Final Project – Draft
Adarsh Singh
African American Art (Fall 2018)
Purvis Young’s painting ‘The Struggle’ is one of his signature works representing the African Americans in the south. It is a blend of collage and painting on wood with unique display of activities and movements on the borders of the piece. Acquired by SAAM in 2014, the gigantic piece with dimensions (88 x 77) inches is showcased on a gigantic wall in the museum. The Struggle is an icon of challenge and persistence; it was part of a core group of paintings that comprised the long mural Young made in Goodbread Alley between 1971 and 1975.
“The Struggle”, which is the central panel, depicts interracial strife, and the trials of immigrant life in a depressed area. It is bordered by a number of smaller, individually dated paintings describing life’s struggle; these show figures working, dancing, singing, swimming, fighting, trying to move up in the world, and raising their arms in a show of unity. The main painting is on re-purposed plywood with remnants of wooden planks nailed to the outer edges. The two smaller paintings are on degraded fibreboard panels and are attached by nails to the two top corners. This painting was constructed on site in Goodbread Alley and is widely regarded as an iconic example of his work and a rare survivor from this period. It was part of the murals of the alley. The mural, since torn down, consisted of hundreds of pictures painted on pieces of wood, then nailed to the side of boarded up buildings along Fourteenth Street, known locally as Goodbread Alley for the smell of bread that once floated down the street. The mural was so colourful it could be seen from I-95 which, when it had been rerouted through the area, cut off Overtown economically and culturally from the rest of Miami.
The work is not easy on the eye: looking at Young's wild masses of black figures is like peering into a gloomy chaos. But the viewer soon begins to recognise the repeated images of distorted human forms, horses, buildings under construction and trucks. The comfort of recognition, however, is constantly undercut by the discomfort of seeing the painful and desperate energy of the pleading figures, often painted in a single, solid, black stroke—a sharp line curving dramatically at the base of the spine and splitting into legs. The people seem to stagger under an unbearable weight, represented in one powerful piece as a solid black shape on one figure's bowed head. The shape is unrecognisable as anything but heavy. People are often crowded out by solid trucks on their way to half finished buildings. People and buildings do not live in harmony, and in this battle, the people are clearly losing.
Born in 1943, Young lived in Overtown, considered one of the worst ghettoes and the most economically depressed black neighbourhood in Miami, a city in which racial lines cut deeply between white comfort and black misery. He was a self-educated artist whose work abounds with social commentary as he brings to the surface the buried pain of an invisible community. Young also has a powerful sense of form and color. The work is non-realistic and possesses both an intense energy and an extraordinary ability to move the observer. He substituted lack of education with intensive reading and gained knowledge about the history of art. He is a storyteller and his obsessions for books and his insatiable appetite for knowledge about art is depicted in the paintings. They serve the purpose of books and document the knowledge of real life situations. The artist was inspired by work of art of the artists who used art and their skills to represent struggles and protests. Many artists use Miami pinks and greens which look pretty in these neutral surroundings. Young's main color is black. Swatches of red, messes of dirty green and a luminous orange are used for strong emotional effect, not to match someone's sofa. In this setting, it is rare to see real, effective art, instead of decorator paraphernalia. The desire to work and the inability to find it is a constant theme of Young's art. In one of his books, work is seen as the way "to get in the world" from which black people are excluded. This book was, originally, a child's scientific text book. Young pasted his drawings over each page, allowing parts of the original photographs to show through. All the pieces in this book are drawn on bills of lading, invoices and receipts, discarded by the "Windward Shipping Co. Ltd." Page after page of groups of lost people stand excluded from the glossy photo-graphs of mountains and oceans, and separate from the world of international shipping and business on which they are drawn.
