Ronald Joseph (artist)
Ronald Joseph | |
---|---|
Born | 1910 St. Kitts, West Indies |
Died | 1992 Brussels, Belgium |
Nationality | American |
Education | Ethical Culture Fieldston School,
New York, New York
New York, New York |
Awards | Rosenwald Fund |
Ronald Joseph (1910–1992) was an
Personal life
Ronald Joseph was born on the Island of St. Kitts in the West Indies.[1] When he was very young, his mother decided to come to the US but she could not afford to take him with her. Mr. and Mrs. Theophilus Joseph, a childless couple who were friends of Joseph's mother, adopted him. Afterwards, the Joseph family moved to the Island of Dominica, where they stayed for ten years. In 1921, his foster parents also decided to come to the US. In New York, Joseph met his mother but remained living with his foster parents.[2]
In 1926 Ronald Joseph received a scholarship for the Ethical Culture School, were he spent two and half years of his high school period. At this time he obtained an art scholarship through Dr. Henry Fritz, with whom he became acquainted through his art teacher in public school. Joseph was taken into the Saturday art class, where he was the only black participant.[2] An artistic prodigy, Ronald Joseph had his student works shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[3] Ronald Joseph graduated from Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 1929.[4] He was honored as "the most promising" young artist in New York City's schools.[1] He began his study at Pratt Institute in 1931 and graduated in 1934.[4][5]
During the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph participated in many exhibitions of African-American art, the Works Progress Administration mural project, and the Harlem Artists Guild.
Ronald Joseph enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps at the declaration of World War II and was posted as a member of the ground crew in Tuskegee, Alabama, and in Michigan. At the end of the war in 1945, he received his G. I. Bill of Rights scholarship.[4]
In 1948, he was presented with the
Ronald Joseph left the U.S. in 1956, disappointed in the unreceptiveness of the art world to his work with mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he felt guilty for having left the U.S. during a period when blacks were struggling for their civil rights; on the other, he felt "lucky" to have been able to live and work in place where he did not feel discrimination as intensely.[7] He emigrated to Belgium and later settled permanently in Brussels. Ronald Joseph was married to Claire Joseph and they had a son, Robin Joseph.[4]
In 1989 Joseph returned to the United States after an absence of thirty-three years to attend the Lehman College exhibition and symposium and to renew his old friendships.[5] Afterward, he returned to Brussels where he continued to work as a painter, living there for the remainder of his life.[5]
Artistic career
Ronald Joseph started his artistic career in
In the 1930s, Joseph became chairman of the Harlem Artists Guild and represented it in Washington with Stuart Davis and Hugo Gellert. Ronald Joseph was also a participant in the mural section of WPA and a representative of the Harlem Artists' Guild to the New York World's Fair (1939–1940).[5]
Joseph's early oil paintings were influenced by Picasso, Braque and other European artists while most of his contemporaries focused on social realism.[6] By 1943, he was hailed by art historian James Porter as New York's "foremost Negro abstractionist painter".[10] His pastels and gouaches from the late forties and early fifties showed a highly structured abstraction combined with a studied spontaneity. Ronald Joseph's finely tuned abstractions often incorporated representational elements along with apparently "purer" forms. He described this aspect of his work in these terms: "It's not abstract and abstract at the same time. It's pure creation.” His works from the 1950s employed both still life and landscape as pretexts for masterly exercises in nearly abstract pictorial construction related to cubism and fauvism.[11]
During
Selected exhibitions
April 16 – May 14, 1937: Exhibition by the Harlem Artists' Guild – American Artists School[12]
1939: Contemporary Negro Art - Baltimore Museum of Art[13]
December 9, 1941 – January 3, 1942: American Negro Art: 19th and 20th Centuries - Downtown Gallery [14]
1943: Library of Congress in Washington, D.C [14]
February 23 – June 6, 1989: Black Printmakers and the WPA - The Lehman College Art Gallery [15]
February 6, 2010 – July 24, 2010: A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund - Montclair Art Museum[16]
Works of art
Tenement Window (lithograph) - c. 1935, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Robert Blackburn (lithograph) - c. 1937, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Country Scene (lithograph) - c. 1934–36, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Graphic Workshop (lithograph) - c. 1935–37, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Under the Elevated (lithograph) - c. 1934–36, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Still Life (gouache) - 1950/1954, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture
The Family (paper / gouache) - 1953, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture
Two Musicians (paper) - 1952/1955, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture
Paris Vista (#6) (oil on linen canvas) - 1950-52
Selected collections
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, Charlotte, North Carolina
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0810125889.
- ^ a b Lee Newsome, Effie (1930). "The Story Of Ronald Joseph". Crisis: 99.
- ^ a b c African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. he Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2003. p. 31.
- ^ JSTOR 2904098.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i King-Hammond, Leslie (1989). Black Printmakers and the W.P.A.: The Lehman College Art Gallery : February 23-June 6, 1989. Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, Gallery Association of New York State. p. 23.
- ^ a b "Swann Galleries – The Shape of Things to Come: African-American Fine Art – Sale 2353 – June 10, 2014". www.swanngalleries.com. Retrieved 2019-04-17.
- ^ a b Sragow, Ellen (1990). "Black Printmakers and the WPA". Tamarind Paper. 13: 74.
- ^ a b Life Impressions: 20th-Century African American Prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (an exhibition catalogue). Hamilton, NY: Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University. 2001. p. 46.
- ISBN 9780520252417.
- ^ Porter, James Amos (1943). Modern Negro art. New York, Arno Press. p. 130.
- ^ A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. China: Northwestern University Press. 2009. p. 136.
- ^ von Wiegand, Charmion (4 May 1937). "Sights and Sounds". New Masses.
- ^ Locke, Alain (1968). The Negro In Art. New York, New York: Hacker Art Books. p. 105.
- ^ ISBN 978-0300063394.
- ^ Raynor, Vivien (12 Mar 1989). "A Black Perspective on the 1930s". The New York Times: 34.
- ^ Genocchio, Benjamin (12 February 2010). "Works That Testify to the Nurturing of Black Artists". The New York Times: 13.