Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
and Pan-Africanist Feminism in Ethiopia Awakening
by Stacey Williams
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In repositioning Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethopia Awakening (1921) within a feminist context, I will draw on that critical Pan-Africanist text, Emancipation and the Freed in Sculpture (1916) by Freeman Murray. Murray's groundbreaking illustration of negative stereotype in visual art was an intellectual argument for black self-determination. Pan-African art criticism gained mass appeal during the Harlem Renaissance with the publishing of The New Negro (1925), by philosopher Alain Locke. In his book, he prescribed the reclamation of African culture for growing numbers of professional African American artists. Both Murray's and Locke's theories were closely associated with W.E.B. Du Bois' promotion of positive images of blacks. From their two perspectives Fuller's Ethopia Awakening was deemed the visual epitome of the "Talented Tenth" movement.
Mary Schmidt Campbell attributes the influence for Ethopia Awakening to Du Boisian philosophy, which "emphasized the Black Americans' common African heritage." Current scholarship by Richard Powell cites Judith Wilson's claim that the "utopian, Pan Africanist novel" Ethiopia Unbound (1911) by west African activist lawyer, J.E. Casely Hayford as Fuller's source of inspiration. In response, I strongly suggest that Ethopia Awakening was not the epitome of Du Boisian philosophy or any other Mr. Hayford's semi-autobiographical novel. Rather, it was the manifestation of Fuller's own Pan-Africanist feminism recognizing her collaboration with Garveyite feminist Adelaide Casely Hayford (J.E. Hayford's ex-wife) in 1920 to build an all girls school in Sierra Leone.
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It makes sense that the initial inspiration for Ethopia Awakening was Fuller's understanding of Murray's call for an interventionist avant-garde. Fuller proposed to make her own version of an Africa figure after critically reading his manuscript, around 1915. Ethopia Awakening was a response to the pleas of the intelligentsia that proclaimed the spiritual and political relevance of Africa for African Americans. The sculpture also reiterated, for the entire black world, the elation and pride that the widely publicized Ethiopian victory over Italian colonial powers during the era. Murray's arguments, including supportive visual material, revealed that Daniel Chester French, and many other sculptors before him, created illusory and undesirable images to bear on black people. However, the discussion of feminism in this paper isolates three female statues of "Africa" to juxtapose another viable process in Ethopia Awakening, which is supported by contemporary Post-Colonial gender studies in art history.
Murray examined a number of sculpted female figures known as "Africa." during the American Renaissance (1865-1917), a period of Neo-classical revival in art. "Africa" figures were created specifically as tributes to the Emancipation Proclamation following the Civil War (1861-1864). These markers of freedom testified to the libertarian spirit of the founding fathers. At the same time that they celebrated a vision of independence, the figures represented Western paternalism and empire by illustrating Africa as naturally submissive, yielding, and uncultivated.
Ethopia Awakening (1863) by the American woman sculptor Anne Whitney, was an example of a pre-Emancipation "Africa" figure in chains. Whitney's, like other Orientalist paintings and sculptures about Africa, depicted a scantily clad, idyllic Odalisque in white marble. The glistening, decidedly non- African looking, "Africa," awakened from her sleep and lifted her veil to expose her body from a horizontal position. Whitney attributed classical beauty and symbolic enlightenment as a positive statement about the impending freedom of enslaved African Americans. It is important to note that although Whitney intended the white marble sculpture to allude to Africa, it was through the visual language of Greek myths.
Mary Livermore in Our Famous Women (1883) described Whitney's depiction of a slave as a representation of abolitionist goals. Livermore stated, she "listened with fear and wonder to the sound of broken chains and shackles falling around her." According to Livermore, Whitney's cause was so "legible and well-expressed that even the uninstructed in art throbbed in sympathy with it." Livermore added that the "recumbent . colossal" expressed the teeming luxuriance of the tropics in which she had her birth." Orientalist tropes were seamlessly constructed in Livermore' critique. The discussion of freedom for Africans in America was depicted by a woman upon whom a curiously seductive gaze was focused onto body and land. A reconfigured desire for power and possession is transmitted in such pronounced sexual overtones. The figure's denoted exoticism and eroticism conveyed the colonial voyeuristic tendencies in art and real life mistreatment of women in the colonies.
