“He was a chronicler. He’s telling a story of his time. And he was also a social critic of African American life, and the works survival keeps that African American world alive as well.”
—Jeffrey Wolf
Bill Traylor’s Black Bear, circa 1939–1942, is an exceptional example from the approximately 1,200 extant works of art made by the artist between 1939 and 1942. Using modest materials such as found cardboard to create his bold, sparsely populated compositions, Traylor created a distinctive body of work while sitting on a wooden box on the sidewalk of Monroe Avenue, the center of Montgomery, Alabama’s African American community. One of the only known artists who was enslaved at birth to make a significant body of work, Traylor and his drawings have finally been getting the recognition they deserve. In 2018, Traylor was the subject of the first major retrospective exhibition ever organized for an artist born into slavery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and was most recently the subject of a solo exhibition of David Zwirner, New York, earlier this year. Traylor’s work and life was also the subject of a 2021 documentary, reflecting a resurgence in his groundbreaking drawings and paintings.
“One day Traylor picked up a stub of pencil and a scrap of cardboard and began to draw... He produced hundreds of drawings and paintings that rank among the greatest works of the twentieth century.”
—Roberta Smith
Born around 1853, Traylor turned to artmaking around 1939, at the age of 86 years old, after witnessing several American historical events, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation. Never learning to read or write, Traylor developed his own pictorial language, using deceptively simple animals and figures to represent scenes steeped in history and storytelling - “he put down this entire oral history in the language that was available to him, which was the language of pictures.”i Depicting a lone, eponymous black bear, the present work reflects a careful attention to space and movement within the composition. The horizon line is slightly askew, angling the bear slightly upwards, as if it were moving across the page towards an unseen goal. The deep black of the bear’s coat contrasts against the taupe of the cardboard, highlighting a distinct ability to capture the essence of the animal in a simple and informative way. Traylor’s artistic style, as noted by Peter Schjeldahl, “has about it both something very old, like prehistoric cave paintings, and something spanking new. Songlike rhythms, evoking the time’s jazz and blues, and a feel for scale, in how the forms relate to the space that contains them, give majestic presence to even the smallest images. Traylor’s pictures stamp themselves on your eye and mind.”ii
