“A Way of Seeing”: Felrath Hines’s Postwar Paintings

Abstract

2 Felrath Hines, Missa Solemnis, 1950. Reproduced from Floyd Coleman and Holliday T. Day, Felrath Hines (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1995), 23. Estate permission courtesy Dorothy C. Fisher, widow of Felrath Hines In the years since his death, (Samuel) Felrath Hines’s large, abstract canvases have garnered much-deserved attention. Scholars and critics hail Hines as a sensitive artist, mentioning his smaller nonrepresentational paintings of the 1940s, and then turning to his best-known work: the carefully calibrated geometric abstractions of luminous color he made beginning in the 1970s (fig. 1). The nearly exclusive focus on his nonobjective painting supports the narrative that Hines was an inevitable abstractionist whose interests furthered and expanded the traditions of De Stijl, color field painting, and op art. Art historians have recovered Hines, endeavoring to fold him into the rising tide of abstract expressionism at mid-century and, in particular, what Irving Sandler termed after the fact, “the triumph of American painting.”1 Hines did live in Manhattan from the 1940s until the early 1970s, and he, an African American, may be productively discussed as part of the “other” New York School that included non-white, female, and gay modernist painters who did not circulate in the Cedar Bar or Studio 35 orbits.2 This essay does not seek to dispute or refute the impulse to add Hines’s abstract painting to the inventory of the New York School. Instead, it focuses on one of the artist’s mid-century figurative works, Missa Solemnis (fig. 2) and situates this canvas, which has since disappeared, within period debates about what, precisely, made a work of art “modern.” Asked, toward the end of his life, what he had been trying to achieve when he began painting nonobjectively, Hines responded: “I always tried to do something that has to do with a way of seeing. I always have had an interest in knowing if people saw what I saw.”3 Rather than regard Missa Solemnis as a run-up to the project of abstract art making, we might consider Hines’s earlier production as a “way of seeing,” too, one he shared with a number of more celebrated figurative expressionists in the years right after World War II.4 American figurative expressionists of the 1930s and 1940s, indebted to the blunt mark making, distorted forms, and the bold colors of post-impressionist European expressionism, were recognized for paintings that were seen as creative, emotional, and deeply personal.5 Today’s dominant histories of “A Way of Seeing”