Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

Harry Henderson

Description

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), born to a Chippewa mother and African-American father, was the most controversial sculptor of her day. Her story was told in 28 pages twenty years ago by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson in A History of African American Artists from 1792 (1993), a "landmark" tome and standard reference that you have in your collections. Our narrative of Lewis's life and art updates that article with more than 100,000 words, 50 illustrations, 800 references, bibliography, index, and a reference list of more than 100 works with notes on museum holdings. It provides discussions of her fans, her critics, other 19th-century artists, and much more.This first full-length biography reveals Henderson's decades of original research. It digs into hidden relationships, identifies many new sources, and casts new light on well-known works of art. Starting with the suggestion, "Think of Edmonia Lewis as an artist at war," it goes on to tell the story of a young woman on a mission to overturn myths of inequality. Burdened by outsider status and personal secrets, she joined radical feminists and the Roman Catholic Church as she struggled to establish a famous studio in Rome, to publicize her work, and to show her art in the U.S. during Reconstruction. Thousands came to see her shows from Boston to San Francisco, and many more followed her in the news. Backed by her brother, a Gold Rush businessman, she ultimately provided inspiration to, and helped change how the world viewed, talented women of color.KIRKUS REVIEWS said, "The Hendersons' monument of research and craftsmanship seeks to give Lewis the consideration that she has been denied-not dissimilar to the artist's own commitment to proving her competitors and critics wrong, demonstrating that a minority could take on the hegemonic tradition of fine arts. The book provides crystalline accounts of Lewis' feuds and mentorships, as well as rich illustrations of the works being discussed throughout. Overall, the authors deliver a well-constructed mix of primary resources, critical analysis and literary flourishes." MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW called her new biography "a key acquisition for any arts or African-American history holding ... it reads with the passion and drama of good literature." GOODREADS accorded it Five Stars, remarking, "even though it is classified as a narrative biography, don't expect to find extended scenes of improvised dialogue or re-imagined day to day occurrences fleshed out by artistic license. The book remains academic and serious in nature throughout, but with conjecture here and there concerning what Edmonia must have been thinking and feeling." It recently received the GOLD eLit Award for biography, "Illuminating Digital Publishing Excellence." I am sure you would want this essential biography in your collections.Because Lewis and her art connected with some of the most famous literary, feminist, radical, and artistic figures of her time, her life is of special interest to students of American art history, feminist and women's history, American history, African-American studies, American studies, and American-Indian studies, as well as scholars of race, gender, and the 19th-century American novel.Sample chapter, more details and more reviews at www.edmonialewis.com

Sujets

• Sculpture

Informations

• Publié par: Esquiline Hill Press
• Date de parution: 05 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588634528
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
DEDICATION AND INTRODUCTION
LIST OF CHAPTERS / CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
PROLOGUE
Book One - Boston
BOOK TWO, Part One – The World
BOOK TWO, Part Two – The Artist Becomes the Symbol
EPILOGUE – Post Scripts and Traces
APPENDIX: WORKS
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
NOTES - continued
Index
The Indomitable Spirit of
EDMONIA LEWIS
A Narrative Biography
By Harry Henderson and Albert Henderson



Esquiline Hill Press
Milford CT



Made in the United States of America
Contact: ah at edmonialewis.com
www.edmonialewis.com
© 2012, 2014 Albert K Henderson. All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Theodore Leon Henderson


ISBN 978-1-58863-451-1 PDF Electronic Book
ISBN 978-1-58863-452-8 EPUB Electronic Book

