Biography, Art, and Culture

Abstract

Biography, Art, and Culture Julia E. Liss (bio) Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth. Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xiii + 432 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00. Alan C. Braddock . Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. x + 291 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95. Mechal Sobel . Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. xv + 198 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. In her 1939 essay, "The Art of Biography," Virginia Woolf observed that "interest in our selves and in other people's selves is a late development of the human mind."1 Although we may take for granted the biographical enterprise, Woolf's observations still raise questions worth considering. "By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline," Woolf concluded, "the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest."2 In "shaping the whole," the three works before us delineate individual lives by focusing not only on individual "selves" but also on the larger contexts that defined the possibilities, meanings, and legacies of those individuals. As Woolf presciently pointed out, a biography may serve a life well-known or one neglected. "Is not anyone who lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography . . . ?" she provoked.3 These three works strikingly seem to address Woolf's challenge: How to tell the story of a life? How to make it meaningful? To these questions we may add our own: Is that meaning intrinsic to the individual or socially and historically contextualized? What analytical tools can be used to understand individuals and their work? Are there different challenges to the biographical enterprise of the renowned and the little-known? What purpose does biography serve, if not as art then as history? Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher, by Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it seeks to tell the life story [End Page 140] of Locke, a well-known but underappreciated and even neglected figure of intellectual life in the U.S. On the other hand, it aims to tell this story as one of philosophical coherence. This is, as the title tells us, the biography of a philosopher, not a biography of the philosopher Alain Locke. The main goal is to interpret the life to reveal a consistent (although not necessarily seamless) belief system. Consequently, our understanding of Locke's accomplishments and legacy is enlarged and Locke's life in itself is meaningful. "The three subjects of race, culture, and value are the organizing principles of Locke's intellectual life," Harris and Molesworth say at the outset (p. 1). Struggling often between group and individual identities, between exclusion and singular accomplishment, Locke developed an intellectual program that made sense of these struggles: The story of Locke's life shows that cultural pluralism [or what Locke more often called 'intercultural reciprocity'] is the governing idea behind all that Locke produced. The life itself has genuine drama and interest, we believe. . . . But what his life can show us, or make generally available as exemplifying various burdens and possibilities, can best be seen in his writings—or to put it another way, his meaning is in the complex intersections of his life and his work (pp. 3-4). More than intersections, the argument is structured to trace the parallelism between life and work; biography brings the two together. Over all, this volume succeeds in achieving these objectives. It provides a clear and focused rendition of the life work of Alain Locke and a detailed resource on his career and scholarship. Drawing prodigiously on the Locke Papers at Howard University, it goes well beyond what is conventionally known about Locke or available in print. The convention usually begins and ends with The New Negro, the 1925 anthology that Locke edited. Not that The New Negro is not important or illustrative of Locke's interests—it combines his talents for collaborative projects...