In art, think big and recent resolutions with a tinge of caution

Article by: Roxana Popescu
International Herald Tribune; 12/24/2005

As the new year approaches, almost everyone needs some guidance in making resolutions. So correspondents from Your Money recently asked their best sources for personal finance advice that the experts considered essential for getting painlessly out of the old and on with the new. Art investors hunting for the perfect Chagall or Diebenkorn to round out their collections might want to act in 2006, because it is a great moment for expensive modern art. Marc Porter, president of the U.S. division of Christie's International, offered two recommendations for the coming year. First, think big. ''Objects of the highest quality continue to appreciate the most,'' Porter said. ''Buy the best quality you can possibly afford in any field.''Second, think recent. ''The largest number of people getting involved in the art world are focusing on postwar and contemporary art,'' he said. ''All signals seem to indicate that this is the collecting field for the next generation.''Art investment is gaining ground, he said. ''It seems to have passed a time when the question was whether people would invest in art. Now it's unclear how much money is going to move into it. Almost every savvy financial person is looking at art and antiques as an absolutely suitable field.''

Report Says Investments in Arts, Collectibles Becoming More Mainstream

Article by Karen Mracek
The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News; 5/2/2004

Putting your money where your heart is can produce favorable returns -- even if you don't have a lot to invest.
Alternative investments such as art, wine and antiques are becoming more mainstream, according to a report by Cap Gemini Ernest and Young.
And with good reason -- art has outperformed the S&P 500 Index with annual returns of 12.6 percent over the past 50 years compared with 11.7 percent for the S&P, according to the Mei/Moses All Art Index.
You don't have to invest millions to see a return. More than half the U.S. art sold from January to October 2003 went for less than $1,000, according to Christie's International auction house.
But if you can't afford Monet or Picasso, the risks are higher because the value of lesser-known works is so subjective.
" The standard mantra has always been 'never buy art as an investment,' " said Nicholas Lowry, president of Swann Auction Gallery in New York. "But investment, by definition, is about taking a risk."
That's where the passion comes in. For many passion investors, a big payoff isn't a top concern.
" It's about investing in something you are going to enjoy and live with," said Gina Teresi, manager for personal insurance for high-net-worth customers at Chubb Group of Insurance Companies in New York.
The Internet has made it much easier to buy collectibles, from fine wine and antiques to comic books and toys from fast-food kids' meals. Sites such as eBay and Yahoo help collectors and dealers find each other.
Tucson comic book collector Adrian Randall, 39, recently used the Internet to sell an Amazing Spider-Man book for about $300 -- a 40 percent profit over what he paid.
" I go to a lot less trade shows now," said Randall, a software engineer. "I have been able to find books I have been looking for for years."
Affordable art fairs -- which typically feature artwork for less than $5,000 -- are also popping up around the country.
The key to success in passion investing is the same as they key to success in investing in stocks and bonds. "You know the saying: Invest in what you know," Lowry said.
With the right combination of know-how and luck, passion investing can pay off.
A 1906 Nympheas oil painting by Claude Monet was purchased in 1960 for $50,000. It was sold at Christie's New York in 1999 for $22.6 million. That's an annual return of almost 17 percent, outperforming the S&P 500 by about 5 percentage points a year.
But few investments get this kind of return. Even the hottest up-and-coming artists could fizzle out, and their work could become worthless. The same goes for trendy collectibles like Beanie Babies or baseball cards.
For many passion investors, their enjoyment makes the risk palatable.
" It's nice to make money, but it is also fun finding the one you have been looking for," said comic book collector Randall, who says his collection is worth about $5,000.
" I don't think it will send my kids to college," he said. "But it is a hobby I would like to pass down to them."
Local artist Daniel Martin Diaz doesn't give to much thought to the long-term value of his paintings, which often have dark, religious themes.
" It's hard to tell, when someone purchases one of my paintings, if they are planning on reselling it," he said. "I really think that collectors see my work and see that it is always evolving. But the first reason they buy it is because they are truly drawn to the work."
Diaz -- who has been painting full time for six years -- thinks his work will increase in value, because he is putting more effort into each piece.
" The way things are going, my work is definitely going up," said Diaz, who recently sold a painting for $6,500.
" The prices are based on what people are willing to pay and what they have been paying," he said. "Lately, I have been doing some very high-end projects that are bringing the value of everything up."
In exchange for dividends or capital gains, investors get intangible benefits during the time they own the investment.
" The greatest value is the invisible dividends, the constant joy of having something on your wall or having it for your children when they grow up," said Lowry, the art gallery president.
Like the stock markets, alternative investment markets are influenced by forces beyond simple supply and demand.
" Following Sept. 11, the art market did well," Lowry said. "Sales grew as people were looking for an emotional investment."
Like all investments, the keys are to learn all you can about what you're investing in, and to not put all your eggs in one basket, A.G. Edwards financial consultant Bob Dorson said.
" You want to be able to have the best background and be educated about your investments," Dorson said.
Also, know that even the wisest passion investment is unlikely to pay off immediately.
" You can flip a stock real quick," Lowry said. "The art world goes much slower. Art investment is for the long run."
Timing is also important. "There is a lot of hype that may influence the market," he said. "For example, the best time to sell a James Bond poster is a month before the next James Bond movie comes out, when the hype is up."
For passion investors, financial risk may be trumped by the risk of losing the item.
" You can't protect against fluctuation in the market," said Chubbs' Teresi. "But you need to protect against the physical loss."
She specializes in insuring high-net-worth customers at Chubb, a property and casualty insurer that covers about two-thirds of the Forbes Billionaire List and about half the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
In addition to theft, passion investments take some money to protect and maintain.
" Any client who has a passion and is investing significantly in their passion -- whether art, antiquities, jewelry or real estate -- has to have the proper insurance," she said.
Stocks certificates can sit in a drawer, but valued assets need constant care.
" I have to spend anywhere from $2 to $50 on each book to keep it in mint condition," Randall said of his comic books. He keeps his most valuable ones in a safe deposit box.
" If they are truly passionate about a piece of art or a bottle of wine, loss control is very important," Teresi said. "If it's a Picasso or a Monet, they can't buy it again."
Passion investing has another potential pitfall: when it's time to sell, the truly passionate investor may be too attached to let a treasured item go.
" Wine investors purchase bottles because they are passionate about it," Teresi said, "and a lot of them do drink it. They enjoy going to the cellar and drinking a $2,000 bottle of wine with their friends."
Local beverage distributor Andrew McCreery, a certified sommelier and avid wine collector, grew up in a family where wine was a part of his life -- from Sunday dinner to military service that took him to a wine-producing part of Germany.
" I am not looking for a financial return," said McCreery, 37, who has more than 200 bottles in his collection. "I have sold a few bottles in the past, but I really do it because it adds to quality of life."

