Erica M. James, PhD, "Charles White's J'Accuse and the Limits of Universal Blackness", AAAJ by Bahamian Art and Culture

ERICA MOIAH JAMES

Charles White’s J’Accuse and the Limits of Universal Blackness 4

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n November 1966, an exhibition of seventeen monumental drawings and one print by Charles White was mounted at the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles, a politically charged space run by leftist Jewish Americans (fig. 1).1 Before it opened to the public, White went through the show and changed the titles of all the works except for the single four-color lithograph, Exodus II, to the oneword moniker J’Accuse.2 This essay explores White’s deliberate act of re-naming in relation to its historical resonance, yet purposeful dissonance, with an open letter entitled “J’Accuse . . . !,” published in 1898 by the French author Émile Zola.3 White’s appropriation of Zola’s response in that letter to the 1894 trial and wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), a Jewish officer in the French army, signaled a significant fracture in his political worldview centered on the representation of black people as universal signs of liberation—a perspective cultivated on the South Side of Chicago, crystallized as a member of the Artists’ Union (AU) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), globalized at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) in Mexico, mobilized during the US long civil rights movement, and continuously challenged by shifting interpretations of American art in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Despite major civil rights victories in the decade leading up to the Heritage Gallery exhibition, the righteous anger White expressed through this show constituted a notable break in the African American artist’s otherwise unmitigated faith in universal humanism grounded in radical left politics. His invocation of Zola’s “J’Accuse . . . !” was a searing indictment of the United States and its seeming inability, notwithstanding landmark legislation, to recognize black humanity. White was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1918. Disillusioned by a public education system he believed was intent on defining African Americans as different, he became a chronic truant by the age of thirteen. According to his unpublished autobiographical notes in the collection of the Archives of American Art, instead of going to school he spent his time at the Art Institute of Chicago and the public library.4 It was as a young teenager that White discovered Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), a manifesto for art of the Harlem Renaissance that called for a black aesthetic grounded in modernist approaches to African art.5 Through Locke’s vision of “Negro art,” White gained an important sense of his place in the world, admitting “I had never realized that Negro people had done so much in the world of culture, that they had contributed so much to the development of America.”6 The New Negro thus led White toward a self-awareness denied by his formal education; it made the rich possibilities of black culture clear to him. White had begun making art soon after his mother gave him an oil paint set at the age of seven.7 By the time he encountered The New Negro he drew incessantly, and began looking to make connections with other black artists working in Chicago. After returning to Englewood High School full time in 1933, White’s social awareness and artistic skills blossomed through his participation in Chicago’s Art Crafts Guild (ACG), a coterie of young African Americans intent on becoming visual artists. In his autobiographical notes, White recalls that the group was creative and resourceful in identifying places to show their work, holding exhibitions “in places like a Negro Baptist Church, a Young Men’s Christian Association House, a Settlement House, or Boys Club . . . [and] occasionally . . . a vacant lot.”8 Members of the ACG gathered for art lessons taught by George E. Neal, an Art Institute student, first at the South Side Settlement House and then at Neal’s studio at Thirty-third Street and Michigan Avenue.9 Neal shaped the creative ethos of this group, insisting that students depict the beauty of black people and providing them entrée into a progressive black Chicago that seemed to embody the spirit of Locke’s New Negro.10 By the age of sixteen, White belonged to a circle of young black artists and intellectuals that also included painters Margaret Taylor Burroughs and Bernard Goss, dancer

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Fig. 1 Promotional flyer for J’Accuse! exhibition at the Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles (November 14–December 3, 1966), featuring J’Accuse #1. Charles W. White Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Fig. 1

Katherine Dunham, author Richard Wright, and poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker.11 In 1934 White joined a small cadre of activists at Englewood agitating against racism and demanding change. He recalls that this group underscored the importance of fighting against injustice as part of a collective.12 But even the pooled efforts of this protest community did not protect White from discrimination. After receiving scholarships from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Frederic Mizen Academy of Art, for instance, he arrived for classes only to

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be denied matriculation, informed that mistakes had been made in the admission process.13 Eventually White received funding to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He completed his studies in 1938 and, to increase his chances of being hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP), White joined the AU, which had played a major role in forming the WPA. This experience paved his entrance into full-fledged organizational politics in the arts.14 As a member of the AU and, later, the American Artists’ Congress (AAC), White found himself involved in organized protest against racial discrimination, rallying for causes and people far beyond his local community. Perhaps emboldened by the successes of this interracial collective, White also joined the American League Against War and Fascism and organizations that supported the Republican government of Spain in opposition to dictator Francisco Franco. From this point forward, in White’s mind, “the welfare of the Negro people, the progress of all the working people, and the cause of democracy were linked.” Rather than aligning his work with that of a cultural avant-garde, White came to believe that art’s progress and development lay in the ability of its practitioners to forward social and political imperatives. In his words, “the artist could not spend his life in his studio. He had to play a role in social life.”15

n joining the AU in the 1930s, White entered a community intensely focused on interrogating what American art should be. His vision was grounded not only in aesthetics and form, but also in the political role of the artist in response to social conditions around him. An editorial in the March 1936 issue of Art Front, the union’s official publication, clearly articulated its support of this politicized aesthetic: By a stroke of coincidence the National Negro Congress opened its sessions in Chicago on the same evening the Artists’ Congress convened in New York. But there is more than coincidence in the movement of the Negro people for social and political equality and the movement of artists for the right to function as artists. Fundamentally both Congresses are phases of the same question. When an entire people are hounded to the unbelievable degree the Negro is, no honest thought or action can be safe from attack. When bigotry is deliberately fostered to the point where reason is swept aside by the tides of blind prejudice, then social liberties are also vulnerable. . . . The Artists’ Union . . . support[s] the demands of the Negro people for political, social and economical equality. We know that by helping to fight for the rights of Negroes we are striking a strong blow against the forces of reaction and for the defense of the civil liberties of all.16

