Considering that Charles White - Heroes: Gone But Not Forgotten – The Art of Charles White (1918-1979) was a substantial hardback publication dating from 2012, it appears to have had a limited circulation and is not widely available.  This is somewhat surprising as Heroes was a catalogue for the first major exhibition of work by Charles White since Images of Dignity: A Retrospective of the Works of Charles White, an exhibition held at the Studio Museum in Harlem, June 20 - August 31, 1982.  Heroes was curated by Charlotte Sherman, who had a decades-long association with Heritage Gallery, the Los Angeles exhibition space with which White had such a long and fruitful association over many years. As stated on the 'Curatorial Note' at the beginning of the catalogue, she “has been a champion of the work of Charles White for more than fifty years.”

This handsome, hardback publication had on its cover White’s ‘Gospel Singers’, from 1951, tempera on board, 20 x 24 inches. The frontmatter of the publication started “This catalogue has been published in association with the national touring museum exhibition HEROES: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA in association with the Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.”

The work in the exhibition were drawn from the Arthur Primas Collection, “which includes more than five hundred works of art by African American artists and artists of the Diaspora”. 

The ‘Curatorial Note’ at the front of the publication gave very useful information about both the Heritage Gallery and the Heroes exhibition itself. 

The Heritage Gallery opened in Los Angeles on La Cienega Boulevard in 1961 with the purpose of exhibiting artists that had been neglected in the exhibition scene on the west coast in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was only in Europe that black artists, performers and writers experienced freedom. Civil rights marches moved throughout the United Stares. Social protest was in the air. Ben Horowitz brought New York artists from the “left” whose emphasis was Social Realism. Charlotte Sherman, with similar goals, brought the art background, along with artists who were devoted to the protest movements. Ed Biberman, one of the artists they represented, was a close neighbour of Frances and Charles White. It was Biberman who brought Charles to the gallery in the early 1960s. White’s work was already well known to both members of the Heritage Gallery and an exhibition was scheduled soon thereafter. Sherman and Horowitz developed a close working and personal relationship with White and over the years the Gallery had more than fifty exhibitions of his work.

HEROES: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN, The Art of Charles White is a significant exhibition of forty-seven works – drawings, prints and paintings – that span the late 1930s through the 1970s. The work comes from the collection of Arthur Primus, who has generously made them available as a national traveling museum exhibition. This large of a collection of White’s work has not been available to a wide museum audience for many decades. Many of his most revered works are featured in this collection, included “Gospel Singers.” “Head of Abraham Lincoln.” “J’Accuse # 5,” “J’Accuse,” “Frederick Douglas” and works from the prestigious Johnson Publishing Company Collection spanning black history from slavery to Jubilee.

Charles White’s career spanned some five decades as both teacher and artist. His work embodies his philosophy, strength, resilience, tenderness, vulnerability, honesty, and his passionate love for the African American people. As one of America’s greatest visual critics in the realms of social justice and race relations, he enriched the lives of those who knew him and lived in his era, and those who appreciate his art now.

The Table of Contents was as follows:

“Heroes” by Peter Clothier [ten page, extensively illustrated essay on White]

“Charles White: A Natural Draftsman” by Will South [eight page text on White’s singular abilities as a drawer of the human form, which opened with an appreciation of White’s contribution to the 1948 publication, Natural Figure Drawing.]

The Art of Charles White in the Arthur Primus Collection – Commentary by Peter Clothier [reproductions, details and brief commentary on all forty-seven works in the exhibition]

List of Works

Curriculum Vitae

Even with the arrival of the major Charles White catalogue in 2018 (related to the substantial exhibition that travelled from Museum of Modern Art, New York, to the Art Institute of Chicago and on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), ‘Heroes’ was still an important publication that showcased the breadth of White’s work, from some of his earliest pieces through to work made during what was to be the final years of his life.

The exhibition opened at the North Carolina Central University Art Museum (NCCU) and ran from September 28th until December 31st, 2012, before its showing at the Driskell Center on Thursday, January 30th, 2014, with an opening reception from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and remained on display until Friday, May 23rd, 2014.