Art is viewed as good investment option today

Article by Nalini S Malaviya
The Economic Times (Tribune Business News); 11/25/2005

Art is being viewed as an investment option. There are many factors that go into making art pay off as a good investment. Harish J Padmanabha, an art collector and chairman, Forbin Poly Glass, shares his thoughts on how art works for investors.

QUESTION: Is investing in art a new trend?
ANSWER: Not really. Earlier, it was the domain of a few, whose awareness and passion led them to collect art while the investment angle was secondary. Now that the contemporary art market is buoyant there are more investors. The media, publicity and hype have also led to an increase in art investments.

Q: How does one decide which artwork to buy?
A: One should not confuse the value of artwork with its price. One should gain knowledge by constant visits to art exhibitions and sales, galleries, art magazines, auctions and the Internet. Be careful that even mediocre art can be propped up price wise. One is always safe investing in art of established artists, but then, they come at a heavy price.

Q: What are the factors that influence the market price of an artwork?
A: It is an intricate process and several factors are at play. Primarily, the art itself should have its own strength, originality and intrinsic value. It also depends upon the medium, (drawings, watercolours, pastels, oil or acrylic on canvas, graphic prints, sculptures etc) seniority and name of the artist, the promoter and gallery. From an investment point of view it is prudent to watch and follow works of artists being promoted by an established and popular gallery, since they will see to it that the prices appreciate.
More importantly these days 'signatures' sell in the art market. The theory of 'demand and supply' holds good here too, especially in auctions. If in an auction, the works of one or more artists is flooded then the prices come down. To some extent hype and being media savvy contributes to the price.
A 'one time' initial sale of a work by a new artist in a debut exhibition need not necessarily determine that price. This I term, as an anology 'primary market' akin to the IPO of a stock in the stock market. It is the subsequent sale or sales of the same work, which I think determines its true value in pricing. This I call the 'secondary market' as in the stock market. The more a work of art gets sold and resold in the market place its price is bound to appreciate.