If one’s word is a bond, the AU appeared to uphold and defend White’s interests as an artist, a working-class black man, and a human being. However, his faith in the work that this politically informed aesthetic vision could do would be shaken thirty years later, on the walls of the Heritage Gallery. To contextualize White’s position within the critical discourse on American art in the 1930s, I want to relate his philosophy to the writings of artist Stuart Davis that appeared in Art Front and to the criticism of Clement Greenberg, particularly his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in the left-leaning Partisan Review.17 A consideration of Davis’s largely forgotten writings and Greenberg’s influential though increasingly disavowed text reveals the contemporary American art scene as one in which ideas were often able to travel in ways that certain bodies—particularly racialized black bodies like White’s—could not.18

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In the early 1930s, the Soviet Union adopted a Popular Front strategy to unite Communist and non-Communist nations in the fight against rising fascism in Germany.19 In response, the US Communist Party made efforts to “phase out the sectarian, proletarian culture organizations, such as the John Reed Club, and develop broad-based organizations of artists whose leadership would be shared with non-Communists.”20 The AU was formed in the wake of this shift; a broad constituent base allowed the organization to engage in various nonpartisan projects, though the central unifying factor remained anti-Fascism.21 When Davis became the editor of Art Front in 1935, he insisted that the publication welcome controversy and foster aesthetic discussions among participants both inside and outside of the organization.22 During its brief run (1934–37), Art Front was an important voice of the radical left known for its stimulating debates on American art. In the absence of an article credited to White in the magazine, considering his known statements about art in relation to the published writings of Davis and Greenberg can shed light on the cultural and political environment in which White developed his aesthetic practice.23 What becomes clear in doing so is that White’s, Davis’s, and Greenberg’s theoretical approaches to art were inextricably linked to their historical moment. While their official membership in the US Communist Party is still open for debate, all three men saw themselves as liberal Marxists. Chicago artist Mitchell Siporin introduced White to Marxist theory during the painter’s time at the WPA.24 Davis gravitated to leftist ideals through his association with Ben Shahn and in response to the worsening economic conditions artists faced in the early 1930s.25 By the 1930s, moreover, Greenberg and fellow critic Meyer Schapiro were associated with a group of Marxist American writers known as the New York Intellectuals.26 As art historian Cécile Whiting has argued, left-leaning cultural producers like Davis (and, by extension, White and Greenberg) would remain “independent socialist thinker[s], committed to the overall theoretical goals of Marxism and the broadest policies of the Popular Front, but rarely advocating specific Soviet causes.”27 In Art Front, Davis argued for a sustained relationship between political intent and artistic forms. Equating the individualistic aspects of democracy with aesthetic freedom, Davis insisted that the social context of art had to be presented in a manner derived from the artist’s own experience. Because the AU encouraged diverse viewpoints, it is not surprising that Davis and White shared membership but not aesthetic approaches. White had been trained in a social realist tradition while Davis was a fervent critic of this style, arguing that it had become propaganda in the hands of regionalist artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Before World War II, Benton had attempted to make an American art that he believed embodied democratic ideals. In a 1935 essay on the theme of “Art and Social Struggle,” he stated that “for a true believer, art could not be considered vital unless it fit categorically within the scheme of social progress as envisioned and proclaimed by Marx.” Benton rejected the politicization of Marxism within a state apparatus, but, even so, he recognized that Marxist ideologies supported an art for the people, expressed through what he regarded as “modern aesthetics.”28 This position was similar to that which Davis espoused in the 1930s, although the two artists had opposing definitions of what constituted “modern” form. During the 1920s, Davis had actively sought a nationalist approach to art. As art historian Matthew Baigell has observed, citing the artist’s journal from 1920–22, Davis regarded his early, semi-abstract pictures, which drew on American small-town topographies and industrial forms, as “really original American work.” He attacked the cubists as “metaphysicians,” and the dadaists as “European jugglers,” claiming that in emulating European modernists such as Cézanne and Picasso, American artists were ignoring their own abilities.29 By the

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1930s, Davis found his mature idiom in visual engagements with American architecture, jazz, and modern communications inspired by the very cubist aesthetic he had repudiated in the previous decade (fig. 2). This style would later comfortably situate him as a bridge figure between artists associated with the Ashcan School and social realism, and the abstract expressionists. If Davis found growing acceptance for his work during the 1930s and ’40s, Benton found his support take a precipitous fall.30 In the eyes of the 1930s New Left, Benton’s nationalistic ambitions were often expressed in nativist, xenophobic, and racist terms.31 In a 1935 issue of Art Front, for example, Davis openly questioned how Benton’s “gross caricatures” of African Americans could be passed off as “direct representation[s],” dismissing these works as examples of propaganda “constantly being utilized to disenfranchise the Negro politically, socially and economically” (fig. 3).32 Perhaps eager to stoke the fires of debate, Davis followed up these comments by soliciting Meyer Schapiro, also a sharp critic of Benton, to state his position on the matter in Art Front. Schapiro’s resulting essay, “Race, Nationality and Art” (1936), rejected the goals of the American regionalists and admonished avant-garde artists and critics who believed “great national art can issue only from those who really belong to the nation, more specifically, to the Anglo-Saxon blood.” Schapiro also criticized “Negro liberals who teach that the American Negro artist should cultivate the old African styles,” arguing that this position worked into the hands of “white reactionaries . . . terminat[ing] in the segregation of the Negro from modern culture.”33 Schapiro’s essay condemned racialized nationalism presented in the guise of aesthetic purity, along with notions that American art might reflect a single, stable approach or national consciousness through a uniform style. The art historian echoed Davis’s call for art rooted in one’s social and political present, though his view of what that might look like was far more prismatic. Meanwhile, in Chicago, White’s aesthetic approach resonated with Schapiro’s heterogeneous vision. As an African American, White saw the past as very much part of his present. This is evident in the subjects of his early paintings, such as his FAP mural Five Great American Negroes (fig. 4). In this work, space and time collapse in a swirling composition that mobilizes the lives of five singular black

