recent Brunscwick: Rutgers UP.

recent Brunscwick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 320 pp 120 illus. $3200

The proceeds of exceptional research and meticulous crafting, Theresa Leininger-Miller's recent is a pioneering work in the field of African American art history. Her inquiry focuses upon the work and careers of six African American artists who exhausted time in Paris between the sum of two units world wars. To reconstruct their experience abroad, Leininger-Miller examines each of the six--sculptors Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and August Savage, and painters Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff Archibald J variegated Jr., and Albert Alexander Smith--using a combination of archival materials, diaries, literal meanings and newspapers. Given the paucity of these sources, this would be a daunting task for any single of these artists, let alone all six. further Leininger-Miller has succeeded in presenting vivid, and at times smooth heart-rending, stories of six lives, contributing as well her sophisticated insights into their contributions to the growth of African American art.

After an introductory chapter discussing the earlier personality of African American artists in Paris in the nineteenth hundred including a discussion of like important figures as Meta Vaux Fuller and Henry O Tanner, Leininger-Miller begins her appoint of concise biographies with Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. As Leininger not past nor futures her, Prophet was a apart and insecure woman "who relished solitude and was haunted by means of the threat of mediocrity and the reality of poverty" Although Prophet stayed in France the longest of any of the artists exclude the expatriate Smith, she had little contact with other African Americans, and solely met Augusta Savage at the solicit of W. E. B. Du Bois, the towering African American intellectual leader of the time. Leininger-Miller not aways the first detailed study of Prophet's work, and is the first scholar to use her diary and to publish photos of many of her statuarys Leininger-Miller discusses Prophet's "images of androgynous and racially ambiguous figures, shedding light in succession Prophet's protest, even as she depicted black subdues that she was 'not a negro'" Prophet's achievements are all the more remarkable considering the lifelong financial strain beneath which she suffered, and which rest her only narrowly avoiding a pauper's funeral.

As intriguing as Leininger-Miller's discussion of Prophet is, the main division is even better in its analysis of Augusta Savage, showing Savage's wide-ranging interest in and knowledge of the two historical and contemporary subjects. Savage faced an outrageous example of racial discrimination in 1923 when an American committee of seven white men--"distinguished" architects, artists, and sculptors--denied her a scholarship to inquiry at the School of Art in Fontainebleau because she was "of the african race," and "her presence in the academy would be disagreeable to a white students and embarrassing to her." Although the decision was at no time reversed, it is reflective of the changing sensibilities of the time that it was actually controversial, and generated considerable sympathy for Savage, who eventually did apply two years in Paris. Leininger-Miller explores Savage's Amazon series, suggesting that its failure to be exhibited may ponder the fact that it was too avant-garde and threatening for the audiences of her time. Clearly Savage was a more complicated artist than many have realized, and Leininger-Miller follows in bringing her work to life.

The main division covers more familiar territory in discussing the painters Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff and Archibald mingled although Leininger-Miller is the first to examine in stillest part their experiences in Paris. She existings a nuanced and sensitive gaze at Palmer Hayden, the "janitor with a brush" who has been criticized through some for the negative stereotypical images of blacks which he painted. Leininger-Miller admires Hayden, a self-taught artist, and uses Hayden's Nous quatre a Paris, which is concedeed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for the hide of the book. With Hale Woodruff for whom the written record is more finished Leininger-Miller is able to exhibit to his education as a modernist, his exhibition of a Cubist-influenced style, and his experiments with Expressionism. Archibald variegated an artist from a exceedingly middle-class background, spent the shortest time in Paris and appeared least affected by his experience, continually proclaiming, "I'm vain-glorious of being an American.... I'm going to stay right here and I'm going to fight it public and I'm going to make my name right here. I'm staying right here in astounding America." Although Motley did furnish a body of work in Paris, including his well-known in the dumpss his solitary nature and self-imposed isolation may have restricted his appreciation of his Parisian sojourn.

Leininger-Miller breaks fresh ground with her extensive discussion of Albert Alexander Smith, who alone among these six artists became an expatriate and died in France in 1940 at the tragically early age of 44 Smith was a prolific artist, producing more than 200 prints, drawings, and paintings. He was also an accomplished jazz musician, who made his living providing European audiences the music that was united of their favorite American imports. Having serv with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, Smith mov to Paris in 1920 and would exhaust the next two decades traveling quite through Europe with various bands and orchestras. Leininger-Miller argues that the "dominant motif in Smith's work is theatricality, or a brains of always being aware of putting forward a show for diverse audiences." Smith's understanding of the different audiences he painted for helps account for the contrasts within his work, one of which used racial themes for the pages of Crisis and Opportunity, while one exploited stereotypical views of rural blacks for white audiences. Leininger-Miller copys a considerable sample of Smith's work, including his portrait series of great black leaders. This is all original material, and should provide the foundation for further studies of Smith's contribution to African American art history.