Deputy director Thelma Golden has gathered together 87 paintings and drawings by 30 African-American artists in order to figure out–as she puts it in the exhibition’s catalog–“where the ‘real’ ‘black art’ that spoke to the ‘community’ fit in my cosmology of aesthetic production.” Translation: why has the SMH, which was founded in 1968 because black artists seemed to be excluded from mainstream art museums, up to now excluded kitsch? Where are the realistic paintings of noble old folk, precious children, princesses and warriors romantically entwined, and emphatically muscled, winged black angels that the black mass audience loves? Golden deserves credit just for answering such a thorny question with this show. The Museum of Modern Art wouldn’t even think of showing the hugely popular paintings of sunset cottages by white artist Thomas Kinkade. MoMA fancies itself an arbiter of esthetic quality. It doesn’t care if certain kinds of art never make it in the door.
Golden put out a nationwide call to the more than 15,000 artists she says work in the “Black Romantic” manner. The result–presumably the very best of hundreds of submissions–is a kind of a Norman Rockwell-meets-George Hurrell pictorial pridefest. And there’s some good stuff in it. Oliver Johnson trades on nostalgia for the 1930s and ’40s, but he’s a solid painter and emphatic colorist. James Hoston’s “Hot Day In” is a nice, quiet painting of a woman gazing at the warm weather outside her window. On the evidence of “The Rucker,” 28-year-old Kadir Nelson could probably create a Sistine ceiling of basketball if he were ever given the chance. The even younger Kehinde Wiley’s “Conspicuous Fraud #1 (Eminence)” is a searing portrayal of a young man in a business suit, presumably trying to make it in the white man’s world, about to be overwhelmed by his own Medusa-esque dreads. And Keith Duncan’s hip-hop painting-collage “Cain and Abel” has a funky authority to it.
These art works are, alas, exceptions. Too much of the work in “Black Romantic” looks like the dust jacket of a fantasy sci-fi novel. For the most part, the artists’ skills as draftsmen range from awful to merely pretty good. Once you’ve read the titles (such as Troy Johnson’s “Quilting the Fabrics of Life”), hardly anything in the exhibition makes you want to go back and look at the painting in the paintings. The nadir is Toni Taylor’s “Gemini–Souls Akin,” one of those hunk-and-babe, cosmic-love pictures that look like a Luther Vandross record sounds. Golden herself writes that when she first dipped into the kind of art that “Black Romantic” surveys, she was often “physically unsettled by what I perceived to be the overwrought sentiment, strident essentialism, and problematic authenticity that is the lingua franca of this world.” Amen.
“Black Romantic” will probably be a critical failure and a popular hit–for the same reasons that the critically maligned Kinkade outsells almost every other painter in the country. By the time the show closes, however, Golden will likely have started a vigorous debate about the art world’s rejection of kitsch, especially when it isn’t tricked out in irony by hip young white artists. And “Black Romantic” is chock-full of (as a wall text puts it) “imagery that competes with popular representations of the black figure in the media.” But you can’t rebut all those perp-walk photographs in our daily newspapers just by stuffing a perfectly honorable–no, make that courageous–little museum with well-intentioned schlock. Only a true romantic would think you could.
Black RomanticThe Studio Museum in Harlem Through June 23