Fig. 2 Stuart Davis, Swing Landscape, 1938. Oil on canvas, 7 ft. 2 ¾ in x 14 ft. 4 ⅛ in. Allocated by the U.S. Government, Commissioned through the New Deal Art Projects. Ezkenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University 42.1. Art © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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Fig. 3 Thomas Hart Benton, Cotton Pickers, Georgia, 1928–29. Tempera and oil on canvas, 30 x 35 ¾ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1933 (33.144.2). Image © 2016 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Licensed by Art Resource, NY. Art © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 3

Americans to tell the story of a people. On the left, civil rights activist Sojourner Truth appears in the form of Michelangelo’s Cumaean Sybil from the Sistine Chapel. Truth’s powerful body, oversized hands, and bare feet are enlivened by rolling brushstrokes that set her in motion, leading a procession of black people out of symbolic slavery and into their future. Truth gestures toward the educator Booker T. Washington, who stands at a podium delivering a speech. Immediately behind Washington, abolitionist Frederick Douglass embraces what appears to be a runaway slave; to the right, contralto Marion Anderson sings while two unidentified men confer over a book. In the lower-right corner of the canvas, botanist and inventor George Washington Carver peers into his microscope, anticipating new scientific discoveries. The five central figures triumph through action, asserting their power over and possession of the space they inhabit. In this early work, the elements of White’s politicized aesthetic are thus fully activated. Though firmly rooted in an emphatically black American place and history, the artist adopted a formal language grounded in common experience, conceiving of the radical left politics of his painting as applicable to the lives of oppressed men and women everywhere. Focusing on connecting with a broad audience without questioning the ways other artists approached their work, White found no ally in Davis. Though Davis’s goal was to keep culture moving and thus keep fascism at bay, what he ultimately proposed was an overarching American art practice defined by his own formal approach, not artistic freedom at all. His denouncement of social realism placed him on a strained philosophical course with the Soviet Union, and after Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 and the Soviets invaded Finland, Davis publicly denounced the Soviets and the dialectical nature of Marxism. In 1940 he left the AAC, which he believed had come under the control of the Communist Party, though he continued to support the principles of the

Fig. 4 Charles White, Five Great American Negroes, 1939–40. Oil on canvas, 65 x 155 in. Howard University Gallery of Art. Reproduced from Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press, 2002), 173. Art © 1939–40 The Charles White Archives.

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original Popular Front.34 Responding differently to these historical shifts, White remained a committed member of the AAC until its dissolution during World War II and embraced the organization’s aesthetic emphasis on social realism.35 After the war, he became a more open Communist sympathizer, traveling to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations in 1951 and 1954, and contributing political cartoons to left-wing publications such as the Daily Worker, Masses & Mainstream (fig. 5), and Congress View in a realist style that differed from his early modernist gestures. This move was not surprising in the context of a racially divided United States, as the Communist Party took a leading role in the defense of black lives in historic legal cases such as those of the Scottsboro Boys, Rosa Lee Ingram, and the Trenton Six.36 Even the committed African American modernist Aaron Douglas turned to realism to represent the Scottsboro Boys (fig. 6). Let us now turn to Greenberg’s position on modern art and politics, articulated in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” for Partisan Review. Though he was anti-Stalinist in political orientation and viewed as a Marxist by association, Greenberg proposed a closed and classed vision of art in his 1939 essay. “AvantGarde and Kitsch” can be read as a thinly disguised response to the same political events in Europe against which Davis and Schapiro had spoken so strongly, and which White believed resonated with the situation black people faced in the United States. In this regard one might view the text sympathetically, as Greenberg’s utopian desire to seek transcendence in art in the face of global horror. The critic proposed that content should “be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself,” asserting that this was the only way art could move forward.37 In addition to dismissing political content, Greenberg also rejected aspects of mass culture that Davis had come to view as distinctly American, such as jazz. Both Davis and White would have regarded Greenberg’s approach to art as perpetuating the very stasis it sought to prevent. In a 1935 personal note now held in the archives of the Harvard Art Museums, Davis explained: Arguments for a pure art simply mean arguments for the perpetuation of the status quo, because in the artificial and unreal isolation of the artist’s function implied in this concept is implicit a refusal to admit the dynamic and moving quality of life. It is an undialectical and static concept placing belief in absolutes. It is a slave psychology because the artists feel that world events are beyond any power of theirs to change.38

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Just as Davis feared, Greenberg’s extreme position was later drawn upon to justify a type of cultural hegemony over those who did not fit the prevailing mold of art production. Though largely rejected today, the impact of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” on critical conversations about American art and markets in the postwar era should not be ignored, as it assisted in the consolidation of power in the art world between the 1940s and 1960s. Aligned with Greenberg’s directives, mainstream narratives of American art generally disregarded politics and content. The rhetoric of pure abstraction dominated period discussion, and its practitioners were institutionalized as the new avant-garde.39 Davis’s repudiation of social realism and regionalism found broad support in this cultural climate, but his promotion of politically informed abstraction found little traction in circles where Greenbergian aesthetics prevailed. Moreover, artists of color, no matter what they produced, were largely excluded from the conversation.40

hite was well aware of the debates being waged in Art Front and Partisan Review. While he shared Davis’s politics to a great extent, precisely what constituted an appropriate American aesthetic was not at issue for the artist. For him, the key concern was how to address the continued political, economic, and social oppression faced by people of color and the poor. Yet the increasing dominance of American abstraction in the postwar period made it impossible for White to wade into the critical currents of the mainstream. This does not mean that he and other representational or social realist artists did not find a market for their work, but it did affirm the need for White to clear his aesthetic landscape. The early 1940s saw a significant shift in White’s style. The artist was convinced that representing African Americans as dignified subjects could educate