Contrary to Livermore's reading of Whitney's abolitionist aesthetics, the sculpture blurred the historical fact of American slavery and of black people. This image did not denounce slavery. It relied heavily on the subject of non-European slave holding traditions, such as harems, in which control over blacks and women were foreign or essential cultural traditions, to circumvent America's history. Moreover, Whitney's romanticism, with its emphasis on beauty and pleasure diverted from any re-examination of the horrible circumstances of slavery or of the remarkable contribution blacks made to the Industrial Revolution. Interesting to note, Whitney eventually destroyed the female figure and later carved a monument for the martyred abolitionist John Brown.
Daniel Chester French's "Africa" from his New York Customs House grouping of The Four Continents (1906) repeated the portrayal of the sleeping "Africa." In a comparison with the earlier grouping of nude caryatids done in France, known as Four Continents by the sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux (1868-74), the American sculptor, French, reiterated a remarked imperialist view of Africa in America. In Carpeaux's coterie, "Africa" "Asia" "Europe" and "the Americas" represented all as equals. All were nude women; all subjects of colonialism on some level. The four standing figures, in contrast to delicate female representations, supported a globe with upswept arms of modeled muscle and sinew. Carpeaux wanted to patina stain the different skin tones, but ultimately showed race through details such "America's" feathered headdress and the broken shackle at "Africa's" ankle. Carpeaux rejected pictorial nudity, as well as palliated portrayal of Africans. The face of "Africa" was naturalistically molded after an intense-looking black woman with broad features and thick lips. French critic Paul de Saint-Victoire wrote the predictable insult in La Liberte, June 22, 1872 that the figures were "neither man, nor woman, all negresses."
French's continents are massively carved out of monumental blocks of marble. "Africa's" weighty form, with slouched shoulders and drooping countenance, actually inferred a drunken stupor. Her garment, which fell from one shoulder and revealed her breast, was an additional disgrace. The side view of the sculpture showed that "Africa" slept on a sphinx statue or throne [surely a reference to vanquished leadership]. Figuratively, French's internationally acclaimed statue made a challenge to ancient Egyptian craftsmen by diminishing the sphinx, also the most verifiable proof of African accomplishment and civilization.
Demoralizing "Africa" was more apparent in French's work for other reasons. As financial district landmarks, just across from Ellis Island, French's Custom House statues put "Africa" within the context of an ever-expanding dialogue on the American empire. Absolute power counted its trophies by erecting architectural structures to declare their domination. For example, the four continents reflect the United States control over exclusive labor forces of resident African Americans and newly-arrived immigrants, as well as the international, industrial labor projects on the Panama Canal, in the Philippines, and rubber plantations in Liberia. French's "Africa" portrayed American opportunity in the land of the free for barons of industry and wealth that contrasted to racially prejudicial images of laboring classes.
The visual statement that French made about the relationships between white America and non-whites, indigenous colonials in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were the same statements that Pan-Africanist scholarship sought to disrupt. Such biased depictions were in direct contrast to their emergent socio-economic identity. Freeman Murray critiqued the contemporary tradition in "Africa" sculpture in his independently published Emancipation and the Freed in Sculpture (1916) as evidence of repressive culture in America and Pan-Africanist positions to eradicate visually-expounded stereotypes of blacks as vulgar, comedic, or intellectually inferior.