Q: How long does it take for a work of art to appreciate?
A: Till about four years ago it took a fairly long time. Since the past couple of years there is a greater appreciation, but one can't exactly predict the time frame as several factors are involved -- and not all works of all artists appreciate quickly. By and large works of established artists appreciate faster. Some of the crucial factors are works being sold at popular auctions around the world, art camps being held at important venues, knowledgeable curators, and coverage by art critics.

Q: Where does art fit in an investment portfolio?
A: It is an important option in one's investment portfolio albeit for the discerning. To some extent I believe it is esoteric, although I feel it could be positioned between conventional investments such as stocks, shares, bonds, securities, gold and real estate.
In stocks and shares one can start with a relatively small investment whereas real estate calls for larger investments. One should remember that investment in art does not have the ease of liquidity that stocks and shares have or for that matter real estate has. Added to this the hassle of maintaining and preserving the artwork since they are highly susceptible to damage due to moisture, humidity, insects, rodents, ultra violet ray degradation, scratch and tear, breakage, transit damage etc.

Q: What percentage of one's investment should go into art?
A: That's a personal matter. One must remember that in general investment in art is a relatively long-term proposition for the average investor. The relative liquidity in art investment is slow although of late there are instances of speculative trading in art. Some investors are commissioning and underwriting works of some mid-level artists, stocking them, pushing the prices up and disinvesting.

Q: For whom is it a good prospect to invest in art -- high net worth individuals or small investors?
A: I would say until a few years ago investing in art was for high net worth individuals because sales in the 'secondary market' was quite low, therefore, telling on the liquidity.
Now with transactions in the secondary market picking up even relatively small investments can be thought of. However, the down side of it is, prices of good art have skyrocketed in the past couple of years. Perhaps, one could start with an initial capital of about Rs 10 lakhs and progress thereafter.

African-American Art Captivates Both Black and White Collectors

Article by Daniel Grant
The Christian Science Monitor; Features, Art & Leisure sections 6/22/2001

AMHERST, MASS. -- Once thought of as a peripheral interest in the history of
art, a growing number of African-American artists are entering the
mainstream, their works sought after by white and black collectors who see
them variously as highly skilled, a cause to be supported, undervalued, or
all of the above.
" We're catering to first-generation African-American art buyers," says
George N'Namdi, owner of art galleries in Chicago and Birmingham, Mich.,
that feature predominantly African-American artists. More people have
disposable income these days, Mr. N'Namdi says, "and we're trying to get
them to buy art."
Most of the attention is going to such artists as Romare Bearden (1914-88),
Joshua Johnston (1765-1830), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Horace Pippin
(1888-1946), and Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), whose major works sell in
galleries for hundreds of thousands of dollars in private sales.
For works by Tanner, prices have reached $1 million.
The works of living artists have also reached high levels. N'Namdi notes
that prices for the large canvases of Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) have
neared $100,000.
Those of Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) have fetched $30,000-$35,000. Alvin Loving
(b. 1935) "has topped out at $70,000."
In general, prices are "several times higher than they were just 10 or 20
years ago."
Buyers are both white and black. Many of the white collectors regularly
purchase American art and have broadened their interest to include this
overlooked area.
Black collectors "almost exclusively buy the work of African-American
artists," says Halley Harrisburg, director of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
in New York, a white-owned gallery showing African-American artists as well
as white artists. "For many, it is a personal mission: They want to expose
their children to art by African-Americans...."
Says collector Bruce Gordon, president of retail markets for Verizon in New
York, "As an African-American, I wanted to invest in my own culture. I like
art, first of all, and I had an interest and reasonable resources to
invest."
Mr. Gordon notes that he is "not on a mission. I'm not trying to accomplish
something, but when I meet other African-Americans who should be interested
in the art of their own culture, but don't know how to gain access to it, I
introduce them to what I collect."
Galleries exhibiting the work of black artists have reached out to the
African-American community, sponsoring talks and classes about art in order
to "get people to realize that it's all right to collect art," says Sherry
Washington, a gallery owner in Detroit.
The opportunities for emerging African-American artists are far better than
a generation ago, and prices for the works of some artists born after World
War II are higher than for those of earlier generations. Jean-Michel
Basquiat, for example, emerged directly into the mainstream art world,
finding almost immediate critical praise and buyers - as have Lorna Simpson,
Carrie Mae Weems, and a growing number of others.
The resale market for the work of African-American artists has been growing,
although slowly. An untitled 1982 wood sculpture by Martin Puryear (b. 1941)
fetched $489,000 last year at Sotheby's, exceeding the $300,000 to $400,000
estimate.
Even higher prices have been fetched at auction by Basquiat (1960-88), whose
1982 mixed-media "Self-Portrait" sold at Christie's in 1998 for $3.3 million
- a record for the artist - well above the $400,000 to $600,000 estimate.
But many other well-regarded African-American artists haven't done so well
at auction. Part of the reason for the relatively low prices and paucity of
works being offered is that African-American art has not been the subject of
a theme sale at any major auction house, nor is there anyone on the staffs
who is an expert in this field.
" Few people in auction houses know anything about historical or even
contemporary African-American art," Ms. Harrisburg says.
Because of that, "It makes no sense to put work up at auction," she says.

