Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: The Resonance of Form

Essay by Dr. Melanie Anne Herzog Professor Emerita of Art History at Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin

Photo courtesy of The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Samella Lewis, 1984, 2000, p. 25

The sculpture of Elizabeth Catlett (April 15, 1915-April 2, 2012) spans a continuum of form that ranges from representational realism to abstraction. Over the course of more than six decades, in the United States and Mexico, Catlett produced formally elegant and aesthetically compelling figurative and abstract sculptures, the latter evocative rather than descriptive of the human body, using a variety of materials.

Two of her sculptural works illuminate this formal and conceptual range: Mask (1973), carved in mahogany, is one of Catlett’s most abstract sculptures, while Glory (1981), cast in bronze, is a naturalistic, though subtly abstracted, portrayal of a recognizable individual. Across this continuum, Catlett’s sculptures claim space for a materially embodied Black women’s presence, grounded in the inner understanding that sociologist Patricia Hill Collins terms “Black women’s knowledge.” 1 Catlett’s approach to sculpture was simultaneously informed by African and preHispanic Mexican sources, and modernist abstraction – which, she consistently pointed out, has roots in African sculpture.

She was drawn to the rounded volumes of ceramic figures, made by pre-Hispanic and modern Mexican sculptors working in clay, that seem to swell from within like living, breathing bodies. The abstraction of African

figural forms, carved in wood, was a primary influence for her. She did not replicate the formal approaches of sculptors from any particular cultural lineage; more important to her than the invocation of any specific sculptural tradition was how meaning is expressed through form, and she sought, throughout her life as an artist, what she called “form that would achieve sympathy.”2 Of African art, Catlett wrote in 1987, “I am impressed by the use of form to express emotion . . . by the life and vitality achieved through form relations . . . the variety is unending. All African art interests me. I see such force, such life!” 3The elegance of an angular turn; the juxtaposition of concave and convex shapes; the abstraction of anatomical or physiognomic form to its essential components; the sculptural rendering as a singular object of two figures, such as a mother and child, joined in profound intimacy; a pose or a gesture that conveys sorrow, resilience, empathy, dignity – this is what spoke to her. While sometimes subtle, such abstraction can be seen even in her realistic sculptural portrayals of specific individuals. Here she infused her simplified, monumental realism with an abstraction that is grounded in her perception of the elegant and nuanced formal language of the sources to which she looked for inspiration.

1 See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).

2 Elizabeth Catlett, quoted in Michael Brenson, “Form that Achieves Sympathy: A Conversation with Elizabeth Catlett,” Sculpture 22, no. 3 (April 2003): 33.

3 Elizabeth Catlett, letter to Timothy D. Brown, April 23, 1987, in response to questions regarding African sources for her sculpture; in Elizabeth Catlett archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans.

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Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Catlett, Sculpture, A Fifty Year Retrospective, Lucinda H. Gedeon, Neuberger Museum of Art, 1998, p. 26.

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Catlett’s embrace of abstraction, “born,” she often said, “in Africa,” exceeded her attraction to this visual language. African art represented a cultural legacy that she claimed as her rightful artistic heritage, the source of a deeply held artistic ethos resonant with what artist and art historian David C. Driskell referred to as “heritable sensibilities.”4 Catlett said, “I look for the relationship between African art which I cannot live without and the relation of that to Black people, and I see in their faces and bodies African sculpture. . . . It’s something I’ve been living with all my life.” 5 What Catlett derived from her study of African and pre-Hispanic Mexican sculpture enriched her modernist sculptural vocabulary and affirmed what she knew in her own body about how pose, stance, and gesture can signify meaning. For, along with the attention she devoted to these sources, she said, “I am a Black woman. I use my own body in working. When I am bathing or dressing, I see and feel how my body looks and moves. I never do sculpture from a nude model…. Mostly I watch women.”

6 For Catlett, the female body was a subject represented – and felt – from within, an embodied connection with sculptural traditions of dignified figuration within and across her subjects’ ancestries.

Her standing figures are solidly grounded; their robust forms swell with the substantial curves of mature women’s bodies, and the suggestion of musculature in tension conveys the potential for dynamic movement. Poses and gesture variously convey determination, pride, anguish, exhaustion, self-possession, and resilience.

