A Review of
Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Edited by Jonathan Stuhlman and Martha R. Severens
University of North Carolina Press
Hardcover; 272 pages
Companion volume to art exhibit showcases long-overlooked Southern modernism
By Ellen Ann Fentress
Special to the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger
The names Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko flash to mind when thinking about the U.S. as the modern art epicenter at mid-20th century. What do Zelda Fitzgerald of Montgomery, Alabama or Dusti Bongé of Biloxi have to do with that history? More than any art narrative has said until now. A rich book published in conjunction with the exhibit “Southern/Modern” makes the case that modernism flourished in the South despite less recognition then and systemic exclusion since. The volume’s cover is Bongé’s “Where the Shrimp Pickers Live,” a 1940 oil fed by Bongé’s rent-collecting job on the Biloxi Back Bay.
The South’s painting legacy is hardly the most crucial part of southern history now under hard examination. Our era is retelling—make that telling for the first time—the truth of slavery, white supremacy and labor exploitation in the region’s DNA. Yet who paints and what is painted are questions overlapping the general reckoning. The Southern/Modern project attempts and delivers answers.
Do I, a lifelong Mississippian, sound thin-skinned that southern artists were shortchanged? Well, I am, but it’s also true. Consider the famous 1949 proclamation by the American Wing curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” Southern/Modern counters that verdict.
True, there have been shows on individual modernist southern artists, but Southern/Modern is the first to examine the region’s strand as part of the national modern fabric. The exhibit of about 100 paintings and prints centers on southern works between 1913 and 1955.
This kind of project is not just a real-time event, although “The New York Times” named the “daring and revisionist” show a Critic’s Choice. The ambition of Southern/Modern is to establish a basis for future art scholarship. Shows, after all, formulate our understanding of art movements. The understanding of Impressionism coalesced with the 1863 Paris Salon des Refusés. Participation in the 1951 9th Street Art Exhibition qualified a painter for the New York School abstract expressionist canon.
The essays in “Southern/Modern” define modern with a big M and small one, according to Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina and co-editor of the book. As an art term, modern means presenting artists who are “moving away from realism and toward abstraction,” he writes. But this project also includes painters modern in the sense that they frankly depict life around them. Regionalism versus modern is a false choice.
It’s the New York art world’s fault that southern painters didn’t get the recognition and respect their due? Not totally.
Around the time of the1951 9th Street show, an iconic Life magazine photo of abstract expressionist artists featured 17 white men and one white woman. Southern/Modern’s story is more inclusive. Mississippians in the exhibit include Bongé, Walter Anderson, Marie Hull, Helen Jay Lotterhos and William Hollingsworth.
One of the show’s most moving pieces is Hull’s “An American Citizen,” an oil of the impeccably dressed John Wesley Washington. Born into slavery, he was 94 years old at the time of the 1936 portrait. The portrait’s powerful strategic placement in the show is photographed for the “Times” review. “An American Citizen” claims a wall to itself, taking its free and rightful share of space. The human and the portrait get their due.
Two 1943 artists speak in contrast: Bongé and Atlanta-born Lamar Baker, in Mississippi and Louisiana on Rosenwald scholarships to paint the Black experience. Bongé’s exuberant confident self-portrait “The Balcony” is in silent conversation with Baker’s “There’s a Man Going ‘Round Taking Names,” the title taken from a Judgement Day blues song. Bonge’s bright-hued white woman, secure on her titular balcony, side-eyes the world. Baker’s gray-palleted judgement scene says as much about malevolence against Black life on earth as in the life hereafter.
History is written by the victors, Winston Churchill said. I’ve always thought that in the centuries-long tragic story of the South and of Mississippi in particular, there’s an essential book of counter-history waiting to be done. In alternative primary archival documents, there’s a compelling, surprising narrative to present of women and men of all races and identities who managed to resist the status quo southern story in thought and action. In a big sense, “Southern/Modern” is more than an aesthetic story. It is proof of alternate stories in the South. Others wait for telling, too.
Ellen Ann Fentress’s memoir The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning features Dusti Bongé’s self-portrait “The Balcony” as cover art. The 1943 painting is part of the Southern/Modern exhibit, at the Dixon Gallery in Memphis from July 14 until September 29.
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