Charles White

Charles White was a Black American artist, activist and educator who was born in Chicago on April 2, 1918 to a domestic worker, his mother, and a railroad and construction worker, his father, but was raised, primarily, by his mother on the south side of Chicago. where he would spend his childhood in the public library because his mother could not afford a babysitter; there he developed an interest in reading and art. He spent his adolescence and young adult years studying on scholarships at the Chicago Institute of Art, sighting his influences as Mitchell Siporin, Francis Chapin and Aaron Bohrod. He was part of the Black Renaissance of the thirties and forties, teaching and creating art at Dillard University in New Orleans in the early forties where he met and briefly married fellow artist, Elizabeth Catlett, after participating in Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal known as the Works Progress Administration both federally and, locally, in the state of Illinois. He spent the last fourteen years of his life (1956 - 1979) teaching and producing art at the Otis Institute in Los Angeles----not only influencing his students but gaining new insight from them which served to influence the trajectory of his art as well. His art depicted the plight of black Americans and their effort in gaining their freedom from their oppressors----highlighting the slings and arrows of white supremacy and the devastation it left in its wake. He, also, resisted the push at the time by his peers to move from figurative and representational art to abstraction. He was considered a classicist, specializing in drawing, painting and lithography, being heavily influenced by Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera. 

I went to Charles White: A Respective at LACMA which is housed in the Resnick Pavilion. I was, immediately, drawn to his ink on paper because how painterly and expressive it is and as a painter myself, I am always searching for the most auto graphic qualities in my work and that of  others.Therefore, it comes as no surprise that his lithographs are what most stood out to me, in particular, his colored lithograph series "Love Letters I, II, & III". Each piece is medium format which allows one the opportunity to discover them from a bit of a distance and then, slowly, be drawn closer.  Love Letters I and II are in monochrome and appear to be in direct conversation with each other.  Love Letter I depicts a young woman looking straight ahead; she is expressionless; her image is cropped just above the crown and right at her clavicle in a rectangular field that occupies the upper third of the print and flanked to either side by very erratic and heavy marks, The lower two-thirds consist of a vast field of, slightly, more ordered and, vaguely, more uniform marks, resembling a cubist field; centered are two rose blossoms

In a pale reddish tone, expressing the beauty and chaotic tumult of youth. Love Letter II, similarly, depicts the bust of an Afro'd woman, only this time, she appears to be beyond child bearing years with a similar expression and orientation only contained in a circular fashion with a soft blended background. Directly, below her is a rose blossom in deep red. Both the rose and the disk float suspended against the stark backdrop of the cream colored pape, almost minimalist in comparison to Love Letter I as if to express the more sophisticated wisdom and depth that the comes with the experience of age. Love Letter III seems to exist in a much more indirect conversation with I and II in a stark departure from the monochromatic scheme of I and II. Love Letter III is dominated by color in a vast color field of deep teal that encompasses the upper two-thirds of the print with a pale coral conch shell suspended above a male figure's bust wrapped in some sort of heavy robe in the lower third where the deep teal transitions, softly, into the most transparent version of itself it can be, without being colorless. The use of the teal seems to be sampling Rothko's deep contemplative color fields with a touch of Dali like magic in levitating conch, though not fully going all the way with either aesthetic. White is actively participating in the Black artistic tradition of "intertexuality"; of repetition with revision; grounding Dali's whimsy, and Rothko's untethered emotion in the very literal, yet hauntingly ethereal description of a young Black man. A dynamic tension is created; not in the marks, but marriage of these seemingly divergent stylistic approaches into something new and exciting. Here White has found "the notes between the notes", and he plays them into legend. 

Charles White: A Retrospective is a monumental exhibition. Concerned with the Black body in all its splendid possibilities good, bad, tragic and triumphant.