reviews
Michael Benjamin reviews this study by art historian Amy Helene Kirschke of images published in the NAACP journal the Crisis and the role such images played in developing the civil rights ideology from 1910 to 1934.
Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory by Amy Helene Kirschke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Art historian Amy Helene Kirschke examines a critical aspect of the print culture practices among African Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century with her publication Art in Crisis: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory. Kirschke does this with what she calls the “visual vocabulary” of the Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during W. E. B. Du Bois’s editorship from 1910 to 1934. Kirschke sees Du Bois as a “patron” of artists, illustrators, and photographers, whose various works appeared on the cover of the journal or as also in the case of cartoons were placed within it, alongside the articles, essays, reviews, commentary, poems, and advertisements that made up the journal’s publication. Images that appeared in the Crisis during the period of her study included those of Aaron Douglas, Laura Wheeling Waring, and Romare Bearden as well as the works of less well known illustrators such as Vivian Schuyler Key and Bernie Robynson.
The journals, as artifacts of black print culture practices, reveal publications with artistic, illustrative, and photographic images of untold stories. However, as Kirschke recognizes, the role that she assigns to Du Bois as patron for the images published with the Crisis lacks the archival evidence that might further support this claim in the form of business letters, telegrams, and invoices or receipts, concerning commissions to the artists, illustrators and photographers from either Du Bois or the Crisis as the publisher. Still, with the journals as evidence and Du Bois as editor, the publications open to a multilayered visual record of African American social and cultural history drawn from the collective efforts of these print culture workers which Kirschke as art historian engagingly analyzes for her audience.
Kirschke devotes more than twenty percent of her text to the subject of lynching and the visual images of that nightmare for black Americans through the first quarter of the twentieth century, in a chapter titled “The ‘Crime” of Blackness.” Whether a grizzly postcard printed in Germany with dozens of white men gathered around a lynched black man’s corpse in Alabama to “show the way we do them down here” or a sketch from France by expatriate black illustrator Albert A. Smith depicting lynching’s role in the northern migration of southern black folks, as Kirschke argues through the covers and pages of the Crisis, Du Bois used these images to force his audience to face the inhumanity of this practice. Kirschke’s analysis of the iconography and classical allusions built into the images embellishes upon the print practice by which Du Bois introduces this cultural record to a growing audience of historically informed textual and visual readers. With “The ‘Crime’ of Blackness” informed by Du Bois’s views on art as propaganda, in another chapter Kirschke expands the record the Crisis makes to include aesthetic practices of the African Diaspora circulating in the ideological milieu of these times.
However, it is not clear that Kirschke recognizes the art, illustrations, and photographs which she has so carefully culled from the cultural record of the Crisis as selected, no doubt by Du Bois, for the text of the publications of which the images were a part. For sure, as the clique that Kirschke borrows states: a picture is worth a thousand words. However, the Crisis as a print product added value with its images and text that exceeded the sum of its parts. Kirschke’s visual readings “affirming the power of imagery over simple text” suggest interpretations independent of their context. Yet, she also recognizes the expanded magnitude of an image’s power when combined with a related text. At times, only with the meaning produced by a descriptive text does an image offer an effective interpretation. Still, Kirschke’s claim that the Crisis as edited by Du Bois drawing upon a rich black print culture of art, illustrations and photographs served an ideological agenda that he and the NAACP pursued is an important observation. For she reminds us of the conscious exploitation of print’s capacity to preserve, multiply, and disseminate both visual and textual images by early twentieth century African Americans to recover memories and form new identities. If only for this reason, Kirschke’s selection of past images and related texts with her own critical insights are quite worthwhile.
Michael Benjamin is an independent cultural historian. He teaches and writes in the field of American intellectual and social history, African American intellectual and cultural history, and Print Culture Studies. In addition to his doctoral degree in modern history and masters degree in the history of the book he also holds a juris doctorate degree and is a member of the bar.
