African American Art at Woodmere Art Museum

Without a doubt, the most exciting exhibition in Philadelphia right now is “In Search of Missing Masters” at the Woodmere Art Museum. It should also put to rest that old moniker, “African American Art.” It’s either art or it’s nothing, and these works are really something. So why put it in any category except American?

The exhibition of some 135 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, organized by Woodmere’s curator, W. Douglas Paschall, exhibits for the first time a portion of the collection amassed over 30 years by Lewis Tanner Moore, a descendent of the 19th-Century Philadelphia artist Henry Ossawa Tanner. Fittingly, it begins with three paintings by Tanner and includes many prominent Philadelphia artists as well as new names and faces, including the promising young, figurative painter, Sterling Shaw, a recent Pennsylvania Academy graduate.

Although Moore has limited his collection to works by African American artists, the art covers the spectrum of all the divergent stylistic developments of the 20th Century, from Fauve to Abstract Expressionism to neo-primitive to the New Figurative, which now almost monopolizes Chelsea galleries. Throughout the exhibition, I basked in the glow of art I can connect with. It speaks to me and for me and for all of us.

The calm before the 20th-Century storm

The first gallery you enter contains a cross-section of the major art movements of the 20th Century. The lower rotunda space is hung roughly chronologically. All the well-known African American artists of the Philadelphia area are represented, with a few major exceptions, such as Cavin Jones and Charles Burwell, both of whom are included in Moore’s collection but not in the exhibition. Let’s hope a sequel will feature these omissions.

Tanner’s portrait Sister Sarah (1882) is a lovely, classical study of a pensive young woman who was the collector’s grandmother. It’s like the calm before the storm of 20th-Century art. Madonna (late 1940s), by Irene Clark, a Washington, D.C., native who lived in Chicago, reflects the strong influence of Matisse— his distortions, flat patterning and palette— in this study of a suckling baby with a half-black, half-white mother whose facial features are viewed both profile and frontal. It’s such a strong painting that I feel remiss that I’m unfamiliar with the artist. Lewis Tanner Moore is correct when he wrote in his excellent catalogue commentary that black artists have been “systematically and consistently underrepresented in shows in both commercial galleries and museums.” The same can be said of women artists— who, happily, exert a powerful presence in this exhibition.

The sandstone Studio Guard Figure (1948) by Selma Burke, for example, reflects her studies with Aristide Maillol in Paris. The primitive form seems to emerge out of the stone through a natural force. Burke’s Harlem Socialite painted plaster bust in the main gallery is a composed portrait of a handsome woman. Although I’ve been familiar with Burke’s work through the decades, I never before realized she was black. That’s essentially immaterial for Burke’s art but probably explains why she failed to achieve wider public recognition. Let’s hope those days are over.

A frisson of terror

Paul Keene’s La Cadayla Morta (1965) is another landmark work. This large oil-on-canvas painting inspires the celebrated frisson of terror that accompanies the Latino Day of the Dead. Meanwhile, you just want to wallow in its glorious colors and brushwork.

New Hope Landscape (1990s), by the recently deceased Louis Sloan, is a gem. The warm tonality of a setting sun permeates the sky, shrubs and fields extending into the distance. Sloan was a beloved teacher for more than 35 years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; he was greeted with affection and enthusiasm at this show’s opening reception.

Moe Brooker is represented by Gift of the Spirit (1987), but for more of his recent work, go to the Sande Webster Gallery, where the exhibition of his paintings, “I Come to Dance My Joy” (through November 4, 2008), will warm your heart and lift your spirits. They are beautifully composed, abstract, odes to life.

Look beneath the surface

Graphic patterning is well represented by Charles Burwell, with Bio Labyrinth #9 (1997), Berrisford Boothe’s Neither Fish nor Fowl (2007) and William T. Williams’s Monk’s Tale (2006). And you can’t miss Roy Crosse’s Maquette for Monumental Sculpture (2000), a reference to Cubist sculpture of the 1920s. LeRoy Johnson’s painted and glazed ceramic Untitled ode to Matisse is delightful, and his Brickyard Book, a construction from his “North Philadelphia” series, requires multiple viewings. You can’t absorb it all at once. On the surface it looks like Outsider art, but look again– not quite!

Should these “African American artists” be classed as a separate entity? After this exhibition, the answer is clearly no. They’re American artists who, along with other veterans who took advantage of the GI Bill after World War II, studied in Paris. Art is universal.


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