ARTNOIR'S - AFRICAN/AMERICAN ART HISTORY 101

ARTNOIR'S AFRICAN/AMERICAN ART HISTORY 101

RICHMOND BARTHÉ, (1901-1989), Sculptor
" ... capture the beauty that I've seen in people and abstraction wouldn't satisfy me ... My work is all wrapped up with my search for God."

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Porter, in MODERN NEGRO ART wrote that Barthé was introduced as a sculptor to a gathering at the Chicago Women's City Club, Negro in Art Week in 1927, and from that time persisted in serious, sensitive, and significant production. He maintained a special interest in race themes and race portraiture, however, the genre never became an obession with him. In his early studies Barthé showed some grasp of plastic feeling, as revealed particularly in the plasters entitled Head of a Tortured Negro, Mask of a Boy, and West Indian Girl. His related studies of figure motifs, such as The Breakaway, a piquant sketch of a cabaret dancer, and The Blackberry Woman, are proof of a deft hand and a memory that retains the essential elements of a given action. Barthé's handling of nude Negro physique proclaims his gift for natural plastic feeling. He allows the typical slenderness of the Negro body to become subtly elongated, but without distortion. This device is plausible but not unique. The German sculptor, Georg Kolbe, used such emphasis in his representations of male Negro subjects, as, for example, the bronze Somali Negro of the Dresden Museum the same thing is found in the "Ancestor" carvings of certain African tribes.

The theatre had great attraction for Barthé. He discovered most of his themes there, beginning with such literal chracter studies as The Comedian. The series includes portrait busts of Phillips Holmes, John Gielgud, Katherine Cornell, and ranges through such interpretations as Chorale, posed by Harold Kreutzberg; concluding with a large frieze recently completed on a them from The Green Pastures and intended for an exterior wall of the Harlem River Project, in New York City. On this project Barthé collaborated with two white sculptors, Heinz Warneke and Frederick Barbarossa. This long frieze is entirely architectonic; it yields almost nothing to realism or the representational. Its figures, extremely uniform, are arranged instaggered groups. In such a formalized composition, constrained by the surrounding architectural field, race idion necessarily has been sacrificed to the more universally human traits. In as controlled a way as possible, the sculptor wished to suggest the emotional crisis experienced by the black Hebrew Children when they are told that their journey to the Promised Land is near its end. Their attitudes are variously grave, weary, skeptical, despondent, and resigned.

In a few pieces of small statuary Barthé proved himself one of the most sensitive modelers of all American sculptors. Neither technical flaw nor artisitc failing mars the three small bronzes The Harmonica Player, Shoe Shine Boy, and The Boxer. These are so close to perfection of statement that their effect on the spectator is transporting. Never elsewhere has the sculptor better suited means to mood or pose to action. These works suggest both grace and strength, while they portray as much the fine tension of the artist's spirit as the infinitely subtle and gradual modulations of the supple contours of the forms.

Barthé's early life was spent in the towns of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, St. Martinsville, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He began formal art training at the SCHOOL of the ART INSTITUTE in Chicago. Under the influence of ARCHIBALD J. MOTLEY, JR., Charles Schroeder and Albin Polasek, he decided that his talent and spiritual direction were more suited to becoming a sculptor.

Barthe felt at ease with modeling figures and faces from clay. Porter wrote that "through a brief study of African forms" Barthé was "able to deal more tellingly with the problem of form in" his "more serious work. After 1931 it was almost impossible to detect in" his "work ... a trace of the erstwhile African influence." Barthé captivated the art world by producing sculptures and busts of African American subjects as never before seen. His creative approach to African American portrait drawings and small sculptures in stone and bronze received numerous acclaims in the art world. For over sixty years, Richmond Barthé produced works reflecting portraits and racial situations of African Americans. His subjects were mixed from movement (THE BOXER, 1943) to pioneers such as George Washington Carver (1946) and Booker T. Washington (1946). Two of his sculptures: The BLACK-BERRY WOMAN (1932) and the AFRICAN DANCER (1933), were purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art. He exhibited in the HARMON exhibitions in 1929, 1931, and 1933, and the cooperative show at Delphic Studios in 1935. His first commissions were busts of Henry Ossawa Tanner and Toussaint L'Ouverture. He received the Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1929 and 1930. His 1939 exhibit at the Arden Galleries in New York helped him to get recognition and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940 and 1941, and was elected in 1945 to the National Sculpture Society. In 1949, he was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

Porter wrote that Barthé's relief medallion portrait of Arthur Brisbane, newspaper editor and columnist, on Fifth Avenue, New York City, was probably the first public commission received by an African American artist for a public monument commemorating the services or deeds of a white man. "While public statuary commemorating the achievements of Negroes has been executed by white sculptors, rarely has the reverse been true."

With all his fame, Richmond Barthé never reached the financial security necessary and commensurate with his great work as an African American sculptor. With the help of the actor, James Garner of The Rockford Files, and Esther Jones, Barthé's final days of his life were made easier. After his death in 1989, James Garner turned over the remaining works of Barthé to the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and the Schomberg Center in New York.

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