Woodruff, Hale

August 26, 1900
September 10, 1980

Born in Cairo, Illinois, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, a painter and educator, moved with his mother to Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended public schools. In 1920 he moved to Indianapolis to study at the John Herron Art Institute while working part-time as a political cartoonist for the black newspaper the Indiana Ledger. In 1927 he traveled to Europe and lived in France for the next four years. He studied with the African-American painter Henry O. Tanner and at the Académie Scandinave and Académie Moderne in 1927 and 1928. Like other American artists who sought an education in the center of the art world, Woodruff spent his time recapitulating the succession of avant-garde art movements of the previous fifty years. His landscapes and figure paintings first synthesized elements of the late-nineteenth-century styles of impressionism and postimpressionism in their interest in the nonrealistic shifts of color and the manipulation of the texture of the brushstroke. His key work of the period, The Card Players (1930; repainted in 1978), plays on the distortions of figure and space found in the work of Paul Cézanne and the cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. This work emphasizes Woodruff's debt to African art (which had also been a source for the cubists) in the masklike nature of the faces. Woodruff had first encountered African art in Indianapolis in the early 1920s, when he saw one of the first books on the subject. As it was written in German, he could not read it, but he was intrigued by the objects. Woodruff and the African-American philosopher and teacher Dr. Alain Locke visited flea markets in Paris, where the artist bought his first works of African art.

In 1931 Woodruff returned to the United States to found the art department at Atlanta University. Through his pioneering efforts, the national African-American arts community developed the kind of cohesion that previously had been lacking. Woodruff himself taught painting, drawing, and printmaking. To teach sculpture, he recruited the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. The works that came from the department's faculty and students came to be known as the "Atlanta School" because their subjects were the African-American population of that city. Fully representational with modernist nuances, they fall into the style of American regionalism practiced throughout the country at that time. The use of woodcuts and linoleum prints added a populist tone to these works, which dealt with everyday life. Besides teaching, he brought to Atlanta University exhibitions of a wide range of works, including those of historical and contemporary black artists and the Harmon Foundation exhibitions, providing a unique opportunity for the entire black Atlanta community, since the local art museum was then segregated. The year 1942 saw the initiation of the Atlanta University Annuals, a national juried exhibition for black artists that expanded opportunities for many who were frequently excluded from the American art scene. Woodruff's legacy can be seen in the remarkable list of his students—Frederick Flemister, Eugene Grigsby, Wilmer Jennings, and Hayward Oubré—and of the artists who showed in the Annuals, including Charles Alston, Lois Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, Claude Clark, Ernest Crichlow, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Norman Lewis, Hughie Lee-Smith, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White. The exhibitions continued until 1970.

During this same period, Woodruff, as part of his efforts to present a populist art, produced a series of murals. Two of his inspirations were the murals placed in public buildings across the country by WPA artists, and the Mexican mural movement. Woodruff himself received a grant to study with Diego Rivera for six weeks in the summer of 1934, when he assisted in fresco painting. After completing two WPA murals, he painted the major work of this period, the Amistad Murals (1938–1939) at Talladega College (Alabama). Designed in the boldly figurative style associated with social realism, the murals depict the mutiny led by Cinqué aboard the slave ship Amistad in 1834 and the subsequent trial and repatriation of the Africans. Other mural projects included The Founding of Talladega College (1938–1939), murals at the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company (Los Angeles) on the contribution of blacks to the development of California (1948), and The Art of the Negro for Atlanta University (1950–1951).

In 1946, after receiving a two-year Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship to study in New York (1943–1945), Woodruff moved to that city permanently to teach in the art education department of New York University. The move was not a rejection of the South, but came as an attempt by Woodruff to be part of the new art capital, which had shifted from Paris to New York. Woodruff changed his style from that of a figurative painter of the American scene to a practitioner of the ideas of abstract expressionism. While employing the gestural spontaneity of that style, he incorporated design elements from the African art he had studied since his student days in Indianapolis. Worked into his compositions are motifs from a variety of African cultural objects, including Asante goldweights, Dogon masks, and Yoruba Shango implements—a kind of aesthetic Pan-Africanism. This, the third major style of his career, demonstrates the adaptability of an artist always open to new currents in both the aesthetic and political worlds. He continued to be supportive of African-American artists by being one of the founders in 1963 of Spiral, a group of black New York artists (including Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Richard Mayhew) who sought to weave the visual arts into the fabric of the civil rights struggle.

Woodruff received awards from the Harmon Foundation in 1926, 1928 and 1929, 1931, 1933, and 1935, and an Atlanta University Purchase Prize in 1955. He received a Great Teacher Award at NYU in 1966 and became professor emeritus in 1968.

See also Painting and Sculpture; Tanner, Henry Ossawa

Bibliography

Reynolds, Gary, and Beryl J. Wright. "Hale Aspacio Woodruff." In Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation. Newark, N.J.: The Newark Museum, 1989, pp. 275–279.

Stoelting, Winifred L. "Hale Woodruff, Artist and Teacher: Through the Atlanta Years." Ph.D. diss., Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., 1978.

Studio Museum in Harlem. Hale Woodruff: 50 Years of His Art. New York: Author, 1979.

Wilson, Judith. "'Go Back and Retrieve It': Hale Woodruff, Afro-American Modernist." In Selected Essays: Art and Artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1980s. Atlanta, Ga.: National Black Arts Festival, 1988.

helen m. shannon (1996)