Charles White’s first mural, Five Great American Negroes (1939), displayed just outside the entrance of Charles White: A Retrospective, provided the introductory artwork of the exhibition’s installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.1 At the center of this ambitious composition, White rendered a scene of surprising physical intimacy. Frederick Douglass wraps his arms around the brown back of a shirtless man whose head is buried in the great abolitionist’s shoulder. Although this embrace is surely meant to emblematize Douglass’s significance as refuge and champion for the enslaved, in the context of this illuminating retrospective, it appears as an embodiment of the ethos of intimacy and care that characterizes White’s approach to figuration. White’s lifelong dedication to the beauty and dignity of black people emerges as the wellspring of his humanist artistic practice. This quality resounds in White’s own words on the power of music, which he praised in 1955 for expressing “the dignity, the outpouring of tenderness, the social and comradely feelings, and the humanity of the people” (91). Outpourings of tenderness are potent in White’s work both at the level of subject matter and in the delicacy and increasing skill with which he deployed his mediums—first as a painter and then, for the majority of his career, primarily as a draftsman and printmaker. Critically, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue situate White’s forthright commitment to figuration as a dynamic response to the shifting political movements and ongoing racial injustice of the times in which he worked, from the Great Depression of the 1930s through the black power era of the 1970s. Even as the exhibition’s generic subtitle—A Retrospective—suggests a slight hesitation to characterize, and thereby delimit, White’s work in any way, a focus on the activist dimension of his practice is evident in the wall text and even more strongly in the catalogue. The volume includes essays on White’s public mural practice, engagement with midcentury black feminism and West Coast activism, and his legacy as a community-oriented educator. It is a credit both to White’s art and the scholars who have interpreted it that political and aesthetic concerns are persuasively interwoven and inextricable. Although White was well-known during his life, in the decades since his death in 1979, his work has received limited scholarly attention. This major exhibition, organized by curators Sarah Kelly Oehler of the Art Institute of Chicago and Esther Adler of MoMA, is the first to examine the full sweep of his career since Images of Dignity: A Retrospective of the Works of Charles White, presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1982. It joins other recent retrospectives of midcentury African American artists, including Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist curated by Richard J. Powell in 2014 and Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis curated by Ruth Fine in 2015. Foregrounding the production of black artists in this period charts new paths through midcentury American art, dislodging the stale 1945 divide between the end of a parochial “American art” emblematized by the Regionalist painting of Thomas Hart Benton on the one hand, and the high modernism of abstract expressionist paintings like those of Benton’s one-time student Jackson Pollock on the other. Additionally, as a focus on artists like White makes clear, it is no longer tenable to teach a twentieth-century US art history that relegates the production of black artists to a single day on the “Harlem Renaissance” before engaging with artists of color during the rise of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This exhibition asks us to envision the mid-twentieth century through an artist whose formative orientation looked toward postrevolutionary Mexico, whose enduring aesthetic investigations centered on the black body, and whose unwavering commitment to making art responsive to social problems and popular audiences charts new art historical through lines from the 1930s to the 1970s. In 2018–19, Charles White: A Retrospective traveled from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, then to its final display at Los Angeles County Museum of Art—a three-city tour that mirrors the trajectory of White’s life. White was born in Chicago, and by his late teens he was part of a circle of young black artists including writer Richard Wright, dancer Katherine Dunham, and poet Gwendolyn Brooks.2 In

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查尔斯·怀特的激进主义形象

查尔斯·怀特 (Charles White) 的第一幅壁画《五个伟大的美国黑人》（1939 年）展示在查尔斯·怀特的入口外：回顾展，提供了纽约现代艺术博物馆展览装置的介绍性艺术品。 1 在这个雄心勃勃的中心构图，怀特渲染了一个令人惊讶的身体亲密的场景。弗雷德里克·道格拉斯 (Frederick Douglass) 搂着一个赤膊男子的棕色后背，他的头埋在伟大废奴主义者的肩膀上。尽管这种拥抱肯定是为了象征道格拉斯作为被奴役者的避难所和捍卫者的重要性，但在这个具有启发性的回顾展的背景下，它似乎是怀特塑造形象方法的亲密和关怀精神的体现。怀特终生致力于黑人的美丽和尊严，这是他人文主义艺术实践的源泉。这种品质体现在怀特自己关于音乐力量的话语中，他在 1955 年称赞音乐表达了“人民的尊严、流露的温柔、社会和同志情谊以及人性”（91）。在怀特的作品中，无论是在题材层面还是在他运用媒介的精致和不断提高的技巧方面，都表现出强烈的柔情——首先是作为一名画家，然后在他职业生涯的大部分时间里，主要是作为一名绘图员和版画家。至关重要的是，展览及其随附的目录将怀特对形象的直率承诺定位为对他工作时代不断变化的政治运动和持续种族不公正的动态回应，从 1930 年代的大萧条到 1970 年代的黑人权力时代。尽管展览的总副标题——回顾展——暗示怀特在以任何方式刻画并由此界定怀特的作品时略有犹豫，但墙上的文字和目录中更明显地体现了对他的实践活动维度的关注。该卷包括关于怀特的公共壁画实践、与本世纪中叶黑人女权主义和西海岸激进主义的接触以及他作为面向社区的教育家的遗产的文章。怀特的艺术和解释它的学者都认为政治和美学问题令人信服地交织在一起，密不可分，这都是功劳。尽管怀特生前就广为人知，但在他 1979 年去世后的几十年里，他的工作受到的学术关注有限。此次大型展览，以及抽象表现主义绘画的高度现代主义，例如本顿曾经的学生杰克逊·波洛克（Jackson Pollock）的绘画。此外，正如对像怀特这样的艺术家的关注所表明的那样，在与有色人种艺术家接触之前，将 20 世纪的美国艺术史放在“哈莱姆文艺复兴”的一天，这种做法不再站得住脚。身份政治在 1980 年代和 1990 年代的兴起。本次展览要求我们通过一位艺术家来展望 20 世纪中叶，这位艺术家的创作取向着眼于后革命时期的墨西哥，其持久的美学研究以黑体为中心，他坚定不移地致力于使艺术对社会问题和大众观众做出反应，绘制出新的艺术史通过从 1930 年代到 1970 年代的线路。在 2018-19 赛季，查尔斯·怀特：回顾展从芝加哥艺术学院前往纽约现代艺术博物馆，最后在洛杉矶县艺术博物馆展出——这是一次反映怀特生活轨迹的三城之旅。怀特出生在芝加哥，在他十几岁的时候，他是包括作家理查德赖特、舞蹈家凯瑟琳邓纳姆和诗人格温多林布鲁克斯在内的年轻黑人艺术家圈子的一员。 2