Fig. 5 Charles White, Cover of Masses & Mainstream 6, no. 2 (February 1953). Charles W. White Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Art © 1953 The Charles White Archives (image only). Fig. 6 Aaron Douglas, Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson, ca. 1935. Pastel on paper, 16 ⅛ x 14 ⅝ in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Art © Heirs of Aaron Douglas/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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and elicit empathy in ways universally understood by working people. This desire to connect with a segment of society excluded by Greenberg’s bourgeois values required an aestheticized political form that could gesture toward abstraction. The artist’s 1942 painting The Embrace (fig. 7) is a powerfully conceived composition, very different in emotional affect and political intent than Five Great American Negroes, completed only two years before. Here the representational subject of the work becomes the so-called common man that White sought to address in his art.41 Set in a desolate landscape, at the moment just before the sun fully rises or sets, the painting depicts a man and woman engaged in a fierce embrace. The figures are arranged in a tightly conceived composition, rendered in a restrained color palette with brush applications ranging from pointillist to painterly. Their faces are weary and sorrowful, their garments tattered and their bodies bound together as a single sculptural form. Their embrace is a gesture of love, but also a sign of mutual dependence. Their bodies are muscular and sure, and their oversized hands, forearms, and biceps communicate strength and resolve. Their forms are broken up and rearranged in a flattened collage of shapes reminiscent of synthetic cubism; the angled placement of the woman’s head is, in fact, a clear reference to The Old Guitarist (1903–4) from Picasso’s Blue Period, and the painting communicates a similar pathos. As a pupil at the Art Students League in New York in 1942, instructor Harry Sternberg encouraged White to rethink his stylization of the human form to avoid representing a general type.42 It is therefore notable that the faces of the male figure in The Embrace and the artist’s 1944 painting Soldier (fig. 8) are virtually the same. Through this repetition, the individualized figure occupies multiple precarious subject positions. Pressed against the surface of the picture plane, White’s soldier imposes almost desperately on the viewer’s space, commanding the composition. Although the tattered clothes of the male subject in The Embrace have been replaced by a tailored uniform, he is presented in a similarly desolate environment and subdued palette. Likewise, the coloration of the sky again suggests a transition from morning to evening, or the reverse. This

Fig. 7 Charles White, The Embrace, 1942. Egg tempera on Masonite, 25 x 31 ⅛ in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bequest of Fannie and Alan Leslie. Image © 2016 Museum Associates/ LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY. Art © 1942 The Charles White Archives. Fig. 8 Charles White, Soldier, 1944. Tempera on Masonite, 30 x 25 in. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra. Art © 1944 The Charles White Archives.

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temporal uncertainty adds a sense of unease to the painting. Rather than physical strength and daring, the composition emphasizes psychological vulnerability and deep-seated fears. The soldier embraces a gun instead of a woman, his tentative grasp on the weapon calling into doubt whether he would be able to activate its intended roles of protection and attack. He seems shell-shocked. During the early 1940s, White noted that he aimed to “present a feeling of universal humanity within a particular image, so that all people . . . would feel that something of themselves was contained there.”43 Soldier affirms this aim. Completed by the artist shortly before he was drafted into the military, the irony of the painting would not have been lost on black Americans.44 Despite having fought in every major war to defend the United States and its allies, African Americans still could not claim the full rights of citizenship, particularly the right to equal protection from violence, discrimination, and false imprisonment, conditions with which White was intimately aware. It is clear in these works that White’s worldview and his ability to explore it through his art had expanded substantially between his time with the WPA and his conscription into the US Army. While his political and aesthetic concerns were rooted in the particular conditions and struggles of Americans, White intended for his work to resonate equally with human rights causes in the international sphere. The artist’s embrace of collective identities for political purposes suggests a cosmopolitan perspective that would remain with him until the Heritage Gallery opening in 1966. Drawing on the work of cultural theorists Kwame Anthony Appiah and Scott L. Malcolmson, I position cosmopolitanism not as a singularly imagined phenomenon across time, but rather as a state that many diasporic subjects enter, perhaps unconsciously, as a means of navigating local, national, and global spheres.45 For White, the reach of this imaginary could extend beyond the art world and its privileged figures to include individuals from all walks of life. Though White’s work was rooted in a specific African American experience, it expressed his belief in a moral and political ethos of universality channeled through aesthetics.

hen White went to Mexico to study art in the fall of 1946, he became part of a dynamic cultural exchange between Mexicans and African Americans that emerged during the Harlem Renaissance. The Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias had worked in Harlem in the 1920s, during the high point of this artistic renaissance, while the American painter Hale Woodruff traveled to Mexico City to study mural painting with Diego Rivera. In the 1930s, Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros completed several public murals in the United States and Langston Hughes visited Mexico to meet members of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR), a committed Communist organization formed in 1934 to advocate for “the use of culture as a weapon against fascism.”46 A group of artists who supported the Mexican government’s advocacy for socialist art but wanted to “act independently in order to preserve their ideological integrity” broke away from LEAR in 1938 to form the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP).47 Committed to the proletarian potential of printmaking, the TGP’s “Declaration of Principles” charged its members with, as summarized by art historian Melanie Herzog, “working collectively to benefit progressive and democratic interests, especially in the fight against fascism, maintaining the connection between social and artistic aims, and lending support to popular and workers’ organizations,” an ethos similar to that of the AU and AAC.48 Already involved in global human rights issues, White nevertheless recalled his experience at the TGP as the time when he became fully aware of how his art related to realities beyond his own and that of his nation. The artist had always conceived

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of his work as being for “all people,” but his understanding of who, exactly, the people were, was expanding. In White’s work from this period one sees a sharpening synthesis of aesthetic and political ideas. The lithograph Mother, also known as Awaiting His Return (fig. 9), depicts a woman sitting alone at a table, her face resting on an upright arm, a five-pointed star prominently displayed on the wall behind her.49 Based on the title of the print and the visual cues provided, she appears to calmly await the return of her husband or son from war. Like the figures in most of White’s images, her face has been sculpted as if from ebony and her body distilled into overlapping planes, with limited modeling or detailing. The artist’s stylization of the face and body adds to the expressive strength of the print and enhances its ability to communicate pathos. Angles, lines, and shapes converge to create a remarkably balanced work, suggesting that the TGP functioned as a place for White to reset his career. In the fall of 1947, the first major exhibition of White’s work opened at the American Contemporary Art (ACA) Gallery in New York; it included the lithograph Mother and a number of other works the artist made at the TGP. This show

Fig. 9 Charles White, Mother (also known as Awaiting His Return), 1945. Lithograph in black on wove paper, 19 x 15 in. (sheet). National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Jacob Kainen 2002.98.72. Art © 1945 The Charles White Archives.

