Art: SPEAKING AND SILENT

Peter Paul Rubens once met a Negro on the docks of Antwerp, or perhaps at a party, and asked the man to pose. ‘Probably he gave no more than a morning to the multiple study that now hangs at the Brussels Royal Musum of Fine Arts. This portrait bulges with brilliance, makes room for itself; yet it is not monumental in feeling but intimate. Rubens spins his subject swiftly, eagerly, to see and show the same thing from four view points all at once. Who was the model? No one knows his name. Rubens presumably painted him for fun, for love of that gallant bronze head that seems to bear the fingerprints of God upon its temples. It is a speaking head, al though silent. And optimistic, too, against all odds. From that shadowed throat and those strong liana jaws, it speaks of life to men with a torn hope — to paraphrase a poem by Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor.

George Bellows once remarked, and rightly, that “the name given to a thing is not the subject, it is only a convenient label. The subject is inexhaustible.” Yet the label that Bellows gave to his 1909 masterpiece at Washington’s National Gallery has weight. Both Members of This Club, he calls it, and there a black man and a white are trying to beat each other’s brains out for money.

Black militants and white racists have since carried such struggles far beyond the ring, and a few blacks sim ply reduced the problem to a slogan: “Get Whitey!” But others, perhaps most, say as Bellows says by implication, “Let there be a struggle, but let it be between equals.”