In college Art History courses, it is a standard task to compare two similar works of Art from different eras to invite interpretation and analysis. Here is an example:

Georges Seurat – “A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte” 1886 and Kerry James Marshall – “Past Times” 1997

So much in common between these two paintings…at least at first glance. In both paintings, the artists’ “characters” cannot resist the green space and blue water, time spent with friends or family, the lure of boating or a leisurely picnic, even bringing along the family pet. Whether we look upon Georges Seurat’s Sunday afternoon in 19^th Century Paris or at Kerry James Marshall’s pas(t) times of 20^th Century Chicago, folks gravitate to these open-air spaces in fine weather.

            As a college student majoring in Art History, I took numerous trips to Chicago’s Art Institute to view Seurat’s painting, dotted with his thousands of “points” of light and color; it dominated a museum gallery full of other Impressionist landscapes. Seurat’s Parisians stand and recline in hazy stasis, looking out at sailboats, small tugs, and a crew of rowers. Only a small dog is in motion, abandoning his fellow pet, a monkey, to advance on an unsuspecting dog. In Kerry James Marshall’s painting, Chicago projects loom in the background above a banner that partially unfurls a message about “work and play” practiced with “heart, skill, and will” as boaters and picnickers play croquet and golf or listen to music. There is more action and activity here; ironically only Marshall’s dog (added from an earlier study like Seurat’s) is still.

           When I first saw Marshall’s painting, I immediately thought of Seurat’s most famous painting; many others have as well. Marshall places his family and boaters in a familiar context and circumstance to Seurat’s visitors to the Seine. Yet Marshall’s figures are Black, painted in his characteristic darkest colors and hues, and to borrow from Prof. Cornel West, in Marshall’s painting, “Race Matters.” In America, Race always matters, and so it appears Marshall is working from an Art tradition that owes less to Seurat and more to Aaron Douglass, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden, Marshall’s artistic forefathers, whose paintings are visual narratives that share, promote, and immortalize the struggle and contributions of Black Americans as they survive Slavery and Reconstruction, set out upon the Great Migration, and reinvent American Art, Music, and Literature in Harlem.

            Marshall’s painting also draws from a purpose found in the stories and essays of James Baldwin, the drama of August Wilson, and the novels of Toni Morrison, authors who move their characters beyond the traditional and assumed “White gaze” of American Literature that employs stereotype and prejudice to limit and dismiss the possibility of a notable and heroic African-American individuality. This White perspective, ingrained in American literature, renders Black truths and people “invisible” in the language of Ralph Ellison. Or as Toni Morrison once responded in an interview: It is “… as though our (African-American) lives have no meaning, no depth without the White Gaze.” Baldwin, Wilson, and Morrison, and many other Black authors from Frederick Douglass to Amanda Gorman, strive to assert the “meaning” and demonstrate the “depth” of Black Lives by dismantling the presence and power of the “White gaze.”

            Marshall confronts the “White gaze” also found in the Canonical works of European and American painting. Marshall moved to Chicago from Alabama, so he knows Seurat’s painting, Monet’s portrait of his wife sitting beside the Seine in Bennecourt, and Van Gogh’s fisherman on the Seine near Pont de Clichy because they are all found in Chicago’s Art Institute. He deliberately invites a comparison of their works with his Chicago lakeside scene. There is an acute awareness of a “White gaze” by his family members on the picnic blanket as they turn to look directly at those of us who look at them to challenge our widely held American racist assumptions. “Yes, we go to the shore; yes, we play golf; yes, we play croquet; yes, we are as American as you.” There is pride and confidence in their gaze, and there is persistence and resistance as well. Comparing these two paintings provides the means to discover and rediscover, see and review, and learn lessons beyond those regarding color, composition, and brushstrokes.

            This summer, I will eagerly return to museum galleries full of European and American paintings, passing works of the “Masters” housed in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. As I do, I will remind myself that there are artists not included in some of those galleries. I wonder what I might learn should Henry Tanner’s “Banjo Lesson” be placed next to Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson,” or if Charles White’s field workers were nearby Jean-Francois Millet’s farmers, or if Edward Bannister’s landscapes were as accessible as those painted by his Hudson River School contemporaries, Thomas Cole and Frederick Church?

            I suppose I could visit The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. to stroll between Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Barack Obama and Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of President George Washington. These portraits, presented in the same museum, would remind me of shared ambition, equitable access, and possible equality.

            Perhaps the 20^th Century American artist Alice Neel was correct when she said: “I think art is history.” I hope Art also holds lessons for me about the Future as well as the Past.