Black Art Is Buried Treasure

Article By Thane Peterson
Business Week, Personal Business (February 13, 2006)

In an overheated market, works by African American are a bargain — for now.


For art collector John Axelrod, the epiphany came a dozen years ago at a New York gallery show of works by African Americans. The Boston lawyer, now retired, was stunned. "My feeling was, these are not African American artists, these are great artists from the country and period I collect in, and I don't know about them." Today about 90 of the 320 pieces he owns are by African Americans.

That, in a nutshell, is what many black collectors think will happen as more white collectors become familiar with the paintings, collages, sculptures, and photographs of African Americans. Wealthy African Americans are usually heavy buyers at the National Black Fine Art Show (Feb. 2-5 at the Puck Building in Manhattan), in part because they want to support work they believe doesn't get enough attention. But in an art market where prices seem badly inflated, collectors have economic reasons to be buying, too. "There isn't much else to collect that hasn't been overexploited," says David Driskell, the art professor emeritus at the University of Maryland who helped Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille, amass their collection. Predicts Atlanta art dealer Jerry Thomas Jr.: "In the next 10 years we're going to see a very significant appreciation in the price of African American work."

ON THE PROWL
There are already long waiting lists of collectors eager to pay a fortune for works by Chicago's Kerry James Marshall, New-York-based Kara Walker, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988 at the age of 27. But Driskell contends that prices still lag badly for African American masters such as Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), Romare Bearden (1914-88), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), and Elizabeth Catlett, 90, because they remain under-represented in mainstream galleries and museums. Indeed, even after a major Bearden retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art in 2003, the artist's pioneering collages still can be purchased for well under $100,000. "Bearden is the most undervalued artist in America right now," says Miami collector Donald Rubell.

Prices for those artists' works seem likely to rise. E.T. Williams, a retired banker and real estate investor who is on the board of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, says "a major catch-up" is under way as mainstream museums give African American artists more wall space and new museums such as San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora (which just opened in December) are built. That's already giving a boost to older artists, such as abstract painter Sam Gilliam, 72, the subject of a retrospective organized by Washington's Corcoran Gallery that will be moving on to museums in Louisville, Savannah, Ga., and Houston. The Art Institute of Chicago is running a major Catlett show through Apr. 23.

NBA PICKS
Meanwhile, a new generation of collectors is scouting talent. Professional basketball star Grant Hill, 33, who has built a museum-quality collection of black old masters (you can see it at granthill.com), plans to focus on younger living artists after he retires. Two of his friends, retired NBA player Elliot Perry, 36, and Darrell Walker, 44, an assistant coach with the New Orleans Hornets, are already purchasing pieces from emerging mixed-media artists such as Whitfield Lovell, 46, and Radcliffe Bailey, 37.