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Fig. 10 Charles White, General Moses and Sojourner, 1954. Charcoal on paper, 25 x 36 in. Gift from Drs. Edmund and Susan Gordon to the African American Studies Department at the University of Texas, Austin, TX (2014), and housed at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin, TX. Art © 1954 The Charles White Archives.

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Fig. 11 Charles White, I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned, 1956. Charcoal on paper, 36 x 25 in. Gift from Drs. Edmund and Susan Gordon to the African American Studies Department at the University of Texas, Austin, TX (2014), and housed at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin, TX. Art © 1956 The Charles White Archives.

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marked the beginning of White’s long relationship with the cooperative gallery, known for its unstinting support of politically progressive art and artists after the narrative of American art shifted to pure abstraction.50 Earlier that year, in a “Statement on Humanism,” ACA Gallery artists pushed back against attempts by “museum officials, dealers, and publicity men” to shut them out of the American art conversation and reaffirmed their desire to “work to restore to art its freedom and dignity as a living language.”51 Though White was not one of the signatories of the statement, his inaugural exhibition at the gallery might be read as an endorsement of its core principles. Despite the national discourse of McCarthyism, and though largely ignored in the mainstream press, in the 1950s White found strength in his growing stature among artists on the left, whose rhetoric, in turn, influenced his work. In charcoal drawings like General Moses and Sojourner (fig. 10) and I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned (fig. 11), White’s art takes the form of illustrative epistles. In the former drawing, Harriet Tubman (nicknamed “Moses”) stares directly at the viewer while Truth stands in profile, looking wistfully out of the left side of the composition. Gone is the abstract stylization of compositions like Mother and The Embrace; gone, too, is the strength of character evinced by Truth’s imposing physical form in the mural Five Great American Negroes (see fig. 4). Indeed, the figures, though realistically rendered and individualized, seem disconnected from the power of their historical narratives. No longer the imposing beacon of freedom of White’s 1939–40 mural, Truth has been softened into a young Virgin Mary figure. Despite her powerful gaze, Tubman has also been tamed, penned in by the print’s oval frame. The illustrations White produced for Congress View and other left-leaning publications later in the 1940s and 1950s likewise lack the aesthetic and ideological power of his earlier compositions (fig. 12). In fact, critics affiliated with the magazines that reproduced his prints harshly rebuked his entire body of work from this period. In a 1965 interview conducted by the Archives shortly before the Heritage Gallery exhibition opening, White agreed with his critics, deeming satire and pointed political propaganda ill-suited to his artistic enterprise and characterizing much of the imagery he produced in the ’50s as a misstep in his career.52 Even so, several aspects of White’s practice from this decade are important to note because they anticipate the significant shift in the artist’s thinking by the time of the Heritage Gallery show. Putting a principle of the TGP to work, White began producing inexpensive portfolios of his images to be sold at exhibitions at home and abroad. These prints were also distributed through subscription by Masses & Mainstream.53 As a result, when White visited Europe in 1951 and 1954, he found that copies and originals of his prints had made their way to Russia, Hungary, France, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland. His art had achieved the presence and appreciation abroad that he had always desired at home. Though his aesthetic approach would soon shift, this experience bolstered White’s faith in universal human rights, the power of the global working class to affect necessary and sustained change in the world, and the ability of the black image to carry this message.54 This faith would continue unabated until 1966.

e can now return to White’s deliberate evocation of the Dreyfus case and Zionism in his 1966 exhibition at the Heritage Gallery, where he renamed all but one image on view J’Accuse. By making an exception in the case of the lithograph Exodus II, the artist proposed an analogy between the experiences of Alfred Dreyfus in France, the Jews in Egypt, and blacks in the United States. Such an analogy acknowledges a long history of relations between African Americans and left-leaning Jews that coalesced around the fight for civil rights. As historian Clayborne Carson has observed,