Despite the hardships, some people seem to have found a way to enjoy their life. They can be seen dancing and playing around which is very natural in a community. The use of entire space of the wood signifies the amount of people and their actions the artist is trying to depict. It suggests that his experience in looking at the struggles of black people has been massive and hence he knows how to apply the brush for it. Since the art style is collage and the artist wants to represent an entire society, he has not focussed one specific area by providing extra brightness to the colour. When the viewer takes a first glance at the painting, he can see the whole community as a whole. Even though the two men on the top have an enormous size but they blend in with the surroundings. The reason they might be slightly more evident would be because of their size. One of the men is black while the other is brown, which could be a possible link to the immigrant life. At that time, lot of immigrants were finding their way into United States. Since they were a minority and lived in poverty, the only strength they possessed was coming together as a group. Gradually, due to the hardships in Africa and the need for labour in USA, black people were moving north and increasing in numbers. Immigration is a diverse movement and that is the reason why the artist has shown people of other colour sharing the community with the black people. There is a narrative coherence in the words and drawings of this book. It is a story of people waiting ("Purvis it take time"), as a group ("Outrageous the people said"), and as individuals ("I am determining to get in the world"). The aimless people eventually succeed in getting work which consists of nothing more than moving large objects about. Their effort seems hopeless. Another meaning it depicts is of romance between interracial partners during hard times. The surroundings represent a rural setting with overcrowded small houses and a single road or a railway track in between. Several of these houses are damaged which can be seen in the areas where the paint is spread out. Similar to the houses, vehicles can be seen on top of each other and at weird angles which possibly shows the rough terrain. Another device in Young's work is the large face exploding from amongst the tiny people, concrete buildings, and hardhats. These faces register anger, pain and red tears; bursting out of their crowded world seems to have resulted in a violent rupture. One of the strongest paintings shows a huge pregnant woman, stoically still against a background of small chaotic figures. Her head, spine and legs are strikingly beautiful and straight, but her belly is grotesquely distended. This mother of thousands will clearly be destroyed by the creativity bursting from her, which has already ruined her beauty. Mixed in with the pain, despair and ugliness is an energy box of anger and weariness. Many of the tiny figures stand with their arms stretched upward in a powerful gesture which is outraged, yet pleading. In one painting, men being borne-away on the flatbed of a truck seem unwilling hostages to a mechanical monster. They stretch their arms up to heaven and to the words "no works" daubed in black at the top of the painting. The two big trucks on the top of the work depict the labour and hard work the community provides without getting proportional benefits. It could also mean that the group of labour is leaving for work in the morning or returning in the evening since lot of people can be seen outdoors. The panel has several instances of subjective figures, where it is hard for the viewer to establish the activity. The trucks do not signify their presence in a straightforward manner since they are stuck externally and do not draw parallel with the environment. But after sensing the abstract environment and carefully analysing the small figures, it becomes clear that the artist wants to demonstrate uncertainty. The powerful feature that catches the eye of the viewer is the unity amongst the people. Holding hands to cheer each other and together rise up the ladder which is not evident in the society today. The use of bright colours to represent the atmosphere of the painting also gives an hint of positivity in the community despite the struggles. It adds to the unity displayed by the different actions of the people and encourages the viewer to look at the positive aspects of life. The mark of any exceptional talent in whatever discipline is the openness of the image to varied interpretations and a sense of balance. Purvis Young's vision of an earthly hell would be mere polemic without his expression of hope and spirituality. In many of the crowds appear people with haloes. In two of the paintings these orange-haloed figures carry an orange Christ figure which stretches out to cover them all. The bearers' bodies are not crushed, bowed or deformed by this weight, but move easily with their burden. Young's symbol of realised potential is the horse. His horses are painted with a simple elegance. In some paintings the massed people blend with massed horses until it is difficult to tell horse from man. Clearly, Young sees the ideal horse and the saint as the potential for all black people. His work leaves us wondering, "How long it go to take."
The first layer of the piece is the traditional square canvas, which features erratic, broad brush strokes with uneven opacity of paint. The color palette of the background appears to be much brighter than the other layers, as most of the color is red, yellow and orange. The paint strokes on this layer differ from large areas with medium to full opacity, to visible, erratic brush strokes.
This layer of canvas also features sparse glitter that appears to have been painted on with the same broad, erratic brush stokes as the paint below it. The glitter brush strokes are far from opaque, and can only be seen upon close inspection of the canvas layer. As with the composition of the piece, the glitter changes when the light hits it, creating a multi-dimensional appearance that changes when the viewer walks around the piece or depending on the light in which the piece is presented. In dim light, such as under the shadows of the other layers, the glitter appears as small, red or yellow painted circles gathered in painted brush strokes. However, on the areas in which the light hits the glitter, the viewer can see not only the trails of the brush strokes, but the different colours of the glitter in different areas. The broad strokes of color have paint and chalk-like surface textures, such as places where the paint clumps, and places where the chalk smears. The cones and pillars have a base layer of color that is very smooth and reflective, but the canvas and irregular shapes all show strong surface textures of brush and pastel strokes. In addition, the stroke texture can also be seen in the center of the cones and pillars, where there are large brush marks. The paint underneath these strokes is completely smooth, and highly reflective, whereas the canvas layer, and the strokes themselves, are very matte albeit the brush strokes of glitter.
