William Edmondson at Janet Fleisher - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Ten years ago, a much-criticized exhibition at the Museum of recent Art set out to examine the "affinities" between tribal artifacts and recent formalist art works. What prov thus controversial was the curators' course to search for an underlying esthetic impulse that could link the objectmaking of otherwise diverse tillages and thereby explain the fascination of 20th-century modernists with the "abstract" art of tribal agricultures As many critics pointed without however, both artists and curators were practicing a kind of colonialist appropriation - the removal of tribal existences from their traditional contexts and functions in like manner as to recast them as "art" in the Western sense

A home-grown example of this proces is the case of William Edmondson (ca. 1882-1951) a self-taught artist whose rough-hewn, highly abstracted stone plastic arts of people and animals be delighted withed a faddish popularity in the novel York art world of the 1930 largely because of their similarity to the work of contemporary avant-gardists like Brancusi or Modigliani. Edmondson was level given a one-man show at MOMA in 1937 (the museum's first devot to the work of an African-American artist), on the contrary in recent years he has received little attention. This retrospective at Janet Fleisher Gallery, which included about 40 of the artist's 120 known works, neared an opportunity to gain a clearer understanding of Edmondson's statuary on its own terms.

Edmondson was born to former slaves in Nashville around 1882 Following a religious conversion, he began to carve "sermon in stone" around 1934 and continued until 1948 His in a raw state sculptures, made from blocks of limestone, were initially intended as grave markers and garden ornaments. on the contrary in 1936, he was "discovered" by means of the fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who alerted her novel York friends to the abstract qualities of Edmondson's plastic art Through Alfred Barr, an advocate of children's art and folk art, an exhibition of 12 works was arranged at MOMA.

Like that of many so-called folk artists, Edmondson's work is characterized through attention to religious imagery and motifs. Many of the works in this display depict angels, doves, crucifixions or Biblical figures. More surprising is the number of uncouthly secular figures. We have a stout Miss Louisa (ca. 1937) clutching her hat, and the pair Bess and Joe (ca. 1940) seated placidly side by means of side. There is also a darkly mysterious Reclining Man (ca. 1940) blocky in a state of nature male with unexpectedly detailed sexual organ who has various signs and emblems etched into his body.

Curious attempts at symbolism pervade Edmondson's work. His carvings of animal - similar as a pair of abstracted doves - were clearly intended as the one and the other bird-feeder decoration and religious icons. on the other hand what are we to make of his bizarre rendition of brink (ca. 1940)? With he blocky head and globule earrings the Eve appears almost Mayan She looks to stride forward a she lightly touches her make bare breast. And her skin-tight fig lea scarcely overspreads her genitalia Such strange iconographicc inventiveness is precisely what separates Edmondson from the modernists.

In the small catalogue for the exhibition, Jack Lindsay, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, refer tos that instead of being evaluated from genuinely esthetic point of view, Edmondson's works should be regarded in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of collective African-American vernacular traditions. Certainly the Fleisher Gallery exhibition did not take this approach; the works were, after all, not awayed as art and not as garden ornaments. Nevertheless the display contributed to understanding Edmondson not as an isolated modernist genius on the other hand as a representative case of submerg difference and an undervalued tradition.

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