These collectors haunt galleries such as D.C. Moore, Michael Rosenfeld, and Bill Hodges in New York and G.R. N'Namdi (which has locations in Detroit and Chicago as well as New York). They also track shows by hip curators at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and get to know the artists. "We know that one day we'll go down in history as collectors," Walker says. It may pay to follow their lead.

African American art could offer value for investors

London Stock Exchange (February 6, 2006)

The work of African American artists could represent a sound investment for the medium to long-term, experts believe.

African American art remains undervalued, according to some sources, because it is one of the few remaining areas that has not seen heavy buying.

There are a number of significant collections held by art enthusiasts and prominent black figures, but African American art is thought to have significant potential for future growth.

"In the next ten years we're going to see a very significant appreciation in the price of African American work," Atlanta art dealer Jerry Thomas said during an interview with Business Week.

As more and more collectors warm to the idea of African American art, the value of certain works is sure to grow.

In uncertain economic times, a number of people are turning to alternative investments like art or fine wine, both as a means of making their money work for the future and to give them pleasure in the meantime.

Canon and Complexity: Piety, Subversion, Assault

Dr. Richard A. Long

The title that I have selected for this presentation suggests that a canon or officialized body of material represents simplicity in contrast to complexity. It would be more accurate to say that a canon represents the culmination of a quest for purity, the unadulterated, the authoritative. The quest involved in establishing a canon is fraught with hazard and hardly ever results in complete satisfaction for those for whom the canon is constructed.

In the process of compiling the book of writings we designate as the Old Testament, the Hebrew priests accepted and rejected items from a larger body of sacred or sanctified works, editing, correcting and censoring in the process. The end product was what was to be called in Greek the canon. We can only wonder, however, at the process which placed the harsh Code of Deuteronomy in proximity to the erotic Song of Solomon. Exegesis is still bedeviled by that choice today, despite millennia of allegorical interpretation.

Similarly, centuries later the Church Fathers who constructed the New Testament left out of their canon works such as the Gospel of Thomas, which emerges from the shadows to haunt the biographers of Jesus. Their inclusion of the Gospel of John which depicts Jesus in a ministry of one year along with those of Mark, Matthew, and Luke which narrate a ministry of three years provided ample substance for generations of dispute.

Similar canonic histories may be discerned in the sacred writings of Hindus and Buddhists.

The Western idea of a canon for works of art may be thought to be implicit in the chronicle of the Italian chronicler Vasari. At any rate by the eighteenth century the stars of the High Renaissance became the cornerstone of what was taught and esteemed in the art circles of England and France. Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael became objects of piety in the academies and the paragon of collections. By the early nineteenth century, there was already subversion-—the work of the Nazarenes in Germany proclaimed that there was value in the medieval painting tradition. They were followed by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. This subversion grew to the status of an assault upon the canon in France in the work of zealots such as Courbet and the Impressionists’ secession from the Salon.

In Europe the nineteenth century opened with a visual arts canon which the object of piety was the adoration of the High Renaissance; this was subverted by Romanticism with its echoes of the gothic and the exotic; and then came the assault—-the tension of industrial and bourgeois society manifesting itself in new subject matter and novel technique.

The visual arts canon in the United States—-and not incidentally in the other Americas--was essentially that of Europe. It underwent the same transformations, though with suitable provincial or colonial manifestations, New World piety being greater and resistence to subversion and assault stronger.

It is against this background of the American visual art experience that we come to the question of canonicity in African American Art. The primary canon maker of African American Art was Alain Locke and the founding document is his essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” as it appears in The New Negro. It contains both analytic and polemic features. Locke laments the fact that no School of Negro Art had yet developed.

We ought and must have a school of Negro art, a local and racially representative tradition. And that we have not, explains why the generation of Negro artists succeeding Mr. Tanner had only the inspiration of his great success to fire their ambitions, but not the guidance of a distinctive tradition to focus and direct their talents. Consequently, they fumbled and fell short of his international stride and reach. The work of W. E. Scott, E. A. Harleston, W. Braxton, W. Farrow, and Laura Wheeler in painting, and of Meta Warrick Fuller and May Howard Jackson in sculpture, competent as it has been, has nevertheless felt this handicap and has wavered between abstract expression which was imitative and not highly original, and racial expression which was only experimental. Lacking group leadership and concentration, they were wandering amateurs in the very field that might have given them concerted mastery.

