Putting ordinary people in odd, unsettling surroundings was the specialty of Hughie Lee-Smith. In today’s episode we look at his “Confrontation” from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
We’ll find out how an encounter with Italian Surrealism and a forbidden childhood carnival forged a visual language he used to depict universal feelings of loneliness, separation, and alienation in post-war America.
If you want to zoom in and pan around, you can find it here on the museum’s site.
SHOW NOTES
“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/
Episode music:
“Passing Fields” by Quantum Jazz
Courtesy of Free music Archive (CC BY-SA) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Quantum_Jazz/End_of_Line/05_-_Quantum_Jazz_-_Passing_Fields/
“Ghost Carousel” by LAURENT BUCZEK
Courtesy of Pixabay https://pixabay.com/music/build-up-scenes-ghost-carousel-155303/
“Between Worlds” by Tobias Webster (CC-BY)
http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/tobias_weber/56664
“Shades of Spring” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Artwork information
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/confrontation-78130
Artist information
Biography
Hughie Lee-Smith by Leslie King-Hammond and Aiden Faust. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2010.
Hughie Lee-Smith papers, c 1890-2007, bulk 1931-1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/hughie-lee-smith-6317
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughie_Lee-Smith
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/nyregion/art-a-painter-finally-gets-his-due.html
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!
Ready? Then let’s head to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.
MUSIC
Today I’m looking at Confrontation by Hughie Lee-Smith.
If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/smith. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
The awkward pose of a tall, skinny girl who stands facing us in a surreal landscape. She’s on our right with her eyes lowered and hands clasped behind her back. Her feet are parted a little with her left foot, on our right, twisting inwards. Her hair is tightly pulled back and she wears an ivory white dress with thin straps. It’s trimmed with azure blue on the neckline and hem and matches her flat shoes. A black belt cinches her waist.
A second girl stands closer to us on our left. She’s has her back to us with her legs together and hands are on her hips making her elbows stick out. Her head is bowed with hair falling forward to hide her face. She wears a navy blue dress splashed with dusty pink polka dots and black shoes.
They look like they’re about 13 or 14, with pale skin, black hair and the tall, lanky bodies of girls in their early teens. They stand on sand-colored ground scattered with pebbles that stretches between us and a collapsing brick wall. One either side of the wall a flat shoreline runs back to a narrow sea-blue body of water with a line of low tan and black hills in the distance.
The wall is freestanding, it’s just plunked down behind the girls, kind of randomly. It has broken jagged edges on the sides and is partly covered with cracked and pitted plaster.
The girls are divided by 5 spindly poles arranged front to back to create two sort of aisles that each of them stands in. The poles are taller than the wall and stretch up toward a steel-blue sky filled with hazy clouds.
The landscape and girls take up the lower half of this oil painting that’s about 3 ft square with that hazy sky filling the top half.
The poles are wood brown and blue-gray with long coral pink and pale mint green streamers wrapped or draped around them with their free ends coiling and rippling in the breeze. In front of the right hand girl is a hoop suspended between two poles that frames her from the chest up.
This setting is strange enough but what makes this even more dramatic is the sharp light coming from the right side. It’s warm and clear, like late afternoon sun, but creates deep, elongated shadows that stretch along the ground to the left of the girls and poles. And it really emphasizes those broken edges and cracks in the wall.
So what’s the story with these two girls? Have they had a fight? What are they doing in this strange place?
MUSIC
The girls may share the same space but they don’t even look at each other. It feels like one of them might have just said something hurtful or embarrassing and that realization is just sinking in.
Lee Smith nailed their body language. I could feel their awkwardness especially that girl with the hands-behind-her-back-twisted-foot pose.
The other really odd note is the streamers. We usually think of them as being pretty and fun, decorating a party or something festive but here they just seem like forgotten reminders of a better day, They make the whole scene feel kind of sad and lonely.
And it’s this surreal, disjointed, uneasy weirdness that Lee-Smith was going for.
