’s folk art collection can be seen in a number of different buildings at the museum, but most of the best pieces are in the Stagecoach Inn. The collection is stunning in its quality and breadth, and ranks right up there with our own collection at the Fenimore Art Museum in many categories. To be honest, it is better than our in some areas. For my own amusement, I did a quick and unscientific scorecard comparing our two collections, based upon what was on view and the pieces I could recall from past visits and publications.

Folk Art Scorecard: Fenimore vs. Shelburne

Portraits: Fenimore
Landscapes/townscapes: Fenimore
Schoolgirl art: Shelburne
Quilts: Shelburne
Sculpture: Shelburne
Ceramics (stoneware): Fenimore
Ceramics (redware): Shelburne
20th century: Fenimore

All in all, pretty evenly matched. The point for you, however, is not a useless and indefensible curatorial exercise. If you love folk art, these are two collections you must see, as they complement each other in many ways and are of very high quality. They are an important window into the lives of ordinary Americans, and prove beyond dispute that the academy has no monopoly on great art.

And it is even more fascinating to consider that, barely a century ago, this material was referred to as trash. We should be grateful to the few passionate and stubborn people, like Mrs. Webb and our own Stephen Clark, who knew better.