Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage | |
---|---|
Green Cove Springs, Florida | |
Died | March 27, 1962[1] New York | (aged 70)
Education | Hermon Atkins MacNeil Charles Despiau |
Alma mater | |
Known for | Sculpture |
Notable work | Gamin W.E.B Dubois Lift Every Voice and Sing |
Movement | Harlem Renaissance |
Spouses |
|
Patron(s) | Teachers from Julius Rosenwald Fund |
Augusta Savage (born Augusta Christine Fells; February 29, 1892 – March 27, 1962) was an American sculptor associated with the
Early life
Augusta Christine Fells was born near Jacksonville, Florida, on February 29, 1892, to Edward Fells and Cornelia Murphy.[4] Augusta began making figures as a child, mostly small animals out of the natural red clay of her hometown.[2] Her father was a poor Methodist minister who strongly opposed his daughter's early interest in art. "My father kicked me four or five times a week," Savage once recalled, "and almost whipped all the art out of me."[5] This was because he believed her sculpture to be a sinful practice, due to his interpretation of the "graven images" portion of the Bible.[6] She persevered, and the principal of her new high school in West Palm Beach, where her family relocated in 1915,[7] encouraged her talent and allowed her to teach a clay modeling class.[8] This began a lifelong commitment to teaching, as well as to creating art.
In 1907, at the age of 15, Augusta Fells married John T. Moore; the two had a daughter, Irene Connie Moore, who was born the following year.[9] John died shortly thereafter.[7] In 1915, after moving to West Palm Beach, she met and married James Savage;[10][11] she retained the name Savage throughout her life, even after the two divorced in the early 1920s.[7][9] In 1923, Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston, a protégé of Marcus Garvey.[12] Poston died of pneumonia aboard a ship while returning from Liberia as part of a Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League delegation in 1924.
Education and early career
Savage continued to model clay, and in 1919 was granted a booth at the
After completing studies at Cooper Union, Savage worked in Manhattan steam laundries to support herself and her family. Her father had been paralyzed by a stroke, and the family's home destroyed by a hurricane. Her family from Florida moved into her small West 137th Street apartment. During this time, she obtained her first commission from the New York Public Library on West 135th Street, a bust of W. E. B. Du Bois.[9] Her outstanding sculpture brought more commissions, including one for a bust of Marcus Garvey.[9] Her bust of William Pickens Sr., a key figure in the NAACP, earned praise for depicting an African American in a more humane, neutral way as opposed to stereotypes of the time, as did many of her works.[14]
In the spring of 1923, Savage applied for a summer art program at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France.[9] She was accepted, but when the American selection committee found out she was Black they rescinded the acceptance offer.[9][15] Savage was deeply upset and questioned the committee, beginning the first of many public fights for equal rights in her life by writing a letter to the New York World.[9] Though appeals were made to the French government to reinstate the award, they had no effect and Savage was unable to study at the school.[2] The incident got press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually, the sole supportive committee member sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil – who at one time had shared a studio with African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner – invited her to study with him. She later cited him as one of her teachers.
