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There is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist, at Michael Rosenfeld through July 26.

What may sound feral is a 1935 sculpture, with the skilled modeling of the School of Paris brought to New York. And what may sound like the sculptor’s considered judgment, harsh or appreciative, of a wild man is the stage name of a cabaret dancer. He may seem to be raising a savage weapon, perhaps a machete, above his head, but it is a performer’s graceful step on a Paris stage and in Barthé’s art. Its pedestal size makes it easy to admire the handling of bronze and the preternatural slimness better suited to a cabaret act than to a state of nature. Benga must have chosen his feral handle to reflect stereotypes of the black male, catering to them and playing against them, but there is little trace of African art or the “primitivism” that haunted Pablo Picasso. When it comes to Barthé, Modernism yes, irony no.

He looks rather sophisticated himself. Photos open the show with him and Alain Locke, a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance, or actors playing the parts, dapper and dressed to the nines. They look much the same in archival footage of an exhibition opening packed with sophisticates. Isaac Julien, who co-curated the new exhibition, came upon it while preparing for Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), his video in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Julien is claiming an ancestor for his own artistry and intellect and for African American art. He is also claiming an image of blackness that does not exclude gays like Barthé, Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and himself.

He can easily find one in the sculptor’s standing males like Benga. They are often sexualized and always in debt to European tradition, like Black Narcissus from 1929. You may remember Narcissus in myth as so in love with his image reflected in water that he drowns. Here he, too, is lithe and attractive, but also vulnerable. He could be pleading for love, like Julien’s or yours. He holds what might be a cucumber or a penis.

Barthé wants his figures to be at once mythic and particular, in the present. Others include laborers, and the dualism continues in portrait heads. They extend his art to women, with enormous sympathy and with a Black Madonna as well. They may still border on precious, without the edge and complexity of greater artists or blackness in America. Sculpture in general can feel like a footnote to the Met’s survey of the Harlem Renaissance, after paintings and photographs—and to Harlem’s vitality in literature and music. For Julien, though, statues never die.

Locke contemplates them in his video at the Whitney, in an idealized setting—perhaps the Barnes Foundation, in dialogue with Albert C. Barnes. So, in entering the darkness, will you, only the sculpture may be hard to see. You may not even notice it beside Locke’s firm but gentle gaze. Then, too, the new show opens not with sculpture, but rather those photos. Julien’s version of history is fluid enough to limit its own impressive claims for the past. He calls the show “A New Day Is Coming,” which speaks instead of the future.

That optimism infused the Harlem Renaissance. For Barthé, sculptures were studies in heroism, almost to his death in 1989. He called one work The Negro Looks Ahead. Still, he looked first and foremost not to the future, but to past and present. He tempts one to run one’s hands over a head like a phrenologist or lover, to imagine a mind in full. It will not be the savage mind.

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