From “Heroes” by Peter Clothier:

It is not surprising that the young Charles White, coming of age in the 1930s on the south side of Chicago, would first be influenced by the Social Realism of that period, nor by the socialist thought that prevailed amongst the intelligentsia and the creative minds of 1930s America. In the days immediately following the Great Depression, he did not have far to look to find evidence of the social and economic injustice that engaged progressive thinkers and working people of all kinds. It is not surprising, too, that his earliest ambitions gave voice to populist social messages in the form of large-scale wall paintings that emulated the example of the great Mexican painters—Rivera, Orozco, Siquieros—though there were models, too, closer at hand, in the murals by American artists sponsored by the Works Project Administration. The demand for social justice was in the air: White simply claimed it for his own heritage, in works now lost in all but photographic records: “Five Great American Negroes” and “A History of the Negro Press.”

There are smaller works, however, by Charlie’s hand that manifest the stylistic conventions of the Social Realism that he first embraced. Aside from some atypical works of the period—we’ll return to them in a moment—the present collection includes just a few of them, notably the 1946 lithograph “Awaiting His Return” and the two 1948 offset lithographs “Head of a Man” and “Our War” from the magazine Negro: USA; also the slightly earlier (1946) ink on paper drawing “Freeport Columbia,” clearly made to be printed as an editorial commentary on the plight of returning African American GIs in the years following World War II—a time of truly heroic courage and sacrifice. The image speaks powerfully of the complacent conspiracy of politicians, police and Klansmen that condoned the practices of arson, pillage and lynching; and, in the figure of the insurrectional black soldier, the nascent, imminently looming spirit of power and hope acquired through suffering.

…(Of special, somewhat different, but still notable interest is the remarkable portrait of Abraham Lincoln that dates from 1952—a hero, certainly, to African Americans for his achievement in emancipating blacks from slavery. It is noteworthy that this portrait is accomplished very much in the style of the German-born artist Winold Reiss, who was selected by the preeminent social critic and ­­­­-­­advocate of black culture Alain Locke to provide illustrations for his seminal book, The New Negro, published in 1925. Locke’s book and Reiss’s portraits of the intelligentsia of the Harlem Renaissance were famously amongst White’s most profound early influences, and it is a pleasingly poignant irony that this, one of his only two white subjects, was executed in the manner of a white artist known for portraits of black Americans.) ­­ White’s strategy for establishing the “heroic” stature of his subjects in visual terms is evident in his two representations of “Micah” in the early 1960s—one woodcut and one lithograph. Micah is the biblical figure who spoke out against social injustice and promoted a world of equality and peace, a natural choice for White--, who stood for the same principles. His Micah is a towering, statuesque figure whose power is represented not only in the massive hands (a holdover, to be sure, from White’s Social Realist youth) but also in the posture, the folds of the robe, and the isolation of the figure from its background: the man stands alone. In each case, though, it is in the face that we find the expression of human suffering and the determination to endure and triumph over it, the quality of the hero that transcends pure physical strength. In the more naturalistic of the two works, the lithograph, the figure seems intent on moving forward, leading by example towards a more just and hopeful future.

White takes a softer, gentler approach in the masterful charcoal drawings of the “J’Accuse” series of the mid-1960s, their title borrowed from the celebrated late-nineteenth century call for justice for the Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus by the novelist ­­Émile Zola. In #2 of the series, the multiple, beautifully modeled heads seem to merge with each other in a common cause against a background whose fiery energy fails to consume them, but rather lends them intensity and power. Each face perfectly reflects its own, individual struggle, and each manifests the sheer beauty boasted in the contemporaneous “Black Is Beautiful” movement. This image reads like the celebration of a celestial chorus, whose modulated harmonies and syncopations rise from darkness towards the light. “J’Accuse #6”—this is surely Belafonte?—manifests the same longing for salvation in song, this time in a single figure whose soulful inner energy reflects and rhymes with the creative turbulence around him.