In 1923, Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston, a protégé of Garvey.[12] Poston died of pneumonia aboard a ship while returning from Liberia as part of a Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League delegation in 1924. In 1925, Savage won a scholarship with the help of W.E.B DuBois to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.[16] This scholarship only covered tuition, and after being unable to raise money for travel and living expenses, she was unable to attend.[9] In the 1920s, writer and eccentric Joe Gould became infatuated with Savage. He wrote her "endless letters", telephoned her constantly, and wanted to marry her. Eventually, this infatuation turned into harassment.[17]
Savage won the Otto Kahn Prize in a 1928 exhibition at the William E. Harmon Foundation with her submission Head of a Negro.[2] Yet, she was an outspoken critic of the fetishization of the "negro primitive" aesthetic favored by white patrons at the time. She publicly critiqued the director of The Harmon Foundation, Mary Beattie Brady, for her low standards for Black art and lack of understanding in the area of visual arts in general.[18]
In 1929, with the help of pooled resources from the
Later career and teaching
Savage returned to the United States in 1931, energized from her studies and achievements. The
Savage was one of four women and only two African Americans to receive a professional commission from the Board of Design to be included in the
Savage opened two galleries whose shows were well attended and well reviewed, but few sales resulted and the galleries closed. The last major showing of her work occurred in 1939.[2] Deeply depressed by her financial struggle, Savage moved to a farmhouse in Saugerties, New York, in 1945.[9][26] While in Saugerties, she established close ties with her neighbors and welcomed family and friends from New York City to her rural home.[27] Savage cultivated a garden and sold pigeons, chickens, and eggs. The K-B Products Corporation, the world's largest growers of mushrooms at that time, employed Savage as a laboratory assistant in the company's cancer research facility. She acquired a car and learned to drive to enable her commute. Herman K. Knaust, director of the laboratory, encouraged Savage to pursue her artistic career and provided her with art supplies. Though her art production slowed down, Savage taught art to children in summer camps and sculpted friends and tourists, and explored writing children's stories.[4][27] Her last commissioned work was for Knaust and was that of the American journalist and author Poultney Bigelow, whose father, John Bigelow, was U.S. Minister to France during the Civil War. Her few neighbors said that she was always making something with her hands.[28]
Much of her work is in clay or plaster, as she could not often afford bronze. One of her most famous busts is titled Gamin which is on permanent display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; a life-sized version is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. At the time of its creation, Gamin, which is modeled after a Harlem youth, was voted most popular in an exhibition of over 200 works by black artists.[29] Her style can be described as realistic, expressive, and sensitive. Though her art and influence within the art community are documented, the location of much of her work is unknown.
Savage moved in with her daughter, Irene, in New York City when her health started to decline, she later died of cancer on March 26, 1962.[9] While she died in relative obscurity, Savage is remembered today as a great artist, activist, and arts educator; serving as an inspiration to the many that she taught, helped, and encouraged.[25][27]
Stalking by Joe Gould
In 1923, at a poetry reading in Harlem, Savage met the Greenwich Village writer Joe Gould.[30] Gould claimed to be working on the longest book ever written, The Oral History of Our Time. He became obsessed with Savage, writing to her constantly, and proposing marriage. This obsession, which seems to have been violent, and may have involved rape, lasted for more than two decades. During those years, Gould was arrested several times for attacking women. He was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, where he was eventually diagnosed as psychopathic.[30] In 1942, when the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell profiled Gould for the magazine, he portrayed him as a harmless eccentric.[31] Gould died in 1957, in a psychiatric hospital, likely after having been lobotomized in 1949.[30] In 1964, in a New Yorker essay called "Joe Gould's Secret," Mitchell revealed his conviction that The Oral History of Our Time never existed and had been, all along, a product of Gould's insanity.[32] After the article was published, the writer Millen Brand, a friend of Savage's, wrote to Mitchell to tell him that he was wrong, that the Oral History did exist, reporting that "Joe [Gould] showed me long sections of the Oral History that were actually oral history ... the longest stretch of it, running through several composition books and much the longest thing probably that he ever wrote, was his account of Augusta Savage." Brand told Mitchell that Savage had been terrified of Gould but, as a Black woman, was unable to get help from the police. Mitchell never reported any of this, but New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, drawing from evidence in the Millen Brand Papers at Columbia and the Joseph Mitchell papers, then newly deposited at the New York Public Library, told the story in a 2016 book called Joe Gould's Teeth in which she speculated that Savage left New York in 1945 to escape Gould.[30]
Works
- W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey
- Gamin
- The Tom Tom
- The Abstract Madonna
- Envy
- A Woman of Martinique
- Lift Every Voice and Sing (also known as The Harp)[33]
- Sculptural interpretation of Negro Music[34]
- Gwendolyn Knight, 1934–35[35]
Individual exhibitions
- Grande Chaumière, Paris, 1929
- Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1930
- Argent Galleries, New York and Art Anderson Gallery, New York, 1932
- Argent Galleries, New York and New York World's Fair, 1939
- New York Public Library, 1988[19]
Selected group exhibitions
- Argent Galleries, New York, 1934
- Argent Galleries, New York, 1938
- American Negro Exposition, Tanner Art Galleries, Chicago, 1940
- Newark Museum, New Jersey, 1990
- Three Generations of African-American Women Sculptors, Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia, 1996[19]
Legacy
- Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in Baltimore is named after her.
