The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South.

Fisher, Joshua

The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Memphis, Tennessee

June 8-September 15, 2013

Marking the centenary of his birth, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art presented 85 paintings by Carroll Cloar (1913-1993), a native of nearby Earle, Arkansas who spent most of his career in Memphis. The exhibition, curated by Stanton Thomas, offered two different understandings of the artist's work.

As the wall text scattered throughout the galleries pointed out, Cloar was noticeably influenced by several trends in modernist art, which he encountered in New York, where he studied at the Art Students' League in the 1930s; in Mexico, where he traveled on a fellowship in the late 1940s; and on a trip to Europe. Sections of the exhibit were headed with terms like "Surrealism," "Magic Realism," "Abstract Expressionism," and "Pointillism." Wall text provided background on each movement in question and explained how the influence of that movement can be seen in Cloar's work. This commentary and method of approach to Cloar conveyed the picture of an artist who translated visions of the rural South into a more cosmopolitan and international artistic language. In Children Pursued by Hostile Butterflies (1965), for example, Cloar prepared the ground of the painting with Pollock-like spatters, preserving traces of the spatters as the patterns on the butterflies' wings. The subject of normally docile creatures becoming threatening in the imagination of a child recalls the Surrealist Max Ernst's Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924), which Cloar would have been able to see during his student years in New York.

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But if one disregarded the exhibition's didactic framework, a different picture of Cloar's work emerged: not images of the Arkansas countryside painted in the language of big-city modernism but work whose subject matter lent itself to a modernist vocabulary before the artist even learned it. The remarkable consistency of Cloar's style throughout his career testifies to the artist's confidence in his methods and determination to adapt his style to chosen subject matter, rather than the other way around. He was not a dogmatic adherent to one modernist style or ideology, nor was he a dilettante who dabbled in one avant-garde mode after another. On the contrary, he borrowed freely from all of them. The wall text should be seen simply as an attempt to give uninitiated viewers an introduction to the history of modern art, rather than to give historical validation to Cloar's work. Indeed, the choice of the exhibition's title suggested that the work needs no such validation; it was not titled Carroll Cloar: American Modernist, but Carroll Cloar and the American South, suggesting the primacy of the artist's subject matter.

If there is any evolution to be traced through Cloar's oeuvre--and the mostly chronological arrangement of the works here allowed for this--it lies not in his style but in his attitude toward the culture in which he was raised. For most of his career, Cloar's vision of childhood was that familiar mixture of innocence and terror. In Halloween (1960), a girl in a mask encounters a group of Klansmen in the background--fright conjured up for the purposes of fun juxtaposed with a real source of fear. In Playground (1960; Fig. 1), a rare Cloar painting without a natural landscape setting, two children play a game of ball on a paved court that extends to infinity, yet is ironically marked out with the boundary lines of basketball and tennis courts--a metaphor for impending adult life, perhaps. Cloar's paintings are the visual analogue of the Southern Gothic literary tradition of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, whom he cited as influences.

But an even more interesting juxtaposition in Cloar's work is that of timelessness and change. Cloar said that his paintings capture "American faces, timeless dress and timeless customs ... the last of old America that isn't long for this earth." In the reconciliation of this obviously contradictory statement lies the greatest reward for the viewer. Cloar realized that the discourse of painting is the perfect venue for debating whether change or stasis is the dominant characteristic of civilization. On the one hand, painting is inherently an evocation of timelessness. In Europe, Cloar saw examples of the sacra conversazione, in which holy figures confer in a heavenly realm outside of time and space. He adopted this concept in his own work, as in Gibson Bayou Anthology (1956), in which the accidental neighbors of a cemetery near his childhood home stand next to their gravestones, or more literally in Historic Encounter Between E. H. Crump and W. C. Handy on Beale Street (1964), which depicts a fictional handshake between a Memphis politician and the father of blues music, even echoing the half-domed niche backdrop of the sacra by placing the figures in front of the similarly shaped facade of Memphis's Daisy Theater.

But on the other hand, a painter is also a storyteller, and stories carry with them the implication of an unrecoverable past. Works like Alien Child (1955), in which a youthful self-portrait is separated from the rest of his family by a fissure in the earth, or My Father Was Big as a Tree (1955; Fig. 2), which graphically represents the intimidating presence of the artist's father, suggest that Cloar wanted to bid good riddance to childhood. Other works lament what is lost upon growing up. In the Jim Crow South, something that was lost for children like Cloar was the lack of distinction between people of different races. As a child, one of his best friends was an African-American girl named Charlie Mae Brown--a frequent subject of his paintings --but the friendship did not last; Cloar stated that once black and white children got to a certain age, they realized that they lived in different worlds. The painting of E. H. Crump and W. C. Handy is one of the few in Cloar's oeuvre in which whites and blacks appear together. Although the meeting never actually took place, it alludes to a time in which, Cloar believed, people of different races could cooperate. It was to this exhibition's great credit that it did not gloss over the battle for civil rights as a context for Cloar's work and also that it did not try to artificially inflate the artist's progressive bona fides by making him out to be a civil rights crusader. While he portrayed people of all races with respect, as the wall text stated, he "was not a social realist who actively sought change," but rather, "a painter of memory." Not only are blacks and whites rarely seen together in his paintings, but his white subjects are more frequently at leisure, while African-American figures are depicted at work or, even if at leisure, more formally posed than their white counterparts (Fig. 3).

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But for Cloar, being a painter of memory meant painting the memory of things imagined as well as the memory of things seen, and because of the surreal tone of his paintings, it is difficult to tell which is which. One of the last works included here, entitled What Charlie Mae Dreamt (1988) shows the artist and his friend as children eating watermelon with a panther, rabbits, raccoons, and a bird hovering nearby, in a composition reminiscent of Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom. This work was a fitting conclusion to this survey of Cloar's paintings, which generally become more lyrical, bright, and folksy in his later years. Here, approaching the end of his life, Cloar shows his determination to overcome both the fears of childhood and the prejudices of adulthood all at once. The act of eating watermelon, often a negative racial stereotype, is instead turned into an act of sharing. The panther, an animal Cloar's mother taught him to fear (even though they probably no longer existed in Arkansas by the time he was born), is invited to eat the watermelon too, fulfilling Charlie Mae's prediction that there were indeed panthers out in the woods beyond their homes, but that they were friendly.

This exhibition was designed primarily for the beginner, with such features as a step-by-step reconstruction of Cloar's working method, and an "Interactive Gallery" aimed especially at children, in which visitors were invited to paste photographs and newspaper clippings to the wall, as Cloar did in his studio. While one can hope that this survey also stimulates more scholarly interest in Carroll Cloar, who was clearly more than just a talented regionalist, the exhibition was perhaps most rewarding when seen through the eyes of a novice or a child.

Joshua Fisher

Arkansas Tech University