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“both groups . . . responded to minority status in American society by identifying with the universalistic, egalitarian ideals of the Western liberal tradition.”55 Eric J. Sundquist, moreover, has probed how African Americans adapted the “foundational Jewish narrative to the culture of the black diaspora.”56 Informing the writings of authors such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, Negro spirituals like “Go Down Moses,” and metaphorical journeys to “The Promised Land” taken by black Southerners (including Martin Luther King Jr.), the Exodus narrative has served as a powerful story of freedom for many black Americans. At the Heritage Gallery, White appropriated and transformed this story and Zola’s “J’Accuse. . . !” to indict US racism. While no one is certain what sparked the artist’s change in titles, I argue that it expressed White’s crisis of faith in the capacity of his politicized aesthetic to do the work he intended it to. In 1966, the dream of freedom for blacks in the United States seemed to be slipping further and further away. White found himself faced with the question: How could black people represent something in his work that they did not possess in society? In their studies of the widely known example of profound injustice, art historians Dewey F. Mosby, Jennifer J. Harper, and Albert Boime have explored the possible references to the Dreyfus case in the work of African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937).57 But unlike Tanner, White left nothing to speculation, directly evoking the case in order to make visible black Americans’ ongoing struggle for civil rights. Dreyfus was a French Jew born in the city of Mulhause, in the Alsace region of France, and the son of a successful manufacturer.58 It is likely that his family came to Paris after the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, which ceded the area to Germany. Like many Jews who migrated to Paris from the disputed Alsace region, the Dreyfus family cultivated strong ties in France; Dreyfus entered L’École polytechnique, Paris, in 1878, and proceeded to become a highly regarded officer in the French army. We might describe Dreyfus and his family as cosmopolitans, insofar as they were diasporic Jews who embraced a French national identity. In the midst of a rising wave of anti-Semitism in France, in 1894 Dreyfus was falsely accused of giving military secrets to the Germans. Brought to trial, he was found guilty of treason, subjected to ceremonial degradation on the order of commanding officers at L’École militaire, and publicly stripped of his insignias as a French army officer. Through it all, he continued to deny the charges and declare his allegiance to his home country, even as French mobs hurled racial slurs, calling for his death and the death of all Jews. His body was no longer his own, but had come to signify the plight of an entire race of people. When evidence supporting Dreyfus’s innocence came to light, it was covered up by the French state. But knowledge of the conspiracy spread. In response, Émile Zola drafted an open letter to the president of France, which was published in the January 13, 1898, issue of L’Aurore. The letter appealed to President Faure’s humanity, urging him to take a stand in defense of Dreyfus. Justice for Dreyfus was presented as a means for the nation to return to solid moral footing. Toward the end of the missive, Zola pointedly accused all involved in the conspiracy. Naming them one by one and stating their crimes, he began each line with the now-famous phrase, “J’accuse.” White’s actions at the Heritage Gallery in 1966 suggest a realization on the artist’s part that, despite years of embracing a worldview whereby his work could originate in the local concerns of African Americans but carry universal implications, his efforts were rotting at the roots. One hundred years following African American emancipation, there were certainly reasons to celebrate—schools had been desegregated across the United States, and the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) signed into law—but spectacular acts of violence worked against the fight for black freedom. In 1963, for instance, the predominantly black

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Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, an important meeting place for civil rights organizers, was bombed, and civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated. The following year, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) members James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered. The year 1965 opened with the activist Malcolm X’s assassination and America’s entry into Vietnam. And, that summer, the Watts riots exploded in Los Angeles, the city where White lived from 1956 until his death (fig. 13). The impact of the years around 1965 on White’s work, particularly the eruption of exhaustion and rage expressed in Watts and the upheaval that spread across the country through 1968, should not be underestimated. In the wake of the Watts riots, black artists in Los Angeles mobilized alongside political organizations. As the Black Panther Party was being formed, so too were artist-led collectives such as the Watts Towers Art Center, Compton Communicative Arts Academy, Watts Writers’ Workshop, Mufundi Workshop, and, later, Black Arts Council, all of which aimed to utilize art to revitalize their communities and encourage residents to become agents of change.59 In this context, the injustice of the Dreyfus case and the promise of the Exodus story would have resonated strongly with White. In an oral history interview for the Archives conducted just one month after the death of Malcolm X and five months before the Watts riots, White expressed a continuing belief in the ultimate goodness of the human spirit, explaining, “I try to deal with truth . . . . I try to deal with beauty . . . . I still feel that man is basically good.”60 By November 1966, however, something had changed. I contend that White’s reframing through renaming expressed a momentary crisis of faith in the black image as a conveyor of the values of universal humanism. Sundquist has posited that the Exodus story resonated with African Americans in part because of the historical inversion experienced by blacks and Jews; whereas Jews experienced an “exodus” from Egypt into exile and diaspora and then to Israel as homeland, blacks were forcibly exiled from Africa through transatlantic slavery and have yet to experience their “exodus” in the United States, their symbolic Egypt.61 Since the US has become home for African Americans, the concept of exodus in this case does not refer to a physical, completed journey but rather to an ongoing struggle for freedom, the ultimate signifier of black humanity. In appropriating Zola’s declaration, White redeployed the accusation, each of his works embodying and enacting the intentions of the Frenchman’s letter.

Fig. 13 Robert Nakamura, Charles White in his Los Angeles studio, ca. 1970. © Robert Nakamura.

Fig. 13

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Fig. 14 Charles White, J’Accuse #1, 1966. Charcoal, crayon, and pastel on paper, 51 x 34 ½ in. Private collection. Image courtesy Pasadena Museum of California Art. Art © 1966 The Charles White Archives.

Fig. 14

Again and again, White presents dignified black people as victims of injustice, and each time the artist’s title demands that the audience consider: Why? White’s formal choices in the Heritage Gallery drawings and print reinforce this reconceptualization of the relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer. In J’Accuse #1 (fig. 14), for example, a black female form rendered in rich blacks, grays, and whites sits in the center of a white visual field, her body enveloped by a shroud signifying all at once bodily trauma, healing, and protection. Her clasped hands are swathed in heavy gloves. Her small face, out of proportion in relation to her monumental body and hands, is a focal point, and close inspection reveals that her eyes are clouded. The impassivity of the face gives one pause, as the figure’s dignified, rocklike form emphasizes inner strength and suggests the breath of life beneath the weighty black cloak. She appears simultaneously still and

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Fig. 15

unquiet, feeble and formidable, vulnerable and protected. Her garments contain, conceal, and protect a historically violated body. White’s return to a manipulation of physical proportions and adornment largely absent in his social realist work from the 1950s is complete in J’Accuse #5 (fig. 15), in which a young black man appears midstride, his face in three-quarter profile. The white field of the paper is interrupted by the man’s large, dark body and the low, leafless branches that frame his head like a crown of thorns. Though compositionally cut off at the knees, he dominates the frame, exhibiting a bodily distortion even greater than that seen in J’Accuse #1. Here the body is imprisoned by multiple layers of clothing, topped by a large overcoat that seems alive. The figure evinces an anxious pose in conflict with the contemplative tilt of his head. Is he the reimagined soldier of 1944, returning wounded and deformed to the

