The Faces They Knew

John Haber
in New York City

Benny Andrews: Portraits

Jake McCord and Emily Furr

In an epic series, Jacob Lawrence took the dream of African American freedom back to the Revolution, as an "American Struggle." Three years later, Benny Andrews sought a history that the textbooks overlooked, in the faces he knew best. So soon after did Jake McCord—and Emily Furr, a white artist, offers a reminder of why he remained an outsider.

Andrews was twenty-seven, but he was still a student and still learning. And then, late in 1957, things came together for him as an artist, but not in class. Ever attentive to people as much as to paint, he looked around him at the Art Institute of Chicago and just had to ask, Who are these men? He found himself adding paper and fabric to oil on canvas to find out. "They are the school janitors to us," he saw, "black and white, but in their minds they were much more." From that point on, he was to ask just how much more than you or I might otherwise ever see.

More than a pretty face

It was not the obvious time to be asking about portraiture. Abstract Expressionism ruled, and representation, as Benny Andrews put it, was "blasphemy." His subjects ran to artists, black and white, because so did his circle, but one might not notice. Norman Lewis wields not a brush but a cigarette and a fierce intelligence. The closest that Howardena Pindell comes to her decorative abstraction is her floral shirt, matching her handbag on the table beside her, or the red shadow on her neck, almost matching her lipstick. Marcel Duchamp presides over a bicycle wheel, but embedded in a table.

Then again, as the art wars heated up, Andrews also asked for more than painterly realism. His portrait of that style's presiding spirit, Alice Neel (who also painted him), pares back the brushwork, leaves color to her blond hair, and dresses her in deep blue and black. She looks dowdy, prim, and decidedly middle-aged, but she retains her dignity, like all his subjects. Nothing matters more to him, not even the particulars of character or appearance, just as with the janitors on their break. One might almost shy away from calling these portraits. "I start out with a face," he explained—but where are the faces?

They can be starkly individual, but also strangely absent. Fabric can build up a nose, so that it becomes tactile to the point of funny, or efface it. It can serve along with paint as a kind of scumbling. In Portrait of a Portrait Painter, Andrews is seated, colored pencil in hand, facing a woman seen only from the back. Even stock still, she puts on quite a show in her bright orange hat, bag, and fancy shoes, while he looks rapt—a box of, I shall guess, pastels floating beside his ankles and a blank white canvas fallen to the floor. She has her weight, and he has his unbearable lightness of being an artist.

Not that he is reducing people to anonymity. A line of men fades into the distance, but the man in the foreground, for all his mournful expression and the fragile flowers in his hand, looks very much alive. When Andrews paints his wife, Nene Humphrey, herself an artist, his omits her nose and eyes, but not for lack of love. She is reading an improbably large red book, but then life here is improbable, too, because there is always so much more. Even when he paints a funeral, Mother Earth, Famine with a zipper for a mouth, Oppression, or Despair, he considers them portraits, too. One can feel the heat on a forge and the heavy tools in a blacksmith's hands as things in themselves as well.

When it comes down to it, Andrews loves surfaces. I doubt that I have ever seen so many hats. They, too, are part for what "conveys a feeling to me of a real person, and I mean in feeling." The flashy fabric could almost pass for Pop Art and after, and most of the work dates from the late 1970s and 1980s, although he lived until 2006. It also looks back to the New Deal, the Great Migration, and the flight from the American South, when art took for granted the need for big, redemptive themes and the face of humanity. He must have seen a bread line for Dorothea Lange or "The American Struggle" and "Builders" for Jacob Lawrence. He would have seen collage as an African American art form in Romare Bearden.

Andrews can seem lightweight, at least in reproduction. He is always trying to go deeper, and in a more skeptical age that has to mean sometimes falling flat. In person, though, he will always have his sense of humor, his empathy, and that collaged fabric. It can serve for paint, texture, or a third dimension, but also the play between the literal and appearances. Norman Lewis wears a real white shirt, buttons intact, but not a real black jacket, and coarse fabric serves for another man's jeans. When Andrews speaks of painting "happiness, love, all those kinds of things," one can hear both the modesty and the ambition.

With enemies like these

For a portrait painter, Jake McCord led an insular life. His favorite activities were fishing and watching TV. Yet he was fascinated by the pageantry of the passing world, like many an obsessive TV watcher, and he took up painting in midlife in response to a party of women that caught his eye. Could a black groundskeeper have become an artist in order to share in the pageant? He did after all covert his front porch in Georgia into a makeshift gallery for all to see. He also treated his subjects, black and white, like the closest of friends.

You might never guess that his women did not all sit for their portraits—and you might well assume that they did so because they were already there, in his home and in his head. They face front, close to the picture plane and more or less life size. Their expressions could pass for the broadest of smiles. They dress to please themselves, like a woman in glasses, while another wears only the skimpiest of bikinis. McCord paints man's best friend as well, plus cats. Many of the women hold a pet as well.

Still, they might have you thinking of an old line beginning with friends like these. They have formidable bare teeth, as indeed does the dog. Most have bright red or purple lipstick and nail polish, on top of shaggy hair and those cats, like witches on their day off from casting a spell. It is not clear how a cat made it to a high mantelpiece without knocking over the clock, and time itself in a painting of another clock seems out of joint. Not that they look quite so comfortable either, and what might pass for a smile on first glance has just as much in common with fear. The woman in a bikini seems to shiver from the cold and from the scrutiny of near naked flesh—and yet it is plainly all in fun, for them and the artist alike.

McCord, who died just past sixty in 2009, might fit well enough with either of two kinds of art today, one more trendy than the next. A self-taught artist, he exhibits with a gallery that specializes in outsider art, most recently by Hayley Barker. He also comports with large, admiring portraits of friends by African Americans like Kehinde Wiley and Jordan Casteel. Either trend might account for the resemblance to street art, children's art, and the comics. Compared to both, his flattery comes with an edge. And yet, compared to still edgier art, it is also utterly without bitterness or cruelty.

For with enemies like these, who needs friends? McCord's dealer shares a larger space with an older gallery, in what is almost always a welcome two for one, but they do not always sit eye to eye. The other is more mainstream, but also more open to whimsy. This once, though, two shows share a winning plainness, along with that ambiguity as to what might count as pleasure or a threat. Emily Furr paints a sleek, dark cell phone plugged into a still blacker device for a recharging that she, too, may sorely need, but it in turn bears down on the phone with the point of, I shall guess, a drill. Her very self or selfie might be at risk.

If so, she enters a dark, cloistered world of seemingly familiar technology with a palpable reality and with purposes all its own. It is also an enticing world, with softly shaded surfaces for all their crispness. The technology may run to heavy weapons, but with windows onto the heavens. The drill painting goes by the name Prostitution Universelles Revised, a promise that sounds more distant but also more enticing in French. In a larger series, planets shoot from the shimmering barrel of a cannon or gun. One may never know for sure whether she has left this world behind.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Benny Andrews ran at Michael Rosenfeld through December 5, 2020. Jake McCord ran at Shrine, Emily Furr at Sargent's Daughters, both through January 16, 2021.