Painted BLACK
in an article for The Magazine
Antiques. “The provocation in
these pictures is more latent
and more fascinating: they
capture ordinary moments
that...happened largely beyond
white America’s imagination
or concern.”
Regionalist painter, Thomas
Hart Benton, whose painting,
South East Cotton Warehouse,
is featured in Painted Black,
became famous for his lively
portrayals of ordinary people
engaged in mundane activities.
important cultural factor in the
South,’ to which Benton replied,
‘niggers,’ and explained: ‘The
colored people by what they
could do in your climate determined your way of life...They
are responsible for the tradition
of ‘good life’ which you have,
for without them to do your
work, you could not have had
that life. Nearly everything you
have can be traced to their influence except your architecture,
and that is borrowed.’ ”
Also featured in the exhibi-
“...most of the painters in 19th and 20th
century America were white, but they regularly
painted Negro subjects, sometimes in
what were their masterpieces.”—J. H. S u r o v e k
As Alexis L. Boylan wrote in
her essay, From Gilded Age
to Gone with the Wind: The
Plantation in Early Twentieth Century Art, “for Benton,
the romance of the South was
embodied in his ideas about
African Americans. He shared a
conversation in which a southerner asked him about ‘the most
tion is work by William Bromley III, among the mid-19th
Century’s best observers and
documentarians of societal
attitudes and forces in action,
dress, and circumstances. His
painting, White Slave, addresses the notion of “white slavery”
in a pre-Civil War image of a
white shoe shine boy polishing
OnV
i e w
Ma
g a z i n e
.
c om
•
William Bromley III,
White Slave, ca. 1855;
Oil on pine panel,
26-1/2 x 20”.
J
u ly
/S
e p t e m b e r
2015
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