Murray wanted this book to set up criteria for sculptors of public monuments, such as French, which reinforced racist postures. He wanted them to be held accountable to blacks for these depictions. In his examination of the wideness and thinness of mouths and nostrils in numerous sculptures representing blacks, Murray contested the use of European facial features for Africans. In Emancipation and the Freed In Sculpture, Murray did not fully examine the role of American Imperialism, foreign and domestic policy, as it pertained to people of color and labor. However, he continuously dismissed the Europeanized or "half-cast" features of "Africa" as concessions to promote the oppression and total erasure of black culture. He stated in the preface of the book:
I am convinced that, for Black Folk - in America, at least - this is of paramount importance. Under the anomalous conditions prevailing in this country, any recognition of Black Folks in art works are intended for public view, is apt to be pleasing to us. But it does not follow that ever such recognition is creditable and helpful; some of them, indeed are just the opposite.If, however, the discussions and attempted analyses herein, tend to encourage or to initiate, in other persons, candid statements and critical analysis in the matters now under consideration, one of my main purposes will be accomplished .Interpretation-- which includes: intention, meaning, effect -is of such paramount importance, that I would not wish to distract attention from it by extensive technical criticism, even if I felt myself competent to indulge in such criticism.
At times, he acted as an apologist to escape the true indignation that these sculptures garnered. He gave French's "Africa" only a slight punition and probed, instead, for its redeeming qualities. For example, although "Africa" in French's Custom House Group is unconscious, Murray translated that as "but dozing, napping, she sits ready to rouse herself on slight alarm." Murray goes further to inscribe some personality, she is brooding" Humanity who contemplates the devastation of Africa.
Murray also reprinted a 1906 review of French's "Africa" that was originally published in the popular American magazine, The Craftsman. He attacked that review, in which the sculpture was described as "a young woman, sumptuously molded, and with features suggestive of an idealized type rather than the ancient Egyptian." Although the reviewers words: "young, sumptuous, and idealized" were obvious compliments to French, based on his decision to lend European standards of beauty to a representation of a non-white, Murray attempted to argue against the erotic value placed on French's "Africa." He stated: "Her fallen mantle exposes for our admiration - or admonition a more than Amazonian form." This bifurcated analysis refuted a singular standard of beauty. However, what is obvious to the reader, at that moment, is that Murray was disinclined to address the relationship between body, bondage, and power. In the depiction of a "Europeanized" woman as " Africa" resides a formula that prohibited a critical reading by a black male. White women were deemed the intellectual and physical subject/object of the white male only. The same could not hold true for black men, of any educated class, such as Murray. Although he sought to expose the repressive social and cultural milieu, Murray was undermined by the violent racist temperament of his society. He understood the taboos, even the risks, of addressing the nudity of a white female, of marble or in flesh, in 1916, even through scholarship.
Murray knew that his racially based arguments were political but might not have any basis in art criticism. In 1915, he chose the black woman sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) as his critical reader because, since 1907, when she created Negro's Progress, she was considered a sculptor of Negro types. She defined an ideal black physiognomy in her Spirit of the Emancipation (1913), which reflected a mastery of anatomy, as well as clearly articulated negroid facial features, commonly associated with sub-Saharan Africans. Thereby, Murray stated that she "documented her evolving racial consciousness, as well as her expanding artistic talent."
Fuller first gained attention from DuBois in 1900 when, as an art student in Paris, she entertained African Americans visiting the Paris Exposition She was one of the first women to attend the Ecole des Beaux Arts, which opened its doors to women at the very end of the nineteenth-century. Fuller's achievements were encouraged by an openly feminist, black middle-class society. Opportunities that were available to black women in her sphere heightened their financial independence, as well as their abilities to appropriate white, upper middle-class values. Her father was a master barber and had a contagious love of art. He analyzed and interpreted paintings and sculpture on their regular visits to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Soon after her post-graduate art training at the Pennsylvania Museum School for Industrial Arts, her father passed away. Her mother, who was an expert wig-maker, and her aunt, who owned prime real estate, insisted that Fuller travel to Paris. The two women funded her studies there from 1899 - 1902. In 1902, she first visited Rodin at Meudon and showed him many works and was greatly inspired. The influence of this controversial sculptor was certainly felt in her mannerist modeling of a Man Eating Out His Heart (1905-6) after Stephen Crane's poem, entitled Secret Sorrow.