She sculpted many representations of motherhood – women who cradle their children lovingly, defiantly, determined to protect them against the weight of historical oppression and the contemporary social forces arrayed against Black people in the United States and marginalized people everywhere. Her sculptural portraits assert her subjects’ active presence, their life energy and character, and their beauty, countering the historical objectification of the bodies of Black and Brown women and the art historical absence of representations of their agency and subjectivity. While she often spoke of her figurative sculpture as representing women of the African diaspora, the often-ambiguous faces of these women recall the manner in which, throughout her years in Mexico, where she established residence in 1947 and lived for the rest of her life, she melded her multiple influences into the visual language with which she spoke so eloquently in her sculpture.

4 David C. Driskell, “Black Aesthetic Directions: Without Critical Portfolio,” in Choosing: An Exhibit of Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black Americans, 1925-1985, ed. Arna Alexander Bontemps (Washington, DC: Museum Press, 1986), 14.

5 Elizabeth Catlett, quoted in Martha Kearns, “Elizabeth Catlett,” in Gumbo Ya-Ya: Anthology of Contemporary African American Women Artists (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1995), 46.

6 Elizabeth Catlett, untitled and undated handwritten manuscript for a presentation about her work, in the artist’s personal files, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

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This visual language extends into Catlett’s abstract allusions to the body, and, in the case of Mask, to masks and other forms of masquerade regalia worn and activated by bodies in motion. The title of Mask, like the form of the sculpture itself, is at once generalized and evocative of Africa as a source – the “heritable sensibilities” that resonated so profoundly for Catlett. One of several of Catlett’s explorations of the mask as a formal play of line, mass and volume, and solids and spaces, Mask is composed of elegant concave and convex curvilinear shapes carved to enclose a volumetric space. But unlike a mask made to be worn, this is a visually and spatially complex threedimensional form in which views into and through the form are differently nuanced.

From these multiple vantage points, the sculpture’s openings and enclosures resonate with suggestions of anatomical figuration, protection, expansiveness, and embrace.

In addition to making the most of the expressive potential of form, Catlett’s sculpture also manifests her deep engagement with the tactile materiality of her mediums as well as their inherent visual qualities. She exploited the plasticity of clay as she modeled ceramic figures that appear to swell and breathe from within – sometimes casting these figures in bronze, and she incorporated into her carvings the patterns of wood grain and the roughness, sheen, or translucency of different types of stone. She also responded in her handling of mass, volume, and surface to the physical properties of her materials. In Mask, she highlighted the curving grain of the sculpture’s mahogany as she carved the sweeping curves and nested concave forms that enclose, but do not fully contain, its central void.

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Cast in bronze in an edition of nine, Catlett’s Glory of 1981 is an example of her approach to sculptural realism. The recognizable subject of this elegant portrait bust is dancer, actress, educator, producer, and activist Glory Van Scott (b. 1947). A principal dancer with the legendary Katherine Dunham Company and the Agnes DeMille and Talley Beatty dance companies, Van Scott also danced with the American Ballet Theatre and has performed on and off Broadway, in films, and on television. She authored eight musicals, founded a youth theater company, and served as project director and artistic coordinator for the Alvin Ailey Company’s The Magic of Katherine Dunham, which opened in 1987 and toured for several decades. In 2002, she was the first recipient of the Katherine Dunham Legacy Award.7 In December of 1981, Glory Van Scott interviewed Elizabeth Catlett about her life

and art at Catlett’s home in Cuernavaca, Mexico.8 Catlett had this to say about the longstanding involvement of Black women in the arts, and the centrality of Black women to Black people’s endurance: I know so many black women in the arts, including you. Like that group of black women that we had in Dallas. . . . Black women have been cast in the role of carrying on the survival of Black people through their position as mothers and wives, protecting and educating and stimulating children and black men. We can learn from black women. They have had to struggle for centuries. I feel that we have so much more to express and that we should demand to be heard and demand to be seen because we know and feel and can express so much, contribute so much aesthetically. . . .9

7 See Glory Van Scott, Glory: A Life Among Legends (Seattle: Water Street Press, 2019).

8 See “Elizabeth Catlett: Sculptor, Printmaker,” interview with Glory Van Scott, in Artist and Influence, vol. 10, edited by James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian (Hatch-Billops Collection, 1991), 1-15.

9 “Elizabeth Catlett: Sculptor, Printmaker,” 14.

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The gathering in Dallas to which Catlett referred was a “Confab” held in May, Black Woman Artist: Where We Were, Where We Are, a three-day event that featured lectures and workshops led by ten Black women luminaries in the arts – including Elizabeth Catlett and Glory Van Scott.

