by Gretchen Wagner
In the autumn of 1946, Herbert Gentry arrived in Paris to begin his studies at the city’s art academies and private studios. The scene he left behind at home in New York was a hotbed for new art in the post-World War II era. Critics had broadcast the term “abstract expressionism” on the pages of The New Yorker, Jackson Pollock began his celebrated “drip paintings,” and Norman Lewis launched his new calligraphic style. While these and other exciting developments were soon to transform contemporary art, a different metropolis, Paris, had immediate and irresistible allure for Gentry. As an aspiring young modernist who first encountered Paris in 1944 as a black solider in the segregated American armed forces days after the city’s liberation, he recalled, “I knew then that I would return to Paris to study art, to work, and to settle until it was time for New York to open up its door to art for all.”[1] The French capital promised many artists, especially artists of color, freedom from social and creative constraints that persisted in the United States.[2] At the time, major American museums that supported an active contemporary program, such as The Museum of Modern Art, favored art by whites and, as scholars observe, “minorities of the ‘folk’ variety over their academically trained counterparts.”[3] Funded by the G.I. Bill, Gentry was one of the first African American artists to go to Paris to study immediately following the war. In doing so, he became an important bridge between generations of black Americans who sojourned to Europe, from celebrated figures Henry Ossawa Tanner, Lois Mailou Jones, and Hale Woodruff in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to aspiring talents such as Beauford Delaney, Romare Bearden, and Ed Clark, among others who followed Gentry there in the 1950s.
Taking up residence at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris and enrolling at the progressive Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Gentry immersed himself in an education that combined studio instruction with life experience. As he stated, “I just didn’t go to art school, I met everybody who was somebody in the art world,”[4] and indeed, he interacted with many sculptors and painters active in the scene. Painter Yves Brayer and sculptor Ossip Zadkine, who both taught at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, were central figures in his early training. They nurtured Gentry’s interest in the modernist styles of Cubism and Expressionism. In addition, Gentry sought out Georges Braque and completed several lessons with the elder Cubist, who invited Gentry to observe his working process. Members of the CoBrA group entered Gentry’s circle as well and introduced him to ideas about the subconscious and the artist as a social being. The saturated hues, compressed spaces, faceted volumes, as well as an incorporation of nonwestern forms, evident in the young artist’s work from the 1940s and 1950s reflect a cross-current of stylistic tendencies. His experiences also exposed him to primitivism and instances of cultural appropriation which underpin the western modernist tradition.[5] Paris, and Europe for that matter, certainly offered African Americans many freedoms, yet inequity remained. In France, the exoticization of black culture endured, and racism was on the rise as the decolonization movement took hold. Nonetheless, within the five years of his initial stay in Paris, Gentry enjoyed several significant exhibition opportunities which put his work in front of the day’s public and critics. In 1949, the prestigious Galerie Seine hosted his first one-person exhibition in Europe, followed by another solo presentation in 1950 at the groundbreaking collective-run Galerie Huit founded by Haywood (Bill) Rivers to champion contemporary American art. He also gained entry to the legendary Salon d’Automne in 1951.
Although visual art was always Gentry’s focus, music also occupied an important place in his life. During his childhood in 1920s Harlem, Gentry’s mother performed in elaborate Ziegfeld stage productions and danced alongside Josephine Baker. Through her, he developed knowledge of the entertainment world, and once in Paris, he quickly gravitated to the vibrant jazz scene there and the connections it had to offer. He stepped easily into the role of managing a musical venue, Chez Honey, which he opened in 1949 in the bohemian Montparnasse district where many American artists had studios. The space, which served as a gallery by day and a popular jazz venue by night, attracted both American and European artists, thinkers, and musicians. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie, among other renowned names, performed there in front of packed audiences which included figures such as Simone de Beauvoir and Richard Wright.[6] Notable creatives enjoyed the buzzing social atmosphere, and Gentry, who was a natural connector, reveled in the interactions and exchanges that transpired. His canvas Chez Honey (1949) captures one such moment where two patrons press together in an intimate encounter. The figure on the right, grasping her companion’s shoulder with a brightly manicured hand, leans in and whispers to her partner, who gazes dreamily upward, as if entranced by the woman’s words, attire, and the club’s sensual ambiance. Instances of social and psychological connection, such as this one, remained a dominant theme in his art throughout Gentry’s career.
