Memory, Mobility, Modernity: Archibald Motley's Portraits and the Art of ‘Serious Painting’

Abstract

This article considers Archibald Motley Jr.'s academic portraiture as an address to the conjoined difficulties of the African-American as a subject of representation and the African-American body as an artefact of slavery. It argues that his work, by marshalling the conventions of this conservative, patriarchal form, stages scripted performances of critical citizenship that situate the work of art as a cosmopolitan site of diasporic memory, transforming the language of genre into an aesthetic of black identity. Cognisant of the relationship between African-American visual and literary culture, of their cooperative relationship in facilitating the telling of tales, the making of subjects and the transformation of those subjects into works of art, Motley chose a form whose precedents, the series of frontispiece portraits to literary works that emerged in the eighteenth century, were embedded in a radical history of self-making. Rather than remaining locked in nineteenth-century models of representation, unable to enter fully into an expressive understanding of the value of modernist aesthetics and their detemporalised symbolist codes, Motley stages a sophisticated challenge to new art practices, resisting the easy universalism of primitivist expression and its depoliticising relationship to constructions of modern subjectivity. His painting confirms that, for the black artist in the 1920s, the aesthetics of time, space, politics and citizenship were conjunctural, mutually complicating and interlinked.