In this founding document Locke calls for young African American artists to establish communion with African art, thereby bringing themselves into the circuit of modernist art, in other words subverting their immediate ancestors. He identifies three young artists as moving “in the direct of a racial school of art,” namely Archibald Motley, Aaron Douglas, and Albert Smith.

. . . . By 1931 in his major article “The American Negro Artist” (The American Magazine of Art 23:210-220), this list had expanded to include the following artists: W. J. Johnson (1901-1970), Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), James L. Wells (1902-1993), Malvin Gray Johnson (1896-1934), Richmond Barthe (1901-1989), and Sargent Johnson (1887-1964).

In many ways Aaron Douglas was the archetypal artist of the Locke canon.

Douglas had attended the University of Nebraska from which he had graduated in 1922 with a degree in Fine Arts. After a year or so of teaching in Kansas City, Missouri, he came to New York City just in time as it were to contribute illustrations, along with his teacher Winold Reiss, to The New Negro. In 1925, also, he contributed illustrations to both Opportunity and Crisis, the two monthlies which were the leading vehicle for the writers and spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance. He thus came to the attention not only of Alain Locke, but also to that of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson. In the March 1927 issue of Crisis, Douglas was listed as “art critic,” but this does not appear to have meant much. In 1926 Douglas collaborated with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and others in the production of the single issue of Fire! His contribution consisted of cubistic cover designs and three somewhat comic nervous line drawings,these quite different from the characteristic cubistic work of his illustrations for the following books in 1927:

Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk,
James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones,
Plays of Negro Life, edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory.

In 1928 Douglas did the book jacket for Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem. In 1927 he had also done his first mural, for Club Ebony in Harlem. He embarked on an ambitious mural project for the library at Fisk University in 1929, calling the older painter Edwin Harleston to his aid. During the course of the collaboration the painters each did portraits of the other. In 1931 Douglas who had spent 1928 in scholarship study at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, left the country for a year’s study in Paris, . . .

We can assume, however, that there were reservations-—subversions in our lexicon—-in respect to the Locke Canon.

The presence of Alain Locke as a member of the faculty of the University in the Art Department did not weigh as heavily as some have supposed in the development of the art program at Howard. Not all black artists had responded to the “Negro art” program propounded by the scholarly Dr. Locke, and his point of view was not particularly relished at Howard. James A. Porter in Modern Negro Art devotes a chapter to “The New Negro Movement” in which he provides a balanced overview of Locke’s view and reactions to it by artists and others. Porter notes:

It is evident that all the propagandistic criticism of the New Negro Movement failed to formulate an aesthetic program for the Negro artist. The admonition to imitate the “ancestral arts” could only foster academicism, and tended, moreover, to confuse the special geometric forms of African sculpture with specific racial feeling.

But he adds:

While unsound in its basic premise, the Negro art propaganda did serve to confirm Negro writers and artists in their search for local atmosphere and one of its most valuable results came from the suggestion that the Negro artists in all fields, look for those facets of life that had hitherto escaped the understanding interest of the artist.

In 1940, Alain Locke published The Negro in Art--A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art which provided an academic summation of the theme of African American art which had begun development in the mid-twenties under his tutelage. The book—-really an album in portfolio—-has three sections:

Part I The Negro As Artist
Part II The Negro in Art
Part III The Ancestral Arts

It is Part I, “The Negro As Artist,” which is most pertinent to a discussion of the canon.

In the preface to Part I, Locke after noting the presence of isolated African American artists in the nineteenth century-—he names several including the painter Bannister of New England, the sculptor Edmonia Lewis who ended her days in Rome, and the painter Duncanson, he deals more particularly with the paradox of the career of Henry Ossawa Tanner. After his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he was a pupil of Thomas Eakins, and indeed in the judgment of current art history, the most illustrious of that artist’s students, Tanner went to Paris. And he remained in France for the rest of his life.

