Art: Mirkels

Back from Nashville, Tenn. a year ago came Manhattan Photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe with a portfolio full of photographs and a head bubbling with enthusiasm. In a semiliterate, 57-year-old Negro tombstone carver she had discovered yet another U. S. primitive artist. The Museum of Modern Art’s Director Alfred Barr Jr. echoed her enthusiasm, and last week the first one-man show the Museum has ever given a Negro artist opened in a couple of alcoves in the Museum’s temporary quarters in Rockefeller Center.

Though he does not yet know it, Artist William Edmondson’s tombstones are all tattle directe. Cut directly in the stone without preliminary modeling, they are all small, because he has not yet been able to buy a sizable block. Their charm lies in the simple-hearted directness with which Sculptor Edmondson has chiseled out woolly-headed angels, rams, dumpy little preachers, lawyers and ladies with bustles (see cut).

Deeply religious, Sculptor Edmondson is far from the bottom of Nashville’s Negro society. A hard-working hospital orderly for many years, he owns his own home and a thriving vegetable patch, turned tombstone carver about five years ago because of a vision. To friends last week he explained his conversion: “Dis here stone n’ all those out there in de yard—come from God. It’s de word in Jesus speakin’ his mind in my mind. I mus’ be one of his ‘ciples. Dese here is mirkels I can do. Cain’t nobody do dese but me. I cain’t help carvin’ I jes’ does it. It’s like when you’re leavin’ here you’re goin’ home. Well, I know I’m goin’ to carve. Jesus has planted the seed of carvin’ in me.” Curiously, Sculptor Edmondson seldom goes to church, but likes to shout and praise God while carving. Unlike most religious Negroes, William Edmondson never quotes the Bible. “The oney time,” said he last week, “as I tried to read the Bible against God’s wishes all the leaves came out.” He says that one day when he was 14 years old and working in a cornfield, the figure of God appeared on the east edge of a cloud and showed him a great flood destroying the world. After that he was careful to follow divine instructions.

He can read large print with difficulty, writes scarcely at all. Carver Edmondson does not smoke, neither does he chew, but he admits to an occasional medical nip of gin.

The statue on which Sculptor Edmondson was working last week was entitled Sad Girl Sitting Alone. This and other Edmondson mirkels are less appreciated by Nashville’s Negro colony than by Manhattan’s art colony. Few have been sold.