Charles White: The Art and Politics of Humanism, 1947–1956

Abstract

Can abstract art lead to nuclear war? The idea seems farfetched, to say the least, but it had currency among postwar Marxists in the United States. In a 1953 article celebrating African-American artist, Charles White, Communist artist Hugo Gellert argued that “so-called abstract, non-objective” art—the avant-garde experiments of New York School painters like Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko—had potentially cataclysmic consequences: “By their elimination of the human form and their negation of humanism,” Gellert wrote, “artists of this type help in their own way to condition the human mind to become reconciled to the possible annihilation of mankind. For there is a connection between destruction of the human form in the abstract and its actual atomic destruction.” However implausible, this dramatic leap from formal abstraction to atomic destruction hinged on the phrase the “negation of humanism.” Humanism served during the Cold War as the answer to what Marxist critics perceived as the “antihumanism” of nonfigurative abstract art, guilty-by-association with the wealthy patrons and elite institutions that supported it. The drawing by White accompanying Gellert’s article, Dawn of Life, represented a contrasting model of socialist humanism in its allegorical content and expressive figuration: a dove of peace released from, or alighting on, the open hands of a young black woman. The drawing appeared on the cover of Marxist monthly Masses & Mainstream in February 1953 (Figure 1), the same issue in which art and music critic Sidney Finkelstein’s essay, “Charles White’s Humanist Art,” anointed White the standard bearer for the journal’s ideology. “Compared to the infantile character of the formalist, non-objective and symbolist art,” Finkelstein wrote, “[White’s] portrayals of people have a true maturity which comes from the role he plays as a person and artist in social life.” From 1947 to 1956, White played a leading role “as a person and artist” in the social life of the radical left in New York. Beginning with his first one-person exhibition in 1947 at the progressive American Contemporary Art (ACA) Gallery, White emerged in the postwar period as the country’s preeminent socialist realist. From 1951 to 1956, he