Locke observes:

Recognition from Paris, at the time the world capitol of art, provided the vindication the Negro artist wanted and needed. But this gain involved the heavy price of the academic mould and the cosmopolitan outlook, both of which proved as great a handicap to the development of a racially representative art as they did, in the case of American artists generally, to the development of a native American art.

This phrase “racially representative art” is the template which Locke had used in his 1925 charge to young African American artists as he had deplored the failure of their elders to demonstrate racial consciousness.

Now in his 1940 Preface he says,
For a racial dilemma, a racial solution was necessary. It came in the mid-twenties from the inspiration of the New Negro Movement and its crusade of folk expression in all the arts . . .

By 1940 Locke had added to his canonic spectrum social analysis leading to a depiction of “religion, labor, housing, lynching, unemployment, social reconstruction . . . .” This, because during the thirties social realism-—inspired by the depression and international populism—-had exploded on the American art scene and had engulfed most of the young African American artists, to a greater or lesser degree.

At this juncture I should cite a recent study Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953 (2004) by Stacy I. Morgan.

Visual artists who receive extended treatment in Morgan’s study include Charles Alston, Hale Woodruff, John Biggers, John Wilson, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett.

The expanded Locke Canon—-comprising modernist Africanity, folk expression and social realism was by the late forties subverted-—if not assaulted by those artists who turned to various mainstream or individual currents such as surrealism and abstraction. These would include in some degree or other, Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee Smith, Charles Sebree, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden.

But it is remarkable that the majority of African American artists down to the Black Arts Movement of the sixties observed the pieties of the expanded Locke canon. A full account of the Black Arts Movement I leave to others, but it is important to observe that in spite of its revolutionary garb its rhetoric hardly differed from that of Alain Locke and it emphatically disparaged those deviations toward surrealism and abstraction that I was citing as subversions or assaults upon the Locke canon.

The Black Arts Movement also opened up the African diaspora question which was a part of the Locke legacy.

I will now turn to an interesting example of canon construction on the African continent as provided in a book of Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995, published by the Duke University Press in 2004. Harney describes the cultural scene in Dakar in the period following independence in which the president, the esteemed poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was the primary theorist of negritude, sought to make use of the visual arts to define his new nation. Senghor and his aides encouraged the development of an “Ecole de Dakar”. The section in the book devoted to this endeavor is fittingly subtitled “A Restricted Field of Production”. Two young Senegalese artists, both trained, as was to be expected, in France were chosen as the exemplars of the new ”Ecole”—-Iba N’Diaye and Papa Ibra Tall, the latter, in particular, being intellectually an exponent of the philosophy of negritude. A visual language of negritude emerged as characteristic of the school. A distinctive medium, tapestry, was developed as a particular exponent of this style. The tapestries, Harney observes:

. . . . featured scenes of daily life and the market place . . . documented indigenous flora and fauna, memorialized the masks and sculptures of ‘traditional’ Africa, celebrated the heroes of pre-colonial history, and chronicled local myths. (p. 68)

She goes on to note:

Senghor’s system, which provided artists with significant amounts of fame and fortune, had invented not only an artistic canon, but also a new social category with its own rhetoric, forms of capital, and power relations. (p. 81)

But, as Harney shows, subversion lurked off-stage. In a chapter entitled “Laboratories of Avant-Gardism,” she depicts several groups and movements, of which I will mention only “Agit-Art” whose “members strove to find a means through which to produce and interpret art outside the boundaries of government control” (p. 108) Their activities involved performance, re-cycling of urban cast-offs, and large-scale outdoor assemblage. Eventually many denizens of the movement were congregated in an artists’ squatter village which became a venue for much of their work. Not unsurprisingly a species of urban renewal demolished the village.

In the chapter “After the Avant-Garde,” Harney observed that other artists took up many of the Agit-Art practices and, in effect, subversion became assault. She goes on to note the insurgence of local art practices, such as glass painting, which had not been admitted to the earlier canon and the impact of globalization.

The scenario depicted in Harney’s book could well provide an investigative model for examining the art history of other contemporary African communities and we can expect that such investigations will ensue.

Suffice it to say that the Locke canon in the United States and its corollary in the Black Arts Movement are equally under assault.

I leave the tracing of such matters as Black Romance and post-Black to others.