DGHM 110: Introduction to Digital Humanities

"A Negro Woman's Gruesome Art"?

Long newspaper article with large print in three different columns. To the right upper side is handwritten in black ink "Western Outlook Sat. Jan 4 '08 __pances" Article is as follows: "Meta Vaux Warrick. From Philadelphia come vivid accounts of a Negro girl who is already ranked by art critics among the leading women sculptors of the United States. Her name is Meta Warrick and her work has won the commendations of the great French master, Auguste Rodin. One of her best sculptural groups was made for the Jamestown Tercentennial, and represents the advancement of the Negro since his landing at Jamestown in 1619. Others of her works have been exhibited in the Paris salon. Meta Warrick is a living proof of the high capabilities of her race. Like the Negro poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose bust she has made, she excels in work that requires artistic finesse and emotional power. Like the Negro painter, H. O. Tanner, whose pictures have during the last half dozen years taken the highest honors in Philadelphia, Chicago, and other American cities where the very best American artists were pitted against him, she gets her effects in primitive and elemental fashion. Tanner pays little or no attention to the laws of perspective and chiaroscuro, as ordinarily recognized, and he uses strange, weird colors applied, one might almost think, with a stick rather than a brush. Yet in this very garish appearance of his canvases critics have discovered wild fervor, great imagination and a wild, romantic spirit that reflects the life of the African jungle. The same spirit is discerned in Miss Warrick's work in clay. She has simply modelled what was within her - what has been carried down through the blood of generations from the African wilds - without the least apparent concern as to whether it conforms with the approved style or not. The result is work not pretty or superficial, but strongly individual, intensely vital. Miss Warrick has viewed life from the nether side. She has chosen to depict the horrible, the gruesome. She has felt the tragedy of life rather than its joy. There is something haunting and appalling in her portrayal of 'Silent Sorrow' and 'The Wretched.' The iron of life has pierced deep into her soul. As a small girl Meta Warrick saw her sister modelling clay leaves and vegetables, as all kindergarten children do, and she would steal pieces of clay, and fashion animals and people with it. When she was older she won a free scholarship in the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art. It was here that her talent developed and compelled serious recognition. The first original piece in clay that she made was a head of Medusa. It marked her debut as a sculptor of horrors. All who viewed her conception - with its hanging jaw ; beads of gore clinging to the face ; eyes staring out from the sockets ; lines of agony ; the whole enmeshed in the folds of fearful serpents - instinctively cried out, 'Horrible!' Then came 'Silenus,' a depiction of Bacchic saturnalia, 'The Dancing Girl' and 'Wrestlers,' more normal conceptions, and then the horrible 'Oedipus' and 'Carrying the Dead Body' Since her return to America, Miss Warrick has turned again to more normal themes. It would be difficult, at the present stage, to estimate her career properly, or to prophesy her ultimate rank among the artists of our time. William O'Donnell, in the World To-Day, goes so far as to compare her with Rodin, not, indeed, in creative inspiration, but in the modes of her expression. 'In a radical departure from the prosaic, the conventional,' he says, 'rests her strongest earnest of success approaching Rodin's.'"

Eph1.41.111

Reprint of ?"A Negro Woman's Gruesome Art" Colored American Magazine (Boston, MA) XIV, no. 3, March 1, 1908

March 1, 1908