Fuller's mature style, after 1906, was motivated by the social and political realities of her time. As a black artist in America, segregation barred her from the career she planned in Paris. After returning home, she made an impact where she could by depicting historical images of blacks, a subject matter that evolved from her commissions for Negro exhibitions. The theme of the black experience is thereby analogous to those in avant- garde Modernism, which articulated the rise of the peasant class, rather than interpretations of upper class symbols. Fuller's view of an iconic black image was distinctly different from Murray's aesthetics. In her reviews of Murray's overall thesis, Fuller was overwhelmingly convinced that the "half-caste" model for representations of blacks by white artists constituted artistic style, which was justifiable in and of itself.
You forget that there is artistic license as well, and just because a person has a sitter before them they are not duty bound to copy all they see. Art is not copying. Anyone with a reasonable amount of training can copy but it is for the artist to take or have what he chooses to discriminate - to exaggerate here - to suppress there - to reconstruct somewhere else - anything that will give emphasis to the inner being he wishes to represent - this is where genius comes in.
Fuller's values concretized a more thorough assessment and corrective of the blatant sexism in racialized "Africa" figures in Ethopia Awakening. Hers was a different approach from Murray's and other Pan-Africanists' who were clearly still working with making trophies in their own image, while Fuller was dealing with more substantive conditions beyond surface aesthetics - a Pan-African feminism.
Fuller's collaboration with Garveyite Hayford (1868-1960) allowed both women to actively express their moral convictions and political platforms. They were encouraged in 1920, the year before Ethopia Awakening was created, and when women's Suffragette movements finally succeeded in attaining voting rights for women. In 1919, Fuller created a tribute to a lynched pregnant woman, entitled Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence. There is little doubt that Fuller's Pan-Africanist feminism was strengthened from her association with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. It was a departure from "Talented Tenth" circles and the bi-partisan politics that Pan-African male leadership, specifically Marcus Garvey and DuBois, thrived on. Furthermore, Garvey trained women in areas of industrial/vocational training, the study of African culture, and leadership roles. The movement recognized feminists' issues such as, education, moral motherhood versus career, and women's health and diet, in direct response to the post-emancipation female condition.
Hayford, also an inspiration, was born into a colonial bourgeois and racially mixed civil servant family. Like Fuller's, her early life involved social events at church, school, and clubs. She rose to presidency of her Freetown women's UNIA in 1919 and then announced her intentions to build an all-girls' school in Freetown. The curriculum would reintroduce and promote precolonial values such as communalism into the colonial society. In 1923, Hayford returned to Freetown, Sierra Leone and later wrote of her vision:
In my mind's eye I could see a school in which girls, instead of blindly copying European fashions, would be dressed in attractive native garments which would enhance their personal charms.I could hear the young mothers teaching their sons the glory of Black citizenship, rather than encouraging them to bewail the fact that they were not white.I could imagine the artistic youth of the hereafter painting pictures depicting black faces not white.I could visualize the listless, lethargic, educated town girl of today, through the medium of well-equipped gymnasiums and trained physical cultures enjoying the energy and vitality of her grandmother who thought nothing of spending days hoeing fields or carrying a load as weighty as any man's. And then I could picture the sons and daughters of Africa's race 'looking the whole world in the face' without any apology whatsoever for the color of their skins, and with such self-respect as to command the respect of all nations.
Hayford and Fuller wrote and produced a benefit staging of a Middle Passage drama, entitled "The Answer" to fundraise for the school, which was performed at black churches. In the drama, as well as her own version of Ethopia Awakening, Fuller promoted an assertion of womanhood and an outpouring of purposeful ambition. In the sculptor's words, the figure showed the process of "awakening, gradually unwinding the bandages of [her] past and looking out on life again, expectant but unafraid." Fuller's Ethiopia depicted the stripping away of old garments, as Hayford deemed necessary. This common denominator illustrated their belief in a proactive and aesthetic approach for the advancement of black women. Whereas Hayford refuted the "blindly" copied European fashions for "native garments," Fuller's comment to Murray: "art is not copying" echoed the same sentiment. These women wanted to challenge the status quo on all grounds; their newly-formed choices would promote positive self-image. In turn, that liberating image was manifested within black female spaces such as the black church, and the home, as well as in the visible outer community.
