Looking in: Albert A. Smith's Use of Repoussoir in Cover Illustrations for the Crisis and Opportunity

Abstract

In many of his illustrations for the Crisis and Opportunity magazines, the African American graphic artist Albert Alexander Smith (1896-1940) used the formal convention of repoussoir, a figure that brackets or pushes back objects within an image. Smith’s figures both guide the viewer’s eye into the image and mediate between her and the internal narrative. However, even as the repoussoir figures work as a pictorial device, they are also signs that carry meaning. Situated between the viewer and the active narrative elements, these figures visually suggest the presence of W.E.B. Du Bois’s veil of double-consciousness and, more specifically, Smith’s own response, which was to integrate learned history into the narrative of his work, while his personal lived history is evidenced in the form. This paper will identify Smith’s formal and content-laden use of the repoussoir figure. It will frame its use within the contemporaneous public discourses between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) literary arm, the Crisis magazine, edited and spearheaded by W. E. B. Du Bois, the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, and Alain Locke’s, The New Negro. At the same time it will consider Smith’s own biography and ultimately his negotiation, revealed in his art, between overlapping and competing stratagems of self-hood open to African Americans in the 1920s. Relatively little has been written about Albert A. Smith, even though, accor ding to Theresa Leininger-Miller, he produced some 220 prints, drawings, and paintings. 1 Her book, which includes one chapter on Smith, is the most complete to date and includes extensive archival information. Laural Weintraub wrote about one of Smith’s etchings, Plantation Melodies, in her 2003 article. 2 Some of Smith’s work has also been discussed by Amy Kirschke and Caroline Goeser. 3 The gap in the existing scholarship that this essay will address is that of the formal artistic choices Smith made in his periodical covers that signify his status as an artist whose formative experiences gave him a somewhat different world-view from that of many of his peers and therefore