Bill Traylor

Bill Traylor (born April 1, 1856 , according to other information 1854, at Benton , Alabama , † October 23, 1949 in Montgomery , Alabama) was an American self-taught draftsman and painter of African American descent.

life and work

Bill Traylor was born in a hut near Benton to slaves on a cotton plantation . From birth he carried the family name of its owner, Traylor. The end of the civil war in the American southern states in 1865 was a trauma for the nine-year-old : Union troops had passed through and burned and looted the plantation . An experience that Traylor told of as an old man.

The family continued to live in the hut after the liberation and now worked as farm laborers ; Traylor also practiced this profession for almost seventy years, albeit on his own little clod . He had been married since 1891 and raised nine children with his wife. After the death of his wife and the departure of the youngest of his children, he left his familiar surroundings in 1935 after more than eighty years and moved to Alabama's capital, Montgomery. Despite his old age, he still worked for a short time in a shoe factory and later lived on social welfare. The street he lived on, however, is not in a poor district , but is mainly inhabited by the black middle class.

In 1939, the young painter Charles Shannon (1914–1996) accidentally discovered Traylor on the street during a foray: he was sitting outside in front of a forge , later a greengrocer, making small pencil drawings on cardboard -  objects of his everyday life such as shoes, cups and rats - and pinned them to a fence. Passers-by bought these works from him for a few cents . Shannon, who got him new painting supplies like brushes and paints, photographed the old man at work.

Shannon, who was very interested in the art of Black America , belonged to the so-called New South , a group of culturally-minded young people from the white educated middle and upper classes of Montgomery, where at that time there was still strict racial segregation . In February 1940, the group held an exhibition in their clubhouse called Bill Traylor. People's Artist with one hundred drawings. At a time when lynching , especially against blacks, was still the order of the day in Alabama and the Ku Klux Klan had influence right up to the top of society, it was certainly not a completely safe undertaking. The local press reported benevolently that the magazine "New South" dedicated a cover story to Traylor.

Shannon supported Traylor with money and materials and regularly picked up the work that was created during the week at the weekend; According to contemporary witnesses , Traylor is said to have believed he worked for Shannon. In 1941, without Traylor's knowledge, Shannon drove to New York City with a bundle of his pictures to show them to friends from the art scene.

It was the time when intellectual whites discovered the culture of black America: in 1937 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had shown the work of a black artist, the self-taught sculptor William Edmonson , for the first time in a solo exhibition ; Lady Day Billie Holiday performed with white musicians and made jazz history with her anti- discrimination song Strange Fruit ; the black dancer Josephine Baker conquered Paris and the Swiss photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled to the southern states and had already brought impressive photo series of black everyday culture home to Europe from Montgomery as early as 1937.

Ever since the USA entered the war in December 1941, a liberal American cultural elite had tried to work against the anti- black image of American white society : after all, black GIs also fought against the racial ideologues in Germany and Japan .

In 1942, the Fieldston School of the Ethical Culture Schools , Riverdale , New Jersey , hosted the Bill Traylor, American Primitive (Work of an Old Negro) exhibit ; The curator is Victor d'Amico , who has been Moma’s museum education director for many years . Alfred Barr , former director of the famous museum, wanted to buy sixteen works for the museum collection and more for his private collection and that of his employees - for US $ 1 to 2 each. Shannon declined and took the drawings back to Montgomery. He became a war painter in the South Pacific and did not return to Alabama until 1946.

Bill Traylor had no inkling of all of these processes surrounding his person and his work. The over eighty-year-old was seriously ill, deteriorated increasingly physically and could hardly paint and draw. All of his works that were created after 1942 are now lost. For a while he lived alternately with one of his children in Washington, DC , Detroit , Chicago , New York City, and Philadelphia , but did not last long anywhere. At some point during this time, his leg was amputated because of foulburn . Finally he returned to Montgomery and took up his old seat next to the vegetable stand; only a few artistic works were created.

In June 1946 a large report about Bill Traylor appeared in Collier’s magazine, which was widely distributed in the USA . The painter, who had last lived in seclusion with a daughter, died in a hospital in Montgomery.

In the 1970s, Shannon and his wife and colleague Eugenia Carter Shannon cataloged around 1,500 drawings by Traylor from 1939–1942. In 1979 the RH Oosterom Gallery in New York showed a selection of the works in a group exhibition, in 1982 the renowned Corcorian Gallery of Art in Washington, DC as part of the show Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980 . This exhibition made Traylor and his work famous, numerous group and solo exhibitions followed, including a. in San Francisco , Atlanta , New Orleans , Dallas and Kansas City as well as several times in Washington and New York. Outside of the USA, he was seen particularly frequently in Tokyo ; in Europe his works wandered through museums and galleries in Amsterdam , Bern and Cologne , Lausanne , Malmö and Paris . The last, large-scale double exhibition in the German-speaking area was in 1998/1999 in Cologne ( Museum Ludwig ) and Bern (Art Museum).

In the meantime, Traylor's works were sold in the art trade and at auctions , e. B. at Sotheby’s , multi-digit high prices. The Traylor heirs filed a lawsuit against the Shannons for the legal ownership of the drawings, which ended in a 1993 settlement : in this, the heirs acknowledged Shannon's significant share in Traylor's later fame.

Today Bill Traylor is considered one of the most popular and well-known Afro-American visual artists, numerous books and a dissertation on him have been published, his often colorful figurative works of almost naive simplicity are also popular as art postcards. Whether what the old man from Alabama put on paper in just a few years with the most economical means in the late autumn of his life is really art, opinions not only differ among art historians to this day .

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the touchingly simple images surely hit the nerve of a new America that was increasingly interested in the roots of its own history and moved towards the environment and peace. Today's exhibitions are rather critically monitored, also with regard to a posthumous exploitation of an allegedly naive former slave by the established art market in the style of a modern Uncle Tom, which cannot be completely ruled out .

literature

• Josef Helfenstein and Roman Kurzmeyer: Bill Traylor (1854–1949) . Deep Blues (with contributions by John Berger and others). Book for the exhibition, Kunstmuseum Bern and Museum Ludwig, DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1998 (English edition Yale University Press 1999)
• That. and Roxanne Stanulis (Eds.): Bill Traylor, William Edmonson and the Modernist Impulse , Kranert Art Museum, University of Illinois 2005
• Andrea L. Potochik: Bill Traylor. African-American Outsider Artist , Diss., Florida State University 1992
• Bill Traylor Postcard Book (30 art postcards), Art Post 2000

Web links

• Photos of Traylor and its first exhibition in Montgomery, Alabama

• Video about Bill Traylor