Art: Black Beaux-Arts

The art department of Atlanta University (colored) is the Southern U.S. Negro’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The man who has done the most to make it so is a tall, athletic, modestly self-assured Negro art teacher, Hale Aspacio Woodruff.

The 100-odd chocolaty students who throng the art department’s corridors (many from the North and Middle West) come to sign up for his classes in drawing, painting, art appreciation. Thirty-five or 40 are admitted to Instructor Woodruff’s advanced painting classes, may hope to follow many another Woodruff pupil (like Lithographer Wilmer Jennings, Landscapist Albert Wells) to awards in nationwide art exhibitions or to jobs teaching art in Negro schools.

Woodruff, now 42, got his early art training in Indianapolis and at the Chicago Art Institute, was later one of the first winners of the Harmon Foundation’s awards for Negro artists. With his award money ($100) he bought a one-way ticket to Paris, eked out four years of vie de Bohème on $750, a handout of the late Otto H. Kahn. Artist Woodruff returned to the U.S. in 1931 to take his post as art instructor at Atlanta, has remained there ever since. In 1936 he spent a summer studying mural painting in Mexico with Diego Rivera.

As famed for his solemn, racially conscious murals as for his teaching, Woodruff has decorated the walls of several Atlanta schools. His best-known work is a large (6½ by 80 ft.) double set of murals in the newly completed Savery Library at Talladega (Ala.) College. Painted in broad, Rivera-like brush strokes and crowded with writhing figures of whites and Negroes, these murals record two historical subjects associated with the story of the U.S. Negro: 1) the history of the 1839 mutiny on the slave ship Amistad, the subsequent trial of the Negro mutineers in New Haven, Conn, and the repatriation of the ship’s slave cargo to Africa; 2) the history of the development of Talladega College itself, from its founding in an abandoned Civil War prison in 1867 by the American Missionary Association, to its rise as one of the most important Negro schools of the South.

Because the second set of murals celebrated Negro education and equality between U.S. whites and Negroes, a picture of one of them, along with one of Painter Woodruff, is being included in a booklet published by the Office of War Information for distribution in India as counter-Japanese propaganda.

In teaching, Painter Woodruff holds to no high-brow theories about Negro art. He believes that the Negro should not hide his race (“to let the world know he can paint and sculp as well as act, sing and write”) but that, as an American, he should draw his inspiration from the whole pattern of U.S. life. “We are interested,” says he, “in expressing the South as a field, as a territory, its peculiar run-down landscape, its social and economic problems, the Negro people.”

Because many of his Negro pupils come from communities where modern sanitary equipment is lacking, practically every landscape painted in his Atlanta classes contains a privy. Sometimes Painter Woodruff affectionately refers to his group of budding landscapists as “the Outhouse School.”