The depiction of beauty of the black female in the past has typically been concealed behind the dormant social issues that they’ve always faced throughout history. Eldzier Cortor challenges this by separating the black female from these social problems and representing them independently. Eldzier Cortor developed a unique style where he represents the beauty of black culture through redefining black femininity. Cortor attempts to use the black female as an emblem to depict beauty and cultural richness. This can be seen in his shift of style from social realist to a surreal, sculpture-influenced depiction of women. Their elongated and symmetrical figures make them seem, as Collins would say, “more like an African mask than the face of a woman who inhabits this world.” These qualities are notable in Eldzier Cortor’s work titled Dance Composition No. 31 where he sketches two women who are dancing. (fig. 2) He depicts them with their arms raised above their head, and wearing simple attire, existing in an unreal space of patterns and flowers.
Eldzier Cortor was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916, he moved to Chicago early as a child and was raised there (fig. 1). He attended school at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he focused on drawing and painting. He marked his entry into the art world primarily through his work with government projects such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Works Progress Administration aimed to employ people to create public works which included art. Cortor more specifically was invested in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a subdivision of the Works Progress administration run under Holger Cahill that was geared towards creating art for the public. Cortor was a part of the easel painting division of the Federal Art Project, and focused on social aspects of the South Side of Chicago, specifically in Bronzeville. Bronzeville was known to be a predominately black neighborhood; artists who worked in this area were a part of the artistic community named “Chicago’s Black Belt.” Whilst working with the Works Progress Administration, Cortor was amongst other distinguished artists of the time including Archibald Motley who is known for colorfully documenting the African American Experience in Chicago. Cortor worked with the Works Progress Administration for five years before moving forward with his art. Searching for the African American experience outside of Chicago, Cortor travelled to the Sea Islands to study and depict the Gullah people, who were known for retaining aspects of African Culture. After winning a Guggenheim fellowship, Cortor could travel to Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti to expand his knowledge of African culture.
Beginning in the 1930’s there was a transformation of art in Chicago known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Like the Harlem Renaissance in New York City, during this movement, there was a boost in racial pride and consciousness from African American artists, including Eldzier Cortor. This cultural awareness, along with the simultaneous appearance of Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project (FAP) led Eldzier Cortor and other artists at the time to focus on “documenting the experiences of black residents.” He focused on the lives of both men and women. Ultimately Cortor had to separate himself from Social Realism due to its political associations with communism, which were unfavorable at the time. Cortor didn’t want his work to create political uproar within the McCarthy influenced community. “Cortor’s production as an artist was interrupted by the McCarthy era, during which accusations of communist affiliations forced many artists into exile.” This influenced the artist to draw inspiration on the black experience outside of Chicago. Eventually, this led Cortor to embrace the black female as his primary subject in his future works.
Early in his career as an artist, Eldzier Cortor’s style has been derivative of his social realist work with the Works Progress Administration, focusing on black life surrounding him. Rogers argues that Cortor’s incorporation of women into his work was due to the “prominence of the black female while engaged in the WPA.” As he evolves as an artist, he separates himself from social realism and decides to dedicate his work on the black female. To escape the social stigma of the black female thoroughly, he had to diverge from the subjects he had previously focused on in Chicago. He travels to the Sea Islands and studies the traditional African cultures of the Gullah women there. From here he starts to find beauty in the roots of the culture. He creates a series of etchings of the Gullah women which includes Dance Composition No. 31. He utilizes winning a Guggenheim fellowship by exploring African Traditions beyond America and travels to Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti. After travelling to Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, Cortor started incorporating Caribbean flora and fauna into his work. Through travelling to these places, he finds inspiration in their art as well. we start to see inspiration from African Sculpture which is what his mature works primarily draws influence from. The elongation of the women’s figures and the symmetry of their faces in Dance Composition No.30 makes them seem more unreal than real. The unreal dream-scape that is seen in some works can be interpreted as magic realism. Rogers defines magic realism as “a style closely related to surrealism but with a focus on reality with various distortions of space and form.”
Eldzier Cortor attempts to isolate the beauty of the black female by removing the constructs that create the archetypical image of them. An example of these constructs can be seen in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, in this series Lawrence depicts women as hardworking in an austere, tense matter. When studying works like these, we tend to focus on the social aspects surrounding the women instead on the subject itself. So Cortor can depict the women as an emblem of beauty, he disregards the black females past in relation to American history. “He deconstructs the characteristics associated with black women as a result of slavery by generating alternative visualizations of black women in the form of allegories that include song, nostalgia and power.” By tracing the roots of the black female and drawing inspiration from African American culture, we are shown a beauty that we aren’t entirely familiar with, a beauty that we can’t find a context for. He focuses purely on the beauty of the women themselves instead of the surroundings that make them beautiful. The removal of these social constructs itself is his own commentary on black culture. He believes that black culture has for too long been depicted based on its history. When he removes these constructs, he is left with a void that he chooses to replace with unreal and fragmented spaces. Most of the time in his works, the backgrounds are composed of different colors and shades that make the work seem dream-like. In Dance Composition, he depicts the two women in the midst of alternating layers of ribbon-like lines. By placing the women in unreal, surreal-like spaces, he places great emphasis on the women. The dreamlike, unreal spaces parallel the beauty of the women.
To capture the beauty of the black female, Cortor turned to the Gullah people who maintained African traditions. Frequently, Cortor would incorporate the culture of the Gullah people into his work, such as traditional African American headdresses as seen in Dance Composition No.31. The Gullah people are the offspring of enslaved African Americans. The isolation of the island along with their sense of community allowed them to preserve African culture more than any other group. “The artist’s expressive and evocative nudes directly confronted previous realist tendencies by shifting the focus from the documentation of a people to an evocation of a creolized culture.” Travelling to the Islands, Cortor was attempting to find the root of African Culture and have it manifest in his work. Though during his travel to the Sea Islands he focuses purely on the female, he is attempting to find a way to depict black culture as a whole. “Cortor felt that by representing the black female, he was capturing the black race” He isn’t just capturing the black female, he is capturing their music, their dance, and their aura.
Eldzier Cortor art has always focused on depicting black culture. But his mature style represents black culture through the black female. He believes the beauty and aura of the black female is enough to depict the culture. Thus, he chooses the women as an emblematic figure for black culture. To depict the black female as something more meaningful than the subject itself, he must do more than paint the subjects and treat them as people. He puts “emphasis on design technique to support his definition of these women as studies rather than individuals” He treats the women as emblems of beauty that symbolize black culture and pride. In Dance Composition No. 31, depicts these women with elongated arms and figures in order to make them seem less human. Throughout his works, he has been continuously making their faces seem more and more mask like, like that of African Sculpture. He refrains from adding any significant characteristics to the subjects, thus separating them from their usual associations such as social status, and problems. What the artist is left with is the subject, the black female, in its purest form. He replaces it with song, dance, and power.
In his career as an artist, Eldzier Cortor deviates from the typical way of depicting the black female. Instead of depicting them through social commentary, he searches for beauty within their roots. He challenges the longstanding idea that the beauty of the black female must be associated with its past by proving that it can exist entirely on its own.