Charles Wilbert White, Jr. was an American artist, printmaker and educator. He mainly depicted African American related subjects in paintings and murals, working primarily in black and white or sepia and white colours.
Background
White was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on April 2, 1918. He was the son of Charles White Sr., a railroad and construction worker, and Ethelene Gary, a housekeeper. His parents never married. His father died when Charles White was eight. White's mother later married again. Her husband was a steel mill worker who would become an abusive alcoholic, especially towards a young Charles. When the boy was thirteen, they got divorced.
Education
Charles White's mother raised him alone and had to work to make ends meet. When his mother went to work she often left her son at the public library. There White developed his interest in art and reading.
When he was seven years old, White's mother bought him a set of oil paints, and he painted his first picture. White also played music as a child. When he was nine, his mother bought him a violin and found him a music teacher. In addition, he studied modern dance and was part of theatre groups. However, it was art that became his true passion.
Charles White worked to earn money to help out in the house from the age of nine. Meanwhile, his mother took him to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he read and looked at paintings developing a particular interest in the artworks of George Inness and Winslow Homer.
Whereas White didn't have much money in his childhood, he often painted on whatever surfaces he could find including shirts, cardboard, and window blinds. Charles White learned how to mix paints by attending painting classes organized at a park near his home and sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago.
From 1926 White's mother began sending him to Mississippi twice a year to his aunts, Hasty Baines and Harriet Baines. There he learned about his heritage and African American Southern folklore. An early activist, as a teenager, Charles White volunteered his talents and became the house artist at the National Negro Congress in Chicago.
Charles White did not graduate from high school and he was expelled due to his refusal to attend classed after being disillusioned with the teaching system. He was encouraged by his art teachers to submit his artworks for a scholarship. White was admitted to two art schools, however, they pulled his acceptance because of his race.
Eventually, White received a full scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While in school, he managed to become an excellent draftsman, completing five drawing courses and graduating with honours. To pay the costs of materials in art school, Charles White worked as a cook, using his mother's instruction and recipes. later becoming an art teacher at St. Elizabeth Catholic High School.
White was hired by the Illinois Art Project a state affiliate of the Works Progress Administration in 1938. The artist's artworks were shown at the Chicago Coliseum during the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro which was part of an exposition commemorating the 75th anniversary of Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery.
Concurrently, White was an art teacher at the Southside Community Art Center. His first exhibition held at Paragon Studios in Cincinnati in 1938 was followed by a number of other shows that took place in different parts of the United States. Among many others, there were exhibitions at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Roko Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Besides, Charles White also displayed his paintings at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
Charles White settled in New Orleans in 1941 and worked as a lecturer at Dillard University. White eventually moved with his wife to New York City, where the painter Ernest Crichlow introduced them to Black artists and intellectuals. While in New York City White worked with artist Harry Sternberg who encouraged him to move beyond "stylization to individuation in his figures."
From 1943 he served in the US Army during the Second World War, but was discharged due to problems with health. He spent three years in a Veterans hospital in Beacon, New York. Charles White did not paint during this time, devising his own therapy and rereading all that he had read during his adolescence.
Upon his recovery, Charles White returned to New York and started to work on his new paintings. In September 1947 he had a one-man show at the American Contemporary Artists Gallery. In fall, at the invitation of the famous muralist David Siquerios, White went with his wife to Mexico. They worked and improved their skills at Mexico’s famous graphic workshop Taller de Grafica Popular for nearly a year. "I saw artists working to create an art about and for the people," recalled White his Mexican experience. "This has been the strongest influence in my whole approach. It clarified the direction in which I wanted to move."
Around this time, White’s art began to gradually shift from historical figures to ordinary common Black folks. His artworks became more rhythmic and fluid, realistic and humanistic. In the early 1950s, Charles White went to Europe, visiting such countries as France, England, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union, and was delighted to find that his lithographs received high recognition there.
In 1956, due to problems White experienced with health, he was advised to move to Los Angeles for its more mild climate. From 1965 to 1979 he taught at the Otis Art Institute (today Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles. Among his students were David Hammons, Alonzo Davis, and Kerry James Marshall. His art pieces were featured in Two Centuries of Black American Art in 1976; it was the first exhibition of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art devoted exclusively to African-American painters. The last years of his life Charles White spent in Altadena California.
The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America
Sojourner Truth, Et. Al
Harvest Talk
Shaping of Black America
The Gospel Singers
Paul Robeson
Young Woman
Juba
I Have a Dream
J'Accuse! No.3
Sound of Silence #2
Untitled
Untitled
Study for Cathedral of Life
J'Accuse! No.5
I Been Rebuked & I Been Scorned (Solid as a Rock)
Untitled (Fulfillment)
Untitled
Untitled
Skipping
Let The Light Enter
Head of A Man
Mater Dolorosa
Untitled (Portrait of a Man)
Matriarch
Portrait of Frederick Douglass
Views
African American Southern folklore heavily influenced White's art for the rest of his career as an artist. Besides, after reading Alain Locke's book The New Negro: An Interpretation, a critique of the Harlem Renaissance, Charles White's social views changed. He learned from the text about important African American figures in American history. That's how he described his experience, "A book that fascinated me and opened up new vistas, was Dr. Alain Locke's The New Negro. I had never realized that Negro people had done so much in the world of culture, that they had contributed so much to the development of America, it became a kind of secret life, a new world of facts and ideas."
The music became a special source of inspiration that moved him - the spirituals, blues, ballads, the work songs. This music had a very profound meaning for White and his oeuvre.
Quotations:
"Art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. It must adapt itself to human needs. It must ally itself with the forces of liberation. The fact is, artists have always been propagandists. I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle."
"I use Negro subject matter because Negroes are closest to me. But I am trying to express a universal feeling through them, a meaning for all men... All my life, I’ve been painting a simple painting. This does not mean that I am a man without anger - I’ve had my work in museum’s where I wasn’t allowed to see it. But what I pour into my work is the challenge of how beautiful life can be."
Membership
Charles White was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1972.
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1972
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Charles White contracted tuberculosis during the Second World War. He managed to recover, but in the late 1940s, his health began to deteriorate again. He was hospitalized for a year in New York where he underwent lung surgery.
Quotes from others about the person
Kerry James Marshall: "Under Charles White’s influence I always knew that I wanted to make work that was about something: history, culture, politics, social issues. ... It was just a matter of mastering the skills to actually do it."
Lauren Warnecke: "[White] was a humanist, drawn to the physical body and more literal representations of the lives of African-Americans."
Interests
music, reading
Artists
Mitchell Siporin, Francis Chapin, Aaron Bohrod
Connections
White married his first wife, Elizabeth Catlett, famed sculptor and printmaker, in 1941. They met at Dillard University, where they both taught. After his trip to Mexico in the late 1940s, his marriage to Catlett ended. In 1950, Charles White married Frances Barrett. They spent their honeymoon in Europe. Charles White was a father of two children: Jessica and Ian.
Charles White: Black Pope
Beginning with White’s early days as an artist in the Chicago of the 1930s and ’40s, moving through his time spent developing his craft in New York in the late 1940s and ’50s, and closing with his final decades as a revered figure in Los Angeles, Charles White: Black Pope explores the artist’s practice and strategies through consideration of key works.