In Young’s eyes the world was full of racism, class struggle, violence and hypocrisy. “I don’t like the luxury I see of a lot of these church people while the world is getting worser,” Young said in a mid-nineties interview reprinted in his New York Times obituary. “What I say is the world is getting worser; guys pushing buggies, street people not having no jobs here in Miami, drugs kill the young, and church people riding around in luxury cars.” His despair was his source of inspiration. “Purvis Young has spent his life painting images of humanity crushed by despair.”The war in Vietnam inspired him to paint his first work. He would go around and stick his paintings on the fronts of abandoned buildings. He believed in displaying his feelings to the world and for several years his work went unnoticed. Living in prison inspired him to draw what he thought and on coming out he realised he could use different brush strokes to depict each feeling. His work included paintings on plywood scrap and remnants of cargo crates and like his style of art, the way he made them is similar to multiple scenes in a frame. Discarded furniture and mounds of dusty books could be found in his warehouse with splattered television sets and herd of bicycles against the wall.
On comparing the work to James Lawrence’s ‘The Migration Series’, it seems like the collage of 60 panels is represented in a general form by Young. Since he does not focus on a particular movement but draws parallels from the neighbourhoods he has witnessed and from the problems in Chicago and Detroit. Lawrence uses each panel to describe an element of the movement. For instance, he shows labour exploitation in one panel while the movement of blacks from south to north in the other. Both paintings are similar such that they depict the black community during relatively the same timeframe. Lawrence’s use of abstraction in depicting characters in the pieces give them a universal appeal as the viewer can imagine him or herself in similar positions. Clear and bright colours are used with extra lighting which is part of the reason where slightly dull colours are represented, the viewer is able to clearly identify the artist’s confidence in his paintings even though he is demonstrating the struggle period. Although the “The Migration Series” panel has more emphasis on the person, I thought the artist has given importance to the general movement from the way he has represented the people. He has not focussed directly on their faces or put extra brightness or colour to represent a body part. This for me played a huge role in identifying them as a group throughout my observation.
Young’s neighbourhood and the street where he has nailed hundreds of pieces on the outside walls, known as Goodbread Alley, were both visible from the I-95. Richard Levine was one of Young’s earliest patrons and helped him break into the larger art world. He was attracted by the paintings he saw while driving to work through the highway and ended up buying many of them. The destruction of the neighbourhood for housing in 1960’s had a huge impact on the murals by Young. People who read the news like Levine were the only few who quickly purchased the paintings. But the majority portion of his collection was damaged and thrown away. It played a significant role in the ‘break-out’ of Young as an artist because it led him to paint more which eventually made him successful. On the contrary, if that construction had not taken place, today we would have a lot more art work by Young that demonstrates the hardships of communities.
Art can be subjective and can lead to greater understanding about a topic or help in changing opinions. Controversial art works have found a hard way to reach top platforms which is part of the reason why there is less information about the “The Struggle”. The fact that artists created paintings of immigration movements, neighbourhoods proves the dire conditions in which a community has suffered. Such pieces give other artists the confidence to show their feelings. Does Young’s work of art still relate to the life of immigrants living in this country? The answer to this question would be crucial in deciding whether Young was able to solve his despair through his art work.
Bibliography
Butcher, Joanne. “Purvis Young.” Art Papers 11, no. 6 (November 1987): 44–45. http://proxy.earlham.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=vth&AN=49138920&site=ehost-live.
Doherty, Tiarna, Helen Ingalls, Amber Kerr, Catherine Maynor, and Leslie Umberger. 2016. “Conserving the Self-Taught Artists Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.” Studies in Conservation 61 (September): 38–43. doi: 10.1080/00393630.2016.1188616.
Harper, Paula. 2003. “Urban Expressionist.” Art in America 91 (1): 36. http:// proxy.earlham.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=vth&AN=8766466&site=ehost-live.
“OBITUARIES.” 2010. Art in America 98 (6): 199. http://proxy.earlham.edu:2048/ login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=vth&AN=51362751&site=ehost-live.
Mack, S. (2018). On Scrap Wood, Broken Doors And Shag Carpets, Purvis Young Painted Overtown. [online] Wlrn.org. Available at: http://www.wlrn.org/post/scrap-wood-broken-doors-and-shag-carpets-purvis-young-painted-overtown [Accessed 11 Dec. 2018].