The Art Show 2024: Charles White

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to participate in The Art Show 2024 with Charles White, a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings from each period of the artist’s career with particular emphasis on the Civil Rights Movement era. Bringing together a compelling selection of major works dating from 1936 to 1975, Charles White offers a concise survey of the artist’s style as it evolved over four decades in his relentless endeavor to affectively convey the humanitarian themes that were the primary concern of his art.
 
Active in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, Charles White produced a powerful body of figurative compositions depicting subjects drawn from the rich history of Black America and the world around him. His prolific oeuvre comprises social realist scenes, narrative compositions of historical subjects, and a large body of portraiture depicting political leaders, creative luminaries, and everyday Black Americans from all walks of life. White’s allegorical compositions of the 1960s are especially well-represented in Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s presentation with a group of large-scale drawings that exhibit his masterful technical skill and directly address the social and political injustices endemic to Black American life. White’s art evolved through various styles over a forty-year period as he adapted his approach to adequately convey his shifting interests, but he never wavered in his dedication to portraying Black Americans in “images of dignity,” as he put it.
 
Highlights of Charles White include two major portraits of venerated musical artists, Paul Robeson (1973) and Leadbelly (1975). Commissioned by photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks (1912–2006) for the promotional art and soundtrack album cover associated with the 1976 film Leadbelly—which Parks directed—White’s portrait is an elevating portrayal of the blues legend, who he renders in titanic proportions reflective of the indelible impact he had on twentieth-century music. Paul Robeson is similarly monumental in scale but takes a tondo format, focusing the eye on the baritone’s exquisitely rendered face gazing heavenward at a dappled beam of light. Chosen by White for its ties to Renaissance portraiture, the tondo functions as “a framing device that subtly evokes a cosmic sense of the measureless or boundless.”

Location: Booth D16