Chapter Nine
SLAVERY,
ANTI-BLACK RACISM &
American Artists
CONTENTS
Introduction
9.1
Théodore Géricault, Romanticism
and the Radical Representation of Race
9.2
The Atlantic Slave Trade: Records and Reverberations
9.3
Abolition and Aesthetics in Britain: J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship/a>
9.4
Picturing Enslavement:
Genre, Race and Stereotype in Antebellum America
9.5
9.6
Emancipation, Black Civil Rights and Social Reform<
9.7
Winslow Homer: Bearing Witness
9.8
Reconstruction and the Remaking of Identity
9.9
9.10
9.11
Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures and Progress”:
Reclaiming Race
9.12
Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner: Breaking Free
INTRODUCTION
An understanding of nineteenth-century modernity is incomplete without a consideration of the complex legacy of racialized slavery. Beyond its economic and political impact and the horrific human toll on millions of people of African descent, the history of Atlantic slavery advanced a Eurocentric worldview which asserted Western supremacy and legitimized the identity construction of the ‘other.’
This chapter will look at how representations of race were conceived, received and confronted in the Western imagination. How did artists picture a negated humanity born of bondage? Beginning with the European Romanticist artists, Théodore Géricault and J.M.W. Turner, and moving through to late-nineteenth American art, we will examine the underpinnings of conceptualizing race as momentous events were shaping modern history. In the context of race, these themes extend to narratives related to slavery, colonialism, and the struggles of marginalized communities.
When Édouard Manet was painting his infamous Olympia in 1863, and Paris was embracing modern life, modernity in the United States was mired in the changes of a nation’s fractured identity. America’s expansive agenda, its manifest destiny, was deeply entwined with slavery. The clash over slavery divided the country and led to the cataclysmic events of the Civil War in 1861, and the Reconstruction era, fraught with stereotypical slander, which followed.
American artists were severely challenged by the impact and aftermath of the war and the profound social changes they witnessed. Some turned to genre images of the every day, ambiguous and open-ended, to comment on the changing relationships between blacks and whites. Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson produced works that reflected America’s complex, changing attitudes toward black citizens in psychologically nuanced works that considered the inner experience of African Americans. Others adopted the metaphorical potential of the natural world, presenting the transformations of a nation in flux through the pictorial investigation of landscape phenomena.
The contributions of nineteenth-century African American artists Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner will close the chapter. The obstacles of racial and gender bias compelled both artists to pursue their acclaimed professional careers internationally, Tanner living i