Art: Two Centuries of Stereotypes

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Obviously, the meanings of art are not confined to masterpieces. A piece of kitsch can tell us as much about its time as a Mondrian, which does not mean that it ceases to be kitsch. Mediocre or rotten art carries all sorts of social data -- messages that may have been overt or subliminal, but in either case work their way out (with a final tweak from their interpreters) over the years.

So it is with most of the art in "Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940," the new exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (on view through March 25). Anyone who visits the exhibition with hopes of high aesthetic pleasure will be disappointed. There are a few paintings in it, and one small sculpture, of real substance and beauty: work by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson and William Harnett, and a bronze study of a black soldier's head done for the Shaw Memorial in Boston, his greatest public work of art, by Augustus Saint- Gaudens. And there is a great deal of poor to average American 19th century art -- clumsy, cliche ridden, provincial, earnest. But the show's point lies elsewhere: in the subject matter and how it is treated.

As curated by Guy C. McElroy, this is a highly polemical exhibition. Its main aim is to show how white American artists (and a few black ones) depicted black American people -- to argue against the notion that art is color-blind. Most American painters, in McElroy's view, put racial stereotypes in their work. These were usually negative. "Prosperous collectors created a demand for depictions that fulfilled their own ideas of blacks as grotesque buffoons, servile menials, comic entertainers, or threatening subhumans," McElroy writes in the catalog. "This vicious cycle of supply and demand sustained images that denied the inherent humanity of black people by reinforcing their limited role in American society."

Before the abolition of slavery, whites felt superior to blacks. After abolition, they kept right on feeling superior -- for what other race could make such a noble gesture as abolition? When blacks appeared on monuments after abolition, they continued to kneel, looking up at their white liberators. To unpick such stereotypes and "subtexts" -- the prejudicial stories behind the images -- is the purpose of this show.

In the main McElroy succeeds very well, though he sometimes overstrains his argument and has not been able to borrow all the paintings he needed. A book hovers behind this exhibition, a multivolume work by various authors that is one of the great scholarly efforts of the 1980s: The Image of the Black in Western Art, published by the Menil Foundation and Harvard University Press.

The first important figure of a black in American art is in Copley's Watson and the Shark, 1778. The black has just thrown a line, without avail, to naked Watson, who wallows helplessly in the green waters of Havana Harbor as the shark charges in to bite his leg off. As McElroy observes, the outstretched arms of Watson and the black "mirror each other," and it may even be that Copley meant Watson's presence in the water to remind us, by reversal as it were, of the slavers' practice of dumping dead Africans into the sea.