Chez Honey, 1949 Oil on panel 15 x 18 inches (38.1 x 45.7 cm)
By the end of the 1950s, Gentry relocated to Copenhagen initiating his frequent travels between Scandinavia, Paris, and New York that continued until his death.[7] During this time and into the 1960s, gestural abstraction became his primary style and earned him a place in the first European exhibition bringing together African American artists.[8] Describing his process in front of the easel, Gentry explained, “there’s a certain spontaneity that exists...my subconscious plays a great role, I don’t calculate.”[9] The compositions from this period vibrate and overflow with visual activity. In several, layers of broad linear brushstrokes structure tonal fields, generating satisfying tension between flatness and recession. Evidence of the figure remains in the totemic profiles of Copenhagen (1960) as well as in the vague faces and eyes that emerge in several paintings of the period. Although his reliance on automatism and energetic rhythms parallels abstract expressionism, Gentry, like the CoBrA artists he befriended, avoided the individualistic rhetoric behind the movement flourishing in the United States.[10] Rather, a collective impulse informs the subconscious spontaneity Gentry summoned to direct his brush. For him, “all the types that I’ve met in my life” flow into the art.[11]
Gentry asserted that his paintings came from the hands of his ancestors as much as his own. “It’s about my family, my forefathers’, mother’s; it’s not only me who’s painting, it’s the people who lived before me, connected with me,” he explained.[12] His close friend Romare Bearden recalled that Gentry often expressed that he would find “something missing in himself and his art, should he not return to his roots.”[13] Gentry grew up surrounded by preeminent artists of the Harlem Renaissance, who reclaimed through their art African traditions as well as stereotypes and caricatures to take control of their depicted identity. To a certain extent, Gentry’s ideas drew upon his proximity to this history; however, he rejected notions that as a black artist he had a responsibility to “tell a conscious story figuratively” about black life and culture.[14] Instead, he adhered to a type of abstraction born spontaneously from the collective subconscious. This commitment to western aesthetics and philosophies distanced him from some of his American contemporaries—such those in the Black Arts Movement who called for clear articulations of black experience—however, as he saw it, identity still had a place in his practice. “The blackness within you will have to come out if you are to be a truthful artist,” he stated.[15] Europe created the space for him, as an African American, to explore his distinct approach freely, which ultimately earned him numerous substantial museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the region. The acclaim Gentry received during these years included the distinguished honor of a retrospective organized by Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1975, securing his place in contemporary discourse.
Gentry spent increasingly more time in New York during the 1970s and 1980s, when he took up permanent residence in the Chelsea Hotel in 1982 between his ongoing trips to Europe. The city of his childhood, now facing economic downturn and widespread neglect, was a different place from his youth. Nonetheless, it provided a creative grittiness, perhaps reminding him of the austerity of postwar Paris and the interpersonal resourcefulness it inspired. Once again, he immersed himself in a vibrant community of artists, writers, and musicians, within which he continued to expand his social and professional network and seek out support. Canvases from this period, where clusters of contoured heads and bodies emerge interconnected among a dense accumulation of webbed line, reference social relationships. One example, Untitled (Subway) (1972), captures public transit riders gazing in unison, as if passing strangers synced in synergetic attentiveness. His brushstrokes suggest more control and consideration than before, and, given Gentry’s propensity to traverse varied stylistic sources, one recognizes parallels ranging from neo-expressionist impulses to graffiti’s linearity. Painting, “it’s about putting things together,” Gentry once expressed, and that certainly pertained to his combination of visual inspirations as well as the communal connectedness that his compositions evoke.[16] Since his first days in Paris until his later years, this approach—based on intuitive creative release and a lifetime of extraordinary encounters—propelled Gentry to define a complex art that profoundly links geographies, generations, and Narratives.
Gretchen L. Wagner is a curator and art historian based in St. Louis. She has completed projects featuring modern and contemporary art at institutions internationally, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and Williams College Museum of Art, among others. Most recently she co-organized the exhibition The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum which celebrated abstraction by contemporary black artists. Wagner holds degrees in Art History from the University of Wisconsin and Williams College.
1 G. R. N’Namdi Gallery. Herbert Gentry: The Man, the Master, the Magic, (Chicago: G. R. N’Namdi Gallery, 2008), p. 17.2 For discussion of Paris’s draw for many African American artists following World War II, see Catherine Bernard, MichelFabre, Valerie J. Mercer, and Peter Selz, Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996) and Marie-Françoise Sanconie, “Paris 1945-1991,” in Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris, eds. Asake Bomani and Belvie Rooks, (Fort Bragg, CA: Q. E. D. Press, 1992), 44-50.3 Darby English and Charlotte Barat, Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 23.4 Brenda K. Delany, “Post-World War II Expatriate Painters: The Question of a Black Aesthetic,” (Ed. D. diss., Columbia University, 2003), 129.5 For a discussion of Gentry’s relationship with the avant-garde circles he encountered, see Rachel Tolano, “Among Others and With Friends: Abstraction and the Social Subject in Herbert Gentry’s Art,” in Making Connections: The Art and Life of Herbert Gentry, (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 2014), 16-25.6 Rehema Barber and Mary Ann Rose, Moved by Music: Herbert Gentry, Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, (Hartford, CT: TheAmstad Center for Art and Culture, 2006), unpaginated.7 In addition to Paris and New York, Gentry established homes in Copenhagen and the Swedish cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö during his lifetime.8 The exhibition 10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe was organized by Den Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen and opened in the summer of 1964. Artists Harvey Cropper, Beauford Delaney, Arthur Hardie, Clifford Jackson, Sam Middleton, Earl Miller, Norma Morgan, Larry Potter, and Walter Williams participated alongside Gentry.9 “Oral History Interview with Herbert Gentry, 1991 May 23,” conducted by Liza Kirwin for the Archives of American Art, accessed June 19, 2020, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-herbert-gentry-11493.10 See Karen Kurczynski, “Ironic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism,” in Abstract Expressionism: TheInternational Context, ed. Joan Marter, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 110-113.11 Archives of American Art, “Oral History Interview.”12 Archives of American Art, “Oral History Interview.”13 Romare Bearden, “Herbert Gentry,” in An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad, (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1983), 9.14 Delany, “Post-World War II Expatriate Painters,” 131.15 Delany, “Post-World War II Expatriate Painters,” 131-32.16 N’Namdi Gallery, Herbert Gentry, p. 6