- She is the namesake of the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
References
- ISBN 978-0787666187.
- ^ ISBN 0-19-516721-X.
- ^ Frederick, Candice (2016-01-14). "Black Women Artists: Augusta Savage". The New York Public Library. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
- ^ a b c Augusta Savage. By: Kalfatovic, Martin R., American National Biography (from Oxford University Press), 2010
- ^ "Augusta Savage | Smithsonian American Art Museum". americanart.si.edu. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
- ISBN 0-8240-6049-0.
- ^ )
- ^ ISBN 978-0-89659-748-8
- ^ )
- ^ Florida State Division of Cultural Affairs http://dos.myflorida.com/cultural/programs/florida-artists-hall-of-fame/augusta-savage/
- ^ 1920 US Census, taken January 17–19, for 916 Banyan Street, West Palm Beach, Florida: James Savage, 25, born Florida, occupation Chauffeur for Private Family; Augusta Savage, 27, born Florida, occupation Laundress for Private Family; Irene Moore, 12. Augusta's father born in Florida, mother born in North Carolina. 6/5/1917 WWI draft registration card shows James Savage, at 916 Banyan, W Palm Beach FL, living with wife and child, Married, African race.
- ^ a b Ancestry.com shows Florida Divorce Index dated 1941 for James Savage from Augusta, in Palm Beach County.
- ISBN 978-0-02-865816-2.
- ISBN 0-942949-24-2.
- ^ "Sculptor Augusta Savage Said Her Legacy Was The Work Of Her Students". NPR.org.
- ^ )
- ^ Lepore, Jill, "Joe Gould's Teeth: The long-lost story of the longest book ever written". The New Yorker, 07-27-2015
- S2CID 157236317– via Taylor & Francis Online.
- ^ ISBN 9781558623729.
- )
- ISBN 0631222391.
- ISBN 9781578593231.
- ^ AHOAAA p. 174.
- ^ JSTOR 3193232.
- ^ a b c "Augusta Savage". Biography. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
- )
- ^ a b c "Augusta Savage | Smithsonian American Art Museum". americanart.si.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-05.
- ^ AHOAAA, p. 179.
- ISBN 978-0-8108-8542-4.
- ^ a b c d Jill Lepore, Joe Gould's Teeth (New York: Knopf, 2016)
- ^ Joseph Mitchell, "Professor Seagull," The New Yorker, 1942.
- ^ Joseph Mitchell, "Joe Gould's Secret," The New Yorker, 1964.
- ^ "Lift Every Voice and Sing, (White metal cast with black patina)". Building on the Legacy: African American Art from the Permanent Collection. Muscarelle Museum of Art. 2017–2018. Retrieved 20 Jun 2018.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Bontemps, pp. 141–142
- ^ "Collections – SAM – Seattle Art Museum". www1.seattleartmuseum.org. Archived from the original on 2018-02-18. Retrieved 2018-02-17.
Further reading
- Farris, Phoebe, ed. (1999). Women Artists of Color : A bio-critical sourcebook to 20th century artists in the Americas. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313303746, pp. 272, 339–344.
- Savage, Augusta (1988). "Augusta Savage and the art schools of Harlem". Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. OCLC 645284036.
- Etinde-Crompton, Charlotte, Crompton, Samuel Willard (2019) Augusta Savage: Sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance. ISBN 9781978505360
- DailyArt Magazine: Augusta Savage: The Woman That Defined 20th Century Sculpture
External links
- Schomburg Center
- Smithsonian Archives Archived 2008-06-09 at the Wayback Machine
- Gamin
- PBS: Art Focus
- Artnet
- About.com: Women's History Archived 2017-02-23 at the Wayback Machine
- Negro Artist
- Book Rags
- Green Cove Spring
- Florida Artist Hall of Fame Archived 2014-08-15 at the Wayback Machine
- 1939 New York World's Fair
- Augusta Savage at Find a Grave
- Profile on NPR Morning edition 7/15/19