In comparison with numerous other "Africa" figures, Ethopia Awakening may be the only standing figure that is not a caryatid. It is an intellectual symbol. By clothing "Africa" the statue differed from the nude spectacles of the past, reversed the gaze, and alluded to self-contemplation within the female domain. Moreover, Fuller reconfigured the "Africa" figures' iconography and inserted her own portrait for the face. Theatrically posed, the petite woman held her small hand to her breast. In its refutation of languorous nudity, Fuller's sculpture did not preclude a doll-like quality analogous to Hayford's remark on "personal charm." In fact, the pose originated in so many fashion figures or mannequins, particularly illustrations in women's magazines at the time. The small size of the statue, about five feet tall, was easily received. It seems physically and psychologically directed at a female audience.
To further fixate on its feminist message, I suggest its relevance to Hayford's liberal arts initiative and its relationship to women's mental and physical health. Around 1919, corsets were connected to prenatal and gynocentric problems and lost popularity. A healthier and less constricting, form of undergarment that looks similar to the wrappings on Fuller's statue replaced the earlier hourglass version. This was apparently not in contrast with Hayford's prescribed abandonment of European fashions, and a return to traditional African standards of beauty and well-being. Thereby a clearer understanding of how the mummy wrappings of "Ethiopia's" lower body alluded not to death but to ancestral, spiritual beliefs in continuous rebirth from which the consciousness of the woman emerges.
Ethopia Awakening was divided into three "spatial tropes" or three registers of the body. The feet and legs are restricted, not unlike depictions of chained "Africa" figures and slavery is not a discarded or hanging metaphor. Ethiopia's clothed torso, in the second register, purposely resisted any likeness to the seductive captive image. In that, Fuller's revision addressed the notion of the submissive, feminized black race and its importance to male fantasies, as Murray never did. One arm rested at her side while the other hand was placed at the heart -- caught in a moment of self-reflection. A cerebral awakening was produced by a heavily-modeled surface and the "quickened light" it created, in contrast to the figure's tightly, compacted plasticity.
The third register, often described as a pharaoh's crown, conveyed a pyramidal shape over the columnar body through a simply-draped cloth on the head. The compressed planes of the face, the head, and the headdress are slightly too large. Fuller's digressed from the former naturalism in her portrait and anatomical studies in order to explore Cubist aspects, such as those informed by African "primitive art," although no other Cubist elements exist in the sculptor's oeuvre. Ethiopia's rhythmic lines, angular curves, and overall geometricity are signs of abstraction which art historian Judith Wilson viewed as "stylistic cues from African sources," merely the usage of "key tropes" to articulate an African theme, without Cubist aims. Art scholar Mary Campbell stated strongly that it is "among the earliest examples of American art to reflect the formal exigencies of an aesthetics based on African sculpture."
Ethiopia actually prefigured Locke's promotion of African-inspired modernism, which he termed the "African legacy." In fact, Locke could have responded to the new plasticity which Fuller modeled in the head, torso, and lower extremities. If that is true, her experimentation with African art was inspired by something more -- it was an aesthetic derived from her activist affiliation with Hayford's efforts to educate black women. As the eye follows the tilted head down the edges of the headdress, the expressive hand secures the drapery at her bosom. Ethopia Awakening conveys a taking of vows and a noble commitment that I suggest was a dialogue with other women.
Ethiopia's raised countenance connotes determination. Fuller's philosophical statement in Ethopia Awakening was not inspired by Du Boisian Pan-Africanism or by the espousal of Locke's theories of the ancestral modernism. Fuller's conception of Africa bloomed during the time she participated with Hayford in the feminist vision to educate African women. In this way, the work reflected major changes in the self-conception of women who designated the rise of black female agency during the early twentieth century.
Links
Meta Warrick Fuller - http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/brawley/brawley.html
[lovely photo portrait of Fuller from Benjamin Brawley's Women of Achievement].
Ethopia Awakening [Fuller] -
http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/women2/fuller.html
[small photographic image of the statue].
Negro's Progress - http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu
© 2000 Part and Stacey Williams. All Rights Reserved.