Suggested Cataloging [1]
DEDICATION AND INTRODUCTION
This book is dedicated to the late Romare Howard Bearden, a distinguished African-American humanist and one of the most creative artists of his century. Bearden and my father, a professional writer, decided in 1987 it would be the third venture of a successful partnership dating to the 1960s. [2] Bearden’s name would grace the title page but for the mortal limit that halted his contribution too long ago.
Based on their twenty-year friendship, Bearden had recruited my father to help him rectify a glaring omission in cultural resources. Barely a word about important African Americans appeared in the canons of art history. Together they pioneered research and wrote biographies to remedy the gap. They published Six Black Masters of American Art in 1972 (Doubleday) and the “landmark,” 542-page tome, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present in 1993 (Pantheon). [3] Thus they set forth the lives of more than fifty important artists.
Among the artists they investigated, one stood out, unique in American history and celebrated beyond the world of art: Edmonia Lewis.
Simply calling her exceptional is a gross understatement, like saying the Louvre collects wonderful paintings. She was a gatecrasher in the elite world of fine art and a self-made woman. She found fame and prospered at a time when wealthy white women had few legal rights; colored women, rich or poor, had less to none.
As a racial, social, and cultural outsider, she labored to harmonize with Victorian society as a model of decorum while balancing pride in her heritage and taking brave chances. She made herself the antithesis of the alarming stereotypes favored by the enemies of her people and a departure from the zealous torque of her heroes’ radical politics.
She expressed herself within the strict neoclassical idiom, bending its rules to her needs. She rarely complained of racial abuse in America, but it was not easy. In Europe, she could express her anger more openly by pushing back at bigots in an equality of insult. Harsh words. Crude gestures. Defiant images carved in white marble soon to be displayed in major American cities.
Her boldness made her a target for scorn, lies, and denial. It so tried her early supporters that some dismissed her. It so tested later admirers that scholar Kirsten Pai Buick published over 200 pages discussing “Lewis and the problem of art history’s black and Indian subject” in 2010. In the twentieth century, attempts to downgrade her and to invade her privacy prevailed. Contemporary praise was buried by historians. Disclosure of a college scandal, confusion about her sexuality, and mysteries over her last days too often overshadowed her skill as an artist and her triumphs as an iconoclast.
The lack of an accurate biography added to chronic errors and confusion about her. It also made her a blank slate for writers with hasty ideas and narrow agendas. Not always doing justice to their intentions, they ignored the bulk of her work and sometimes led the reader astray with unchecked brainstorms, biases, and errors. As a result, even her most ardent fans of recent generations were likely to echo old slanders, slants, and typos as facts, interesting and reliably true.
With laurels for her work from Italian judges and from critics English and American, she personified the dignity and talent of colored women in 19th century America. As Bearden and my father saw her, she is a seminal figure in our cultural record. All artists must struggle for recognition, but she had to do more. She beat the color barrier when it was stoutest in terms of brute force, raw energy, and shamelessness. In modern terms, she outflanked the myths of inferiority with great gifts, superior skills, a studied strategy, and a stainless character. As the ‘Jackie Robinson’ of American art, she continued to inspire long after she went into voluntary exile and disappeared.
Museums and collectors now search for her work, pushing values tantalizingly higher. The last decade far outpaced the prices of the 1990s. Newark Museum purchased two marble busts, Hiawatha and Minnehaha, at $76,375 and $64,625, respectively, at a Christie’s auction in 2000. A Welsh family donated her bust of Longfellow to the British National Museums Liverpool in lieu of $117,000 in taxes. In April 2003, Sotheby’s London auctioned Night, an early version of her prize-winning Asleep, for £84,000 (about $130,000). Minnehaha brought $52,875 at Cowan’s Auctions, Cincinnati, Ohio, in February 2009. In other auctions, the tour-de-force “veiled” Bride of Spring, once thought to be lost, brought $138,000 at Cowan’s Auctions in 2007, a record at the time. A smaller and more sensuous “veiled” Spring took $27,255 at Skinner’s, Boston, in 2010. An early work, the three-figure Indians in Battle sold for $287,500 at Gabriel’s Auctions in Nov. 2010. Sotheby’s New York obtained $85,000, $87,750 and, in 2008, a record $301,000 for copies of the romantic Old Arrow Maker. The following year, a copy of its companion piece, the Marriage of Hiawatha, pushed the record to $314,500. Works that express the African-American struggle, such as the iconic Forever Free and Hagar, both in institutional hands for decades, can easily be described as priceless.
Many of her facts appear in the Bearden-Henderson History of African-American Artists - until now the most complete published authority on her life. [4] Its twenty-eight folio-size pages barely touch on her spirit, the dramas of tortured relationships, and the unique challenges she overcame as a pioneer. Because of her accomplishments and legacy, the authors felt her story deserved more study and a fuller telling for a wider audience. They started to draft sketches meant to sell the idea to a publisher who could reach the general reader. Then Bearden died in 1988.
Encouraged and occasionally aided by important scholars and others, my father pressed on. He spent substantial efforts to unearth little known details that helped him divine a more coherent reading of her life and art. He traced her steps, drafted more sketches, and collected material across North America and Europe. In 2003, he too passed away after a long illness, leaving a mountain of raw research and many ideas in various stages of draft or conversation.
Based on forty years studying the lives of African-American artists, he had fresh historical insights to Lewis’s life and work. Many sources he found challenged errors that hid truths both good and bad. He had exciting ideas about her complex personality and difficulties that nearly sank her career. He also recognized the socio-economic changes and the key role of a newly industrialized press that helped her to assault racism and sexism across the Western world.
Publication of Edmonia Lewis’s history was my father’s dying wish. As I had assisted him, meeting every Saturday for about fifteen years before his death, I shared his curiosity and his desire to memorialize her in print for the general reader. Unlike my father, who as a freelance never wrote without a publisher’s advance, I contributed to many learned journals without an invitation - my way of giving back to a community that had sustained my career in scholarly publishing. I decided to complete his work to satisfy my own curiosity. I hoped to help him tell Edmonia Lewis’s story - if I could - rather than see his devotion wasted. Relying on my memories of our conversations, going through his files and well beyond, I collated sources, marshaled facts, and fleshed out his arguments. Parts of his text and certainly his conception remain as I recall it. I enjoyed revolutionary advantages of full-text sources and databases online, enabling me to add many details previously beyond reach. Such advances led to discovering the surprising and long-sought details of the artist’s death.
In an effort to counter 150 years of errors, confusion, and meanness, I made a free web site filled with facts, links, quotations, and news of auctions and museum acquisitions: “Edmonia Lewis: First Internationally Acclaimed African-American Sculptor,” at www.edmonialewis.com. I am pleased to report the number of visitors has steadily risen each year. I encourage readers of this biography to check the site for copies of documents and other useful information as well as to register to receive notice of “Edmonia Lewis News” via email.
Many biographies of nineteenth-century women celebrate their subjects’ gender by using their first names throughout. Our goal reaches beyond femininity, a narrative style intended to flow like adult fiction and to reach a wide readership. Close attention to chronology, maps, and the role of the nineteenth-century press improved our understanding of social dynamics central to Edmonia’s struggle. Comments that fill gaps in documentation with markers such as “imagine,” “perhaps,” and the absence of quotation marks are simply musings framed as storytelling rather than as monographic analysis. If we have met our goals, the reader will perce