LINEAGES, THOSE TREE-LIKE maps of ancestry, have been a mainstay of royal families of the past and of the biological theory of evolution. They also apply to art, though attempts to create, and publish, a branching tree of art influences and style only came of age in the mid-twentieth century.
African American visual artists have their own branching tree of influence and innovation. Its founders emerged early in the twentieth century, and the significant branching began during the New Deal and the Second World War.
This art lineage may been seen in the lives of five notable black artists in the United States, all of whom have influenced other artists, and boasted their own successes as well. While all have focused on African American themes—the core of the lineage—they have also mixed their styles with the European tradition and created a new species of art.
It begins with the painter Charles Alston, the “jazz age" painter of the Harlem Renaissance, born to an Episcopal ministers family in North Carolina in 1907, and moved to New York City. A gifted illustrator and sculptor as well, he was the first African American to be a supervisor in the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Lawrence, though mindful of black history, studied the academic tradition of European painting, adapting it to his own topics. He painted realist murals on American themes, and did commercial illustration. His realist bronze bust of Martin Luther King resides in the White House. At one point in his career, he turned to full-time painting, developing a unique style that was more modernist than his academic training. This was his "jazz age" output.
In New York City, Alston met another younger aspiring artist, Jacob Lawrence, a decade his junior. At the Harlem Art Workshop, Alston taught Lawrence, recognized his gifts, and urged him to further study. Lawrence was born in 1917 in New Jersey and was reared in Harlem.
Parallel to Lawrence, another black painter of future note was making his way in his native Chicago. He was Charles White, who would go on to teach a second generation of black painters. By the time both Lawrence and White were becoming mature artists, the Harlem Renaissance already had peaked, and they were able to survey the landscape for other art trends, from academic realism to modernism.
Lawrence adopted what he would call "dynamic cubism," and would apply his stylistic figure painting to narrative works that told the story of black lives during the Great Migration to the northern cities, and of life there, and also back home in the rural South. His works, often done in series of small panels, were heralded in the national media by 1941.
Meanwhile, White graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938, and worked in the WPA's easel division and then as a muralist. A deft draftsman, he applied it to telling stories of African American lives in their political and social context. Not surprisingly, like a lot of artists, White was drawn to the utopian ideas of communism, and briefly came under the cloud of the McCarthy Era. Before then, he had experienced life in the Jim Crow South and then, married, he headed to New York and the Art Students League. He trained in drawing and printmaking, and in 1943 completed one of his signature works, the mural The Contribution of the Negro to American Democracy at the historically black Hampton University in Virginia.
After a divorce, he remarried to a white woman, and suffering a relapse from tuberculosis, moved to Los Angeles. There, in 1965, he became a painting professor at the Otis Art Institute until his death in 1979.
Eventually, both Lawrence and White, carriers of the Alston legacy, had their own students. Lawrence taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, and spread his national influence, especially the idea of narrative painting in an age of abstraction. In this, his absorption of the Renaissance tradition—he favored its tempera illustration—he produced a much imitated style.
In Los Angeles, White's influence as a realist and figurative painter carried over to two new-generation painters, in particular his direct student, Kerry James Marshall. The other is Kehinde Wiley. Both mastered the European style of painting, and like Alston, Lawrence, and White before them, applied it to new interpretations of the black experience.
In this lineage, it is clear that black artists drew on the white European tradition of painting, yet applied it to African America topics. Neither the European nor modernist tacks were original, yet their amalgams were quite unique.
And by painting in the European style, for example, both Marshall and Wiley were intent on commentary. As Marshall said, "I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what art is returned as a critical issue." As for Wiley, having mastered the "grand manner" of European realism (having trained at the Yale University Art Department), and cognizant of its icons and themes, he mastered a large-canvas style reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens. He eventually painted the official portrait of President Obama.
Many more black painters have branches from this lineage, and as the group above illustrates, a large number of them retained a core theme—the black experience—and adapted it to the European styles of painting, both traditional and modernist.
Today’s debate over so-called "appropriation" in art would benefit from recollections of how this lineage of black artists borrowed, mixed, and innovated between European and African styles. No one has questioned the artistic success of such appropriation.