Art: REVOLUTIONARY OR VICTIM

Baldwin to the contrary, great painters throughout the history of Western art have looked at the black man and mirrored him as beautiful. Not many, but some. Seeking them out, Author-Critic Alexander Eliot culled the great collections of Europe and the U.S. to assemble the remarkable gallery that TIME presents on the following pages. All of the pictures are white mirrors, since oil paint was never the Negro’s traditional medium: the promise of black Rembrandts lay in other fields. But all of them reflect the unprejudiced eye that saw beauty could appear in any color.

In the course of his search, Eliot immersed himself in the relatively un known field of black letters. There he found poems by men whose names are scarcely known — all black men whose verse cast a new light on the unrealized beauty of blackness. Lit by these neglected lamps, the black man’s mirrored image takes on a new dimension — a dimension that both enhances the particularity of “negritude” and celebrates a human communality of relevance.

Jean-Paul Sartre has said that Negro poetry is “the true revolutionary poetry” of the time, something that transcends race alone. Richard Wright, the father of the black novel, laid claim to “a right more immediately deep er than that of politics or race . . . .that is, a human right, the right of a man to think and feel honestly.” In Chicago, a mural on a ghetto wall glowers and glows at passersby in pride and in challenge. Or, hear Owen Dodson:

When can I pray again, View peace in my own parlor again?

When my sons come home How can I show em my broken hands?

How can I show em they sister’s twisted back?

How can I present they land to them?

How, when they been battlin in far places for freedom?

Better let them die in the desert drinkin sand Or holdin onto water and shippin into death Then they come back and see they sufferin for vain.

Such work stands peer to Frost, Sandburg and other white American poets who are constantly recited in our schools. In fact, the black tenth of the nation has produced at least a dozen lyric voices of the most intense quality: Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Fenton Johnson and Frank Home. Here, selected lines are ranged against the pictures, both as commentary and gloss.