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country he fought for, only to find limited opportunity and a life of continuing violence? Or is he a resident of the nation’s growing inner cities, jobless, lacking protection and opportunity, and coming face-to-face with law enforcement on a daily basis? The figure’s head and gaze are downcast. His furrowed brow indicates inner thoughts, a human core. White’s decision to magnify the distinctions between the body, its adornment, and its environment activates the works in this series, ensuring both their inscrutability and their extended signification. His deployment of form turns theories of abjection away from the body, to the physical and symbolic spaces where these bodies live, move, and survive. The artist’s aesthetically beautiful and politically charged compositions retain a degree of narrative ambiguity as a result of his reengagement with elements of representational abstraction. The final work in the exhibition was the lithograph Exodus II (fig. 16), in which a young, shrouded female figure is encircled by an aura of gold and browns. Like

Fig. 16

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most figures in the J’Accuse series, the woman’s eyes do not meet the gaze of the viewer but are fixed on a point outside the frame. This final image denies the legibility of race, as well as visual access to the body. White does not present the woman in Exodus II as an individual; like Dreyfus, she exists as a sign, and acts as a call to black people to keep moving toward freedom. Although White increasingly distanced himself from the aesthetics of social realism after 1966 and tempered his belief in the power of art to change society, he remained committed for the remainder of his life to the community-driven principles of the ACG, AU, WPA, and TGP. In 1978, he explained: I do not think that art, any more than religion, has significantly changed mankind. . . . [A]rt cannot change society. It can only change individuals. It can’t change politics. It can’t change racism. It can’t change poverty. However, artists are romantics as well as realists, and it’s important to do what we can to try to change things.62 It should therefore come as no surprise that, despite the boiling emotions running through the Heritage Gallery exhibition, White made over 200 signed reproductions of J’Accuse #1 available to the public for one dollar each. The proceeds from the sale were earmarked for an organization in Watts that, according to critic Charles De Groat, “organized to teach various art subjects to children and adults in that area of Los Angeles.”63

harles White came of age in an era that sought to ensure the democratization of culture through the cultivation of an expanded conception of what American art could be. From humble beginnings marked by racism and limited opportunity, his self-awareness as an artist was grounded in humanism and an ethos that aligned art and leftist politics. White developed and deployed these ideas first in the service of his local community, on Chicago’s South Side, and eventually on behalf of people around the world struggling under the threat of political and economic fascism. Even as the writings of Stuart, Greenberg, and Schapiro placed him outside of the critical currents of the American avant-garde, White joined new collectives that sustained his faith in combining aesthetics and politics in the name of universal humanism. The events surrounding his opening at the Heritage Gallery in 1966 thus marked a crisis of faith for an artist who had been devoted to his ideals for decades. White’s historical reframing of the works on view at the Heritage Gallery allowed him to engage audiences differently. Rather than merely inviting exhibition-goers to view the images, marvel at their beauty and pathos, and walk away, the titular denunciation J’Accuse engendered a more reciprocal dynamic. With the rhythmic precision of a southern preacher, White activated a call and response. He asked his audience: What are these figures being accused of, and why? And, what is my position in relation to that claim? In so doing, like Zola, White pointed his finger at his viewers, making them accountable for their role in a society in which humanity and freedom could not be claimed universally.

Erica Moiah James is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the history of art and African American studies departments at Yale University. She has published in the journals Small Axe and Callaloo, among others. Forthcoming essays include “Dreams of Utopia: The Postcolonial Art Institution” (Open Arts Journal) and “Every Nigger is a Star (1974): Re-Imaging Blackness from Post-Civil Rights America to the Post-Independence Caribbean” (Black Camera).

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NOTES

15 Autobiographical notes, White Papers, microfilm reel 3189:19.

Benjamin Horowitz founded the progressive Heritage Gallery in 1961. From the beginning, the gallery promoted the work of African American and Latin American artists, such as White and David Alfaro Siquieros. See Heritage Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2 George De Groat, “Charles White Offers Exhibition of Drawings,” Independent Star-News (Pasadena, CA), November 27, 1966, C-6; and Arthur Miller, “Annie in Wonderland,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, November 27, 1966, Section D, clipping from Charles W. White Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter White Papers).

3 Émile Zola, “J’Accuse…! Lettre au Président de la République,” L’Aurore, January 13, 1898, 1.

4 Autobiographical notes, ca. 1950s, White

16 “The National Negro Congress,” Art Front 2, no. 4 (March 1936): 3.

28 Thomas Hart Benton, “Art and Social Struggle: Reply to Rivera,” University Review: A Journal of the University of Kansas City 2, no. 1 (Winter 1935): 71. 29 Davis quoted in Matthew Baigell,

17 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (Fall 1939): 34–49, reproduced in Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 3–21. The January 1936 issue of Art Front announced the launch of Partisan Review as a kindred publication.

18 For a fascinating discussion of White’s engagement in leftist politics, including the critical reception of his work, see Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

“American Art and National Identity: The 1920s,” Arts Magazine 61, no. 6 (February 1987): 52.

30 Benton openly discussed his change in fortunes in an oral history interview conducted by Paul Cummings, July 23–24, 1973, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Used with permission of the Thomas Hart Benton Estate.

31 Baigell, “American Art and National Identity,” 54.

32 Stuart Davis, “The New York American

19 Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 2.

Scene in Art,” Art Front 1, no. 3 (February 1935): 6. Benton responded to Davis in the April 1935 issue. See Thomas H. Benton, “Benton Sees Red,” Art Front 1, no. 4 (April 1935): 5, 8.

20 Patricia Hills, “1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art

33 Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality and

Front, and the Popular Front,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 30.

Art,” Art Front 2, no. 4 (March 1936): 10.

Papers, microfilm reel 3189:14–15.

5 Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1968).

34 Davis, “An Interview with Stuart Davis,” 21 Ibid. Davis observed that the AU and

microfilm reel 3189:14.

AAC included supporters whose political lives did not align with their professed politics.

