For a good part of this country's history, African American artists have been invisible outside the black cultural community. Even today, in these supposedly more enlightened times, many remain so.
Allan Randall Freelon, who lived and worked in Philadelphia his entire life, is one such artist. But Freelon, who died in 1960, labored under a double handicap.
Not only was he pigeonholed as a "Negro artist" during the 1930s and '40s, the most fruitful years of his career, he also painted in a way that did not endear him to some black artists of the Harlem Renaissance who believed that their art should celebrate a black culture that had been suppressed for several centuries.
Freelon addressed that issue in a 1952 article, "Negro as Artist," that he wrote for a journal published by the Philadelphia Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions.
While acknowledging that the Harlem Renaissance resulted in more attention being paid to black artists, he observed that, "It is equally true that this so-called 'Renaissance' offered a field day for writers of both races to advance their pet theories as to what the Negro should paint or sculpt.
"Tribal heritage, African background [and] child-like primitive simplicity were favorite cliches of both white and Negro critics, so that painting as such was lost sight of, and a huge outpouring of Voodoo Dancers, Jungle Ceremonies and Tribal Rites, ad nauseam, were painted in hopes of receiving favorable comment from the critics," Freelon wrote.
Lewis Tanner Moore, a grandnephew of celebrated black painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, who has maintained an interest in Freelon's work for many years, described the artist as "an advocate of painting for its own sake, of developing technical mastery over your craft."
"I think he believed in doing imagery that grew out of one's own personal experience," Moore added.
For that reason, there aren't any African masks or fetishes in Freelon's art. He painted closer to the American and European art mainstream: first impressionism, then postimpressionism, and eventually his own brand of what was known in the 1930s as American Scene realism.
In doing so, he followed a mainstream trail blazed by earlier black artists such as Robert Duncanson, Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Tanner. They subsequently became visible in the larger art world, but Freelon, their equal in talent and achievement, remains obscure. [...]
| Continue Edward J. Sozanski's registration-required Philadelphia Inquirer review "Painting in shadow"
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