Man of influence
Hale Woodruff retrospective at the High
Like many African-Americans before him and since, including dancer Josephine Baker and film director Melvin Van Peebles, painter Hale Woodruff found motivation, acceptance and inspiration away from the stereotyped, American view of “black” while living in Paris in the 1920s.
Hale Woodruff in Atlanta at the High Museum focuses on Woodruff’s importance in nurturing Atlanta’s fledgling art scene during his 15 years as a teacher at Atlanta University. Woodruff jump-started the city’s art scene with the formation of the Atlanta University Annual Exhibitions, which developed into the National Black Arts Festival. And his murals appear around the city, at the Wheat Street Baptist Church and at Clark Atlanta University, home to Woodruff’s six-panel history of African cultural influence, “The Negro in Art” (1952).
But the exhibition also shows what an influence the world was on Woodruff. Surrounded by expats in Europe, or studying under famed muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico, Woodruff absorbed and articulated the lessons he learned: from Impressionism to American Regionalism, from New Deal politics to capitalist industry.
The High exhibition, which traces Woodruff’s output from early landscapes to late-in-life abstractions, suggests Woodruff as a man learning and experimenting his whole life, though always willing to bend to the needs of those who paid his commissions.
The influences of Impressionism that Woodruff picked up during his continental tenure emerge in “Picking Cotton” (1936), an oddly upbeat commissioned portrait of that difficult labor, done for a Chicago cotton company. The image depicts grinning workers bent over a sea of cotton represented in fat, tactile brushstrokes. Though the daylight shifts, the workers maintain the same poses, as if to show the ceaseless, repetitive nature of the work.
Woodruff’s study under Rivera in 1936 led to multiple commissions, like the painting he created for the country’s first public housing project, Atlanta’s Herndon Homes, as part of the New Deal push for decent housing. The 1942 oil painting “Results of Good Housing” is a soul-stirring work whose simple message — of the sustenance of home — doesn’t dilute its appeal.
“Good Housing” is accompanied by its spiritual antithesis, “Effects of Poor Housing,” a study of quotidian squalor. A stream of filth runs through its shantytown where house-of-card dwellings look like they could be spirited away on the next breeze. Apathetic residents sit with heads in hands, as children and animals make a garbage can their plaything. A young man lurks menacingly nearby, observing the children from behind a tree in a disturbing suggestion of human evil growing within a seedy environment.
Contrast that image with “Good Housing,” where the sky has gone from a despondent gray to blue. In the painting’s foreground, residents plant tulips, children frolic on a simple playground and a man dressed neatly in a necktie and windbreaker totes his lunch pail on the way to work. Like fellow Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, Woodruff’s style emphasizes undulating, softly rippling forms: Hills rise up like waves on a choppy sea and people seem extensions of that energy.
In a single painting, Woodruff conveys an image of progress, vibrancy and self-respect. And on the evidence of that one image alone, Woodruff is clearly a regional treasure well worth celebrating.