Believe it or not, it all began with a carnival. Hughie Lee-Smith was born in Florida in 1915 and when he was a little boy, his parents divorced and his mom went to Cleveland to pursue a singing career. So, he went to live with his grandmother, Queenie Victoria Williams in Atlanta.
Queenie was an old-fashioned, very proper woman who wanted Hughie to become a proper young man. So she was very strict about who he played with and the places he went. One year, a carnival moved in across the street. The little boy was captivated by the music, people, and bright colors of the balloons, streamers, ribbons, and pennants.
He said in his biography, “I wanted to go to that carnival. I looked at that whole panorama of color and sound—all taking place right across the street but I was denied it. But, of course I was never allowed to attend. For, in my grandmother’s perception, the carnival was low-class and iniquitous.”
He goes to say, “The experience must have sunk into my unconscious and manifested itself years later in my paintings…”
When he was 10 Hughie and Queenie joined his mother in Cleveland and when his mom saw how much he loved making art, she immediately enrolled him in art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He studied art all through school, including East Technical High School where by the way, he was on the track team with Olympic legend Jesse Owens!
He finished school near the end of the Great Depression and went to work for the WPA, which was a government program that hired artists for public works, like painting murals in post offices, for example.
After the WPA, he married Mabel Louise Everett and took a teaching job in South Carolina but the pay was so bad they moved to Detroit where he got a job in one of the Ford Motor Company factories
A few years later he saw the work of an Italian artist named Giorgio de Chirco who created surreal, uneasy scenes of city streets and plazas sometimes with solitary adults or kids. They were often lit by a sharp light from one side that created deep long spooky shadows that add to the creepy mood.
This had a huge impact on him and Lee-Smith brought that into his own art and began developing moody, ambiguous, kind of strange landscapes like this with disconnected people either by themselves or with others, all painted in this sharp light. They featured crumbling buildings, but also the snapping ribbons and floating balloons that haunted him from that long-ago carnival. That’s where this odd setting came from.
He realized life could be complicated, full of uncertainty and contradiction and wanted to find a way to show that. He wanted to show what he called aloneness, the experience of feeling separate, different.
And he knew this first-hand as a black man and as an artist.
But he also knew loneliness and alienation are universal. After all, everybody feels as awkward and uncertain as these girls at some point. So he got the idea that by mixing ordinary objects, places, and people into odd combinations it would make viewers feel a little disoriented, maybe getting them to see people or situations they might normally ignore.
MUSIC
He and Mabel divorced and he finally decided to take on New York in the late 50s. The problem was he got there right when abstract art was all the rage.
But he wasn’t a fan and chose to continue painting recognizable figures and objects but putting them into these surreal settings. He did this, he explained, “because I wish to communicate with the spectator and feel I could not achieve this through abstraction.”
Even though he was widely exhibited in the midwest during his early career, he was overshadowed by his abstract colleagues when he got to New York. A lot of this had to do with his decision to stick with a realistic style.
But he started getting some gallery shows in NY. He taught at the Art Students League and in Princeton NJ at a studio owned by his friend and fellow artist Rex Gorleigh. He also became a founding member of the Princeton Art Association.
His work finally began to catch on with the New York art world in the 60s. He showed at the prestigious National Academy of Art and was elected a member. And years later, his paintings were used on the set of a popular TV series called The Cosby Show which gave his reputation a big boost.
In the 80s he and his wife, Patricia Thomas-Ferry moved to NJ, eventually settling near Princeton in the small town of Cranbury.
He left his mark on New Jersey, literally. In 1988, at the age of 73, he finally had his first retrospective at the State Museum in the capital city of Trenton and was commissioned to paint a wall mural for one of the state office buildings.
MUSIC
Despite the loneliness of his paintings, Lee-Smith apparently wasn’t a sad, moody man. According to his daughter Christina, he was thoughtful and intellectually engaging. In his biography she says, “he had a gift for being remarkably present. I never had the sense, for example, that he was worried or distracted or bored when we were together. He was completely there, viscerally and emotionally.”
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps.
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Thanks for joining me!