Hale Aspacio Woodruff’s Mural Study for The Art of the Negro

Hale Aspacio Woodruff is widely recognized for his contributions to public art and the muralism movement in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. The figural style and research-based historical narrative of his early murals reflect the impacts of the prevailing social realism of the time—and remain evident in a recently acquired study for the fourth panel of the artist’s mural cycle The Art of the Negro, the final six panels of which are installed at Clark Atlanta University’s Trevor Arnett Library in Atlanta, Georgia. Woodruff first moved to Atlanta in 1931, after four years living abroad in Europe. Upon the invitation of then-university president John Hope, the artist helped found the art department at the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of historically Black academic institutions that included Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta).

Woodruff and other African American modernists particularly admired the Mexican muralists for their commitment to social justice and aesthetic experimentation. Woodruff spent six weeks during the summer of 1936 apprenticing with Diego Rivera in Mexico City, where he learned the muralist’s techniques—painting frescoes, priming walls, and preparing pigments for Rivera’s Hotel Reforma murals. Woodruff returned to Atlanta equipped with knowledge he quickly put to use for his first mural commissions from the Works Progress Administration’s Graphic Arts Division and in his proposals for Atlanta University.

Woodruff first proposed the mural cycle The Art of the Negro to Hope’s successor, Rufus Clement, in 1938. The artist originally conceived of six episodes in the development of African diasporic life and culture, featuring great Black leaders in different fields, including the visual arts, music, education, and activism. He began work on the cycle in earnest in 1945, producing studies for the six panels that year. Six extant studies survive today, but there were likely originally more. 

The study for panel four that was recently acquired by the Museum reflects Woodruff’s original ideas for the cycle. Though he fully revised the theme explored in the final version of panel four, this study serves as an important document of his creative process. Here Woodruff added, alongside his recognition of Black leaders, a celebration of the “so-called liberators, abolitionists, internationally known . . . who had worked toward liberation notions regarding the Negro,” as stated by the artist in a 1977 interview. The composition includes Cinqué, leader of the Amistad uprising; the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture; the fallen Crispus Attucks of the American Revolution; the abolitionist John Brown; and possibly the enslaved rebellion leader Nat Turner.

Below this pantheon of liberators, two vignettes chart two paths toward freedom in the United States. On the left, Woodruff documents the fugitivity of life for African Americans under enslavement, with Harriet Tubman leading an enslaved man north to freedom on the Underground Railroad. To the right, leading abolitionists Frederick Douglass; President Abraham Lincoln; a female figure representing either an older Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth; and William H. Seward, Lincoln’s confidant and Secretary of State and a close friend of Tubman’s, discuss the possibility of legal emancipation around a blank document, likely the Emancipation Proclamation. This figural grouping resembles Woodruff’s painting Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln Discussing Emancipation (1942–43), another study prepared for submission to a mural competition for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, DC. To the left of these three vignettes in Woodruff’s study for The Art of the Negro, a chorus bears witness to the entire scene. The figures are surrounded by dismantled and broken architectural elements, the fractured white columns of the American Capitol prominent in the right foreground.

This study for panel four was painted in 1945 during the artist’s final months living and teaching in Atlanta, before he permanently relocated to New York City in 1946; he was offered a teaching position at New York University, where he remained until his retirement in 1967. Though Woodruff had resigned from Atlanta, the artist had spent nearly a decade reworking the themes and narratives explored in The Art of the Negro, and he agreed to complete the mural commission, painting the final six twelve-by-twelve-foot canvases between 1950 and 1951 in his New York studio before shipping them to Atlanta for installation in 1952. Woodruff’s immersion in the New York art world, captivated by Abstract Expressionism at the time, altered the thematic focus and style of his ultimate mural canvases. Though he had completed studies five years earlier, he did not work from them, abandoning his previous reliance on the figuration inspired by the Social Realist movement and Mexican muralism and moving toward more stylized figuration and abstraction based on both his study of African art and modernist trends in midcentury New York.

In what would be his last mural cycle, Woodruff ultimately drew upon his vast knowledge of art from across the world to tell the history of global art from his perspective as a Black artist. The art historian Christian Kravagna writes of the series, “With this project he aimed to depict the genealogy of modern art in the wider context of the history of mankind, colonial power and the policies for emancipation from slavery and colonial oppression.” The six final panels destabilize linear histories of modernism and abstraction by rooting their origins in exchanges determined by global histories of enslavement and colonialism.