As they discussed Glory, completed earlier that year, Van Scott said, “I am quite honored that you chose me as a subject.” Catlett replied, “It wasn’t you I chose as the subject exactly. It was your head that I chose. It was the culmination of old-fashioned and modern-sophisticated and the forms represent to me one kind of beauty in black women.” 10 While Glory is a likeness of Van Scott, for Catlett this portrait bust, like her other sculptural representations of recognizable individuals, simultaneously took on larger resonance as a study in form that conveys dignity, composure, and self-assurance. With subtly abstracted naturalism, she fused the depiction of her subject’s physiognomy

with the expressive articulation of curvilinear concave and convex forms, planar turns, finely honed edges, and juxtapositions of sharply defined angles with subtle curves that are characteristic of her sculpture, utilizing the visual vocabulary also seen in her more obviously abstract work as she sought to convey “one kind of beauty in black women.”

In 2014, jazz composer and bass player Rufus Reid released the album Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project. Inspired by five of Catlett’s sculptures, one of which was Glory, Reid sought to convey in sound the resonance for him of these works of art. Of Glory, he said, “There’s angst in the face, there’s power in the face, there’s maybe some anger in the face — and yet composure in the face.” 11With Glory, Catlett declared African American women as worthy subjects of an enduring art form – the portrait bust – with which artists around the world have honored subjects of authority, status, and beauty.

10 “Elizabeth Catlett: Sculptor, Printmaker,” 11.

11 Quoted in Allison Keyes, “How Do You Wring Sound From Sculpture? It Takes A ‘Quiet Pride’,” National Public Radio, Weekend Edition, May 18, 2014, https://www.npr. org/2014/05/18/313175209/how-do-you-wring-sound-from-sculpture-it-takes-a-quiet-pride.

Photos (R): Dr. Glory dancing the role of the Queen in Divine Drumbeats, directed by Katherine Dunham (1980). Glory: A Life Among Legends (Seattle: Water Street Press, 2019).

The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Samella Lewis, 1984, 2000, p. 33.

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Photo courtesy of The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Samella Lewis, 1984, 2000, p. 31

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From abstract works such as Mask, invoking African masquerade and the African wellsprings of modernist abstraction, to representational figures and portraits, such as Glory, the resonance of form pervades Catlett’s sculpture. Committed to the visual accessibility of realism, Catlett also embraced the expressive potential of figural form abstracted to its essence, saying, “I think that any good figurative artist relies strongly on abstractions.” 12

While content and meaning are always present in Catlett’s sculpture, the visual vocabulary of form and materials mattered deeply to her. The aesthetic eloquence of her sculpture does not stand in opposition to her commitment to content; rather, it is through the clarity of her visual language, honed over the course of decades, that the meanings of her sculptural work resound so powerfully and eloquently. s

12 Quoted in Samella Lewis, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett (Claremont, CA: Hancraft Studios, 1984), 85.

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AUTHOR BIO: Melanie Anne Herzog is the author of Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000) and several essays on Elizabeth Catlett’s life and work. She is Professor Emerita of Art History at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, and Senior Lecturer in Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches, publishes, and lectures widely on North American art and artists.

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Mask, 1973

carved mahogany 17 1/2 inches (with base) 13 1/2 inches (sculpture only) 4 inches diameter initials incised on base, “EC” Provenance: The artist to private collection, thence by descent, Morgan Iglehart Ross, Houston, Texas.

Literature: The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Samella Lewis, 1984, p. 189 The artist visited the home of the Houston collector and explained that while Mask was clearly influenced by African masks, and was correctly described as “abstract”, it conveyed a dual narrative of a dark-skinned mother calling for her child.

Catlett executed three works of this subject in the first three years of the 1970s (Magic Mask, mahogany, 1971; Mask, tropical wood, 1972; Mask, mahogany, 1973). Lowery Stokes Sims writes, “Other works of the late 1960s and ‘70s show an even more pronounced abstract quality and may be considered among the most stylistically radical works of Catlett’s career.” (Elizabeth Catlett: A Life in Art and Politics, accompanying catalog, Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture, A Fifty Year Retrospective, at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, 1998.

Estimate: $ 200,000-300,000

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Glory, 1981

bronze with deep brown patina on wooden base 14 x 9 1/2 x 10 inches (bronze only) 2 1/2 inches (h) x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches (base) artist’s incised initials, EC Provenance: the artist to private collection, thence by descent, Morgan Iglehart Ross, Houston, Texas.

Literature and Exhibition: Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York (1988), illustrated, p. 84 Estimate: $40,000-60,000

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