A manifestation of Charles White’s lifelong commitment to the visual representation of Black history and life, Roots, 1963, is a poignant meditation on the African American experience and represents the same core principles that underscored White’s public art projects. Indelibly influenced by the work of the Mexican muralists—both formally and in their exploitation of art’s capability to communicate political injustices—the artist famously painted several Works Progress Administration (WPA)-sponsored murals across the nation portraying both the inhumane struggles and invaluable societal contributions of African Americans. While aspects of his visual language evolved over his lifetime, his career-long commitment to figurative renderings of Black existence was celebrated in a major travelling retrospective last year at the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

"He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did."
— Kerry James Marshall

The Founding Father of Post-War Figuration

 

Executed during a decade defined by the civil rights movement and national unrest, Roots is imbued with not only struggle but also hope. A woman is depicted holding a large bale of hay above her head, a physical hardship that she carries with remarkable dignity and strength. During the same year of the work’s creation, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington D.C.; later that year, White and his wife adopted their first child and immediately fell in love with parenthood. 

 

 

The resilience that the subject of Roots embodies is a product of both White’s life and the historical moment in which it was executed as well as the influence of his artistic forebearers. White’s representation of the Black struggle coalesces his scholarly comprehension of Western art history—he most frequently spoke of his study of El Greco—with his dedication to the majestic representation of African Americans. Indeed, the work shares a formal affinity with the Old Master’s The Vision of Saint John, 1608-1614, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which the souls of martyrs call out to God, asking for justice for the persecution they have survived on Earth and receiving the white robes of salvation. 

 

This socially-committed appropriation of Renaissance imagery for his time impacted the work of one of his students to such a degree that is impossible to overstate: that of Kerry James Marshall, whose depictions of black life are replete with references to the Old Masters. “Charles White kept common cause with the great masters of art history,” Marshall espoused, “holding up his end and passing the torch to the generations that followed him.”ⁱ 

 

Leading in a New Era

 

Through his relentless dedication to figurative depictions of African Americans during the height of apolitical post-war abstraction, White acted as a sort of paternal figure to the next generation of black artists, many of whom were his students. He was a devoted instructor throughout his entire life, but his longest tenure was at the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design), where he taught drawing and was an invaluable mentor to numerous leading contemporary artists, such as Kerry James Marshall and David Hammons, both of which have repeatedly acknowledged White’s formidable influence on their oeuvres. The founding father of post-war Black figuration, White championed African American history and life and inspired entire generations to fearlessly explore their pasts, identities, and experiences.

 

In fact, White has been institutionally recognized as a veteran leader of Black representation for a half-century: in 1968, two art handlers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art founded the Black Arts Council (BAC) and campaigned for the museum’s deeper engagement with both African American artists and Black visitors. In 1971, their early efforts culminated in the landmark exhibition Three Graphic Artists, which installed some of White’s highly influential drawings—including Roots—alongside the work of younger artists Hammons and Timothy Washington. Receiving a full-room exploration in the Los Angeles leg of the 2019 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 at the Broad, this show is today considered to be one of the most pivotal moments in Black representation in American institutions of the 20th century.

 

The Temple to Charles White

  

Roots arrives at auction from the prestigious collection of Payson and Helen Wolff in Los Angeles. After Payson Wolff finished law school at Yale in 1954, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren of the US Supreme Court.  Wolff worked on the opinion for what is known as Brown vs. Board of Education II, the decision that ordered enforcement of the first Brown vs. Board of Education decision from a year earlier.  Because states were slow to enforce the landmark decision outlawing segregation, the Warren opinion in the second case ordered states to begin the process of desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”  

 

Both Payson and Helen remained champions of the civil rights movement for the rest of their lives.  Payson Wolff then spent the rest of his career at Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown in Los Angeles, representing clients such as Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe, as well as Motown Records.  His wife Helen went to medical school in the 1940s, as one of only two women in her class, and after struggling to be accepted as a female doctor, went on to a long career as a psychiatrist. 

 

Over a period of 15-20 years, starting in the 1960s, the couple bought over a dozen works by Charles White, likely all from the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles who represented the artist and later his estate.  All of these works had pride of place in the family home and one of their children describes it as a “temple to Charles White.” They acquired Roots around the time it was included in his 1965 solo exhibition at ACA Gallery, many works from which are now held in notable museum collections, such as Birmingham Totem, 1964, High Museum of Art, Atlanta and In Memorium, 1965, Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles. The family understood Roots to be the great work in the collection, and the family loaned the work to several subsequent exhibitions, recognizing the importance the work plays in White’s oeuvre.

 

Cut from the Archives

 

 

ⁱ Kerry James Marshall, “A Black Artist Named White,” Charles White: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, pp. 15-19.