7 Ibid., microfilm reel 3189:12.

22 Patricia Hills, Stuart Davis (New York:

6 Autobiographical notes, White Papers,

8 Ibid., microfilm reel 3189:16. 9 Oral history interview with Margaret Taylor Burroughs conducted by Anna Tyler, November 11–December 5, 1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

10 Oral history interview with Margaret Taylor Burroughs; Autobiographical notes, White Papers; and “George Neal, Artist, Dies; Rites Held,” Chicago Defender, September 3, 1938, 22.

11 Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 407.

Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 109; Davis, “An Interview with Stuart Davis,” Archives of American Art Journal 31, no. 2 (1991): 4–13; and Hills, “1936: Meyer Schapiro,” 30–41.

23 Art historian Sharon F. Patton has suggested that White wrote for Art Front, but I have not found an article that lists White as author, although many uncredited essays appear in the magazine. We know that the artist wrote for Masses & Mainstream in the 1950s, so it is likely that he also did so for Art Front. See Patton, African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 148.

microfilm reel 3189:15.

24 Peter Clothier, “Charles White: A Critical Perspective,” in Images of Dignity: A Retrospective of the Works of Charles White (New York: Studio Museum, 1982), 12.

13 On White’s dismissal from these institu-

25 Hills, Stuart Davis, 107.

12 Autobiographical notes, White Papers,

11.

35 See “Charles White: ‘Robeson with a Brush and Pencil’,” in Washington, The Other Blacklist, 101–7. 36 See Charles H. Martin, “Race, Gender, and Southern Justice: The Rosa Lee Ingram Case,” American Journal of Legal History 29, no. 3 (July 1985): 251–68; and Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 149. 37 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 6. 38 Stuart Davis, unpublished note, October 1, 1935, Stuart Davis Papers, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum, microfilm reel 1, quoted in Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, 78.

39 See Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

40 The work of African American artist tions, see Chicago Sunday Tribune, August 15, 1937, 5; and Benjamin Horowitz, Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1967), 11.

26 Andrew Hemingway, “Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 13.

14 Autobiographical notes, White Papers,

27 Whiting, Antifascism in American Art,

microfilm reel 3189:18. On FAP activities in Chicago, see Ruth Ann Stewart, New York/ Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978).

68.

Norman Lewis has come to be regarded as one of the most egregious cases of erasure in the history of American abstraction. Art historians Ann Eden Gibson and Ruth Fine have sought to situate his work within an expanded narrative of American abstraction. See Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics; and Ruth Fine, ed., Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in association with the University of California Press, Berkeley, 2015).

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41 See Charles White, “Path of a Negro Artist,” Masses & Mainstream 8, no. 4 (April 1955): 33-44, in which the artist states, “My major concern is to get my work before common, ordinary people” (34).

52 Oral history interview with Charles W. White conducted by Betty Hoag, March 9, 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter 1965 White interview). 53 Autobiographical notes, White Papers,

42 Bearden and Henderson, A History of

microfilm reel 3189:24.

African-American Artists, 409–10.

62 Jeffrey Elliot, “Charles White: Portrait of an Artist,” Sepia 27, no. 2 (February 1978): 63–64.

63 De Groat, “Charles White Offers Exhibition of Drawings,” C-6. De Groat was likely referring to the Watts Tower Art Center.

54 Between 1951 and 1956 White developed 43 Autobiographical notes, White Papers, microfilm reel 3189:21.

44 Shortly after being drafted in 1943 and reporting for duty, White suffered a severe case of tuberculosis and was given a medical discharge. The artist was in and out of the hospital for the next three years, and the experience impacted his health for the rest of his life. White was eventually forced to give up oil painting because of his delicate lungs. 45 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 91–116; and Scott L. Malcolmson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience,” in Cosmopolitics, 233–45.

a close relationship with worker organizations in Europe such as Schweizerische Arbeiter- und Bauernhilfe Zürich. He was particularly connected to the labor force of Hungary. After the invasion of Hungary by the Soviets in 1956, overtly Marxist or socialist realist imagery slowly disappeared from his work.

55 Clayborne Carson, “The Politics of Relations between African-Americans and Jews,” in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), 134. 56 Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 95.

57 Dewey F. Mosby, Henry Ossawa Tanner 46 Alicia Azuela, “El Machete and Frente a Frente: Art Committed to Social Justice in Mexico,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 86. See also Alison Cameron, “Buenos Vecinos: African-American Printmaking and the Taller de Gráfica Popular,” Print Quarterly 16, no. 4 (December 1999): 353–54.

47 Azuela, “El Machete and Frente a Frente,” 87. 48 Melanie Herzog, “Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico: Identity and Cross-Cultural Intersections in the Production of Artistic Meaning,” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 3 (1994): 21. See also “Declaración de principios del T.G.P./The Standards of the T.G.P.,” in El Taller de Gráfica Popular: doce años de obra artística collectiva, ed. Hannes Meyer (Mexico City: La Estampa Mexicana, 1949), 1. 49 Editions of this print have been dated 1943, 1945, and 1946. While it is possible that the artist ran the plate on multiple occasions, or that it was printed by others at his direction, I am inclined toward a date of 1946 because it is unlikely that White printed work during his 1944–46 hospitalization.

50 Davis was a charter member of the

(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1991); Jennifer J. Harper, “The Early Religious Paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner: A Study of the Influences of Church, Family, and Era,” American Art 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 68–85; and Albert Boime, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (September 1993): 415–42. Boime notes instances when, during the trial, African American periodicals such as the Christian Recorder and the journal of the African Methodist Episcopal Church decried American sympathies for Dreyfus, noting that black Americans were victims of similar injustice in the United States (437–38).

58 Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).

59 See Kellie Jones, ed., Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2011); Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Curtis L. Carter, “Watts: The Hub of the Universe: Art and Social Change,” in Watts: Art and Social Change in Los Angeles, 1965–2002 (Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 2003), 7–19.

ACA Gallery.

60 1965 White interview. 51 “Statement on Humanism,” ca. 1947, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed June 30, 2016, http:// www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/ statement-humanism-9984.

61 Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 95–98.

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