Hale Aspacio Woodruff (1900–1980). The Art of the Negro: Interchange (1950–1951).
Oil on canvas (360 cm × 360 cm). Clark Atlanta University Collection of African-American
Art, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
“…I did develop…a kind of root down in Atlanta,” confided Hale Woodruff during an
oral history interview, “You may have heard of it. It was called the ‘Outhouse School’
and, frankly, it was given such a name as this by one of the press writers because
we used to paint landscapes in and around Atlanta in our art classes and the hillsides
were just dotted with outdoor toilets” (
1
). The understated and self-effacing Woodruff was referring to the Atlanta School,
an alliance he developed among black artists in the 1940s, which flourished into national
activities, among them an annual art exhibit. At the inaugural, philosopher Alain
Locke, spokesman of the Negro Movement, known in the 1920s and 1930s as Harlem Renaissance,
praised the exhibit for encouraging “a healthy and representational art of the people
with its roots in its own soil” (
2
).
Painter, muralist, printmaker, experimenter, educator, organizer Woodruff became art
director at Atlanta University, where he founded the art department and permanent
collection and later painted the Art of the Negro murals. Born in Cairo, Illinois,
the only child of a widowed mother, who was “very, very skillful with the pencil and
the pen,” he grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and showed early talent as high school
newspaper cartoonist and later, during his studies at the John Herron Art Institute
in Indianapolis, as weekly political cartoonist for the Indianapolis Ledger (
1
).
Later, Woodruff studied at Harvard University and the Art Institute of Chicago (
3
). He arrived in Atlanta “to paint the red clay of Georgia” by way of Paris, France,
where he lived on a shoestring for 4 years, attending the Académie Moderne and Académie
Scandinave at the time Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Josephine
Baker, Henry O. Tanner, Palmer Hayden, and other American expatriates made Paris their
home. Exposure to cubism in Paris guided his transition from realistic scenes of everyday
life in the rural South to bold abstraction and invention.
During a summer in Mexico, he studied with Diego Rivera, “I wanted to paint great
significant murals in fresco and I went down there to…learn his technique” (
1
). Rivera’s murals, which mingled culture, history, and folklore with sociopolitical
and communal elements, were created for public areas, not private galleries. This
use of art to reach a broad segment of society appealed to Woodruff (
4
). Inspired by his work in Mexico, he painted the widely acclaimed murals at Talladega
College in Alabama, which delineate the development of the college from an abandoned
civil war prison and commemorate the uprising on the slave ship Amistad (
5
).
“I’ve always had a high regard and respect for the African artist and his art…. I
look at the African artist certainly as one of my ancestors” (
1
). While Woodruff was studying in Indianapolis, he became friends with German gallery
owner and art patron Herman Lieber, who gave him Afrikanische Plastik, a book on African
sculpture, which sparked his interest in the subject and indelibly colored his understanding
of art. “Then on seeing the work of Paul Cézanne I got the connection. Then I saw
the work of Picasso and I saw how Cézanne, Picasso, and the African had a terrific
unique sense of form” (
1
).
Woodruff left Atlanta to work at New York University. “I sort of felt that I had done
my pioneering down there…” (
1
). His association with Atlanta University, as well as Spelman and Morehouse Colleges,
had cemented his teaching career. “It’s been my problem and I’m attempting to solve
it, to reconcile being a teacher on the one hand and a painter on the other” (
1
). A professor with a full travel schedule of lecturing and exhibiting throughout
the United States, Woodruff had to balance practicing art and fulfilling academic
duties. But he did not eschew his scholarly work: “So many of the artists who are
showing up on Madison Avenue now are people that I’ve taught at NYU” (
1
).
A thinker as well as painter, he struggled with the demands of social conscience and
artistic excellence, trying to define his allegiance as an artist. “I think all art
if it’s worth its salt has got to be universal. But it comes from a local source,
you see. That’s it. It can be as local as all get-out, but it has to have this transcendental
quality in order for it to be universal. Now it can be black art; it can be yellow
art; white art; anything. But it comes from a local source” (
1
). He drew on Ralph Ellison, who grappling with the same dilemmas concluded, “I want
to be the right arm, the themes of my people, but I want to be a great writer regardless”
(
1
).
The Art of the Negro was commissioned after Woodruff moved to New York. The mural,
6 canvas panels (360 cm × 360 cm) in the rotunda of Atlanta University’s Trevor Arnett
Library, “…has to do with a kind of interpretive treatment of African art….Also, I
wanted it to be something of an inspiration to the students who go to that library,
to see something about the art of their ancestors” (
1
).
Panel 2, Interchange, on this month’s cover, is a dramatic depiction of Woodruff’s
ideas as well as style. The flat figures, exaggerated forms, and stylized scenes within
the larger composition propose a semiabstract version of reality. Woodruff the reader
of history and lover of knowledge packed the mural with African, Greco-Roman, and
northern European symbols and interlocking scenes of harmonious human interaction,
unencumbered by cultural or geographic barriers.
Exchange of knowledge and ideas is at the heart of both the interaction and the symbols
that preceded it. For human achievement is multiethnic and multicultural, formed of
infinite exchanges, intentional, as well as imperceptible and unacknowledged. Woodruff’s
clear vision of an interconnected, reciprocal, and multifaceted world has broad application
in what we now know is also a microbiologic interchange, just as crucial to human
achievement and survival.
Whether straightforward as travel in the spread of African tickbite fever, unexpected
and insidious as a link between malaria and HIV, zoonotic as the transmission of many
emerging infections, or borne of human effort as bednet use to prevent mosquitoborne
disease, interchange is key to science, as well as art.