African American Art in Chicago, 1900-1950
Willie Robert Middlebrook: Black Angels
Needham anticipated later developments in African-American art. By the 30s and 40s, black artists began to look to African art for inspiration and started to differentiate their images from those in the Western tradition: the viewer through a window appreciates the qualities of light and air from a position of security and even privilege–a transcendent eye being possible mainly to those who have food, clothing, housing, and the freedom to traverse the landscape unharassed. Walter Ellison makes this point in House Rent Party (1940), a lively painting of a practice not uncommon even in the 50s: a family needing rent money would throw a party with an admission price. But the partyers are all seen here through a giant keyhole filling the middle of a door. By making the viewer a voyeur, Ellison gives the event a disturbing edge: one opens one’s home out of economic necessity, and the viewer, like the partyers, is both an invited guest and an intruder.
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The bulk of his 19 recent works at G.R. N’Namdi are painted on strips of rag paper, often woven together into depictions of cubes with one corner near the center thrusting toward the viewer. Generally the three faces visible around it are cut away, revealing the interior of the cube. Dreams of Amorgos is more extreme: large squares have been cut out of all six faces, so that the cube’s edges have become “beams,” as in a building frame. One sees it in this three-dimensional way but also as a flat arrangement of woven paper–part of what animates Loving’s work is the tension he creates between the illusion of depth and actual flatness, a classic modernist issue that here seems less a matter of agonized self-questioning than an almost visceral struggle.
Middlebrook’s dense surfaces don’t collapse into monotony because he combines a variety of illusionistic effects; his intentional heterogeneity produces some of the conflict and contradictions of Loving’s abstractions. And for all their illusionistic games, these prints radiate conviction, also suggested by texts Middlebrook and his wife have written, available in the gallery, that describe not only the folklore of black angels but their belief in them.
