7/28/2017 Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture Critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies Search About caa.reviews May 25, 2010 CAA News Subscribe to Book Reviews Richard J. Powell CAA News Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture The newsletter of the Exhibition Reviews College Art Association Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 296 pp.; 40 color ills.; 76 b/w ills. Cloth $55.00 (9780226677279) Essays Review Categories Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Recent Books in the Arts CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2010.54 Dissertations With the recent ushering in of the second decade of the twenty­first century and the Era Supporters of Obama, the study of the black body has fully entered the field of art­historical and visual culture studies, along with being one of the most popular sites of social, cultural, and political contestation. In fact it has long been a particularly fertile field for academic View CAA Journals rumination and semiotic dissection as well as the subject of numerous art collections and archival projects, including Dominique de Menil’s singular Archive of the Image of Visit the CAA Website the Black in Western Art, now in the care of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. In the past decade, the challenge of making sense of the various ideologies and geographical constellations that one might interrogate when researching this topic has been taken up by a number of scholars in the fields of art history and cultural studies, critics who have produced an increasingly expansive discourse on photographs, paintings, sculpture, film, and other media, including including Kellie Jones, Deborah Willis, and Charmaine Nelson. Richard J. Powell now offers readers a conceptual intervention into this field by attempting to characterize and define a particular genre of portraiture and its relationship to the representation of black bodies. With the idea of “cutting a figure” signaled in the book’s title, Powell argues for the recognition of an “active visuality” (7) on the part of the black subjects who inhabit the myriad images upon which he has turned his formidable analytic powers. In assembling these images, and introducing a new classificatory term for them, Powell offers a novel way to understand many of the physically and sartorially arresting portraits of black peoples that have been produced within the conditions of modernity. The success of Powell’s approach hinges on his ability to convince the reader that there is indeed such a thing as “cutting a figure,” which he defines in part as a sense of “sharpness” that is a specifically “black American­informed artistic strategy of modern style” (7). Powell claims that “cutting a figure” is about pride and exhibitionism, and that it is often found in “anatomical distortion, emblematic posturing, and a contrastive decorative scheme.” In his estimation, such a presentation can be found in any number of works that carry “conceptual implications of spirit, insolence, and physical singularity” (10). As Powell himself notes with his brief read of the Anglo­American painter John Singer Sargent’s double portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1897), which features the unnaturally elongated bodies of a pair of white socialites, “cutting a figure”—as a signified—is not solely fixed within the black body. But this artistic strategy, one that he argues can be employed by both artists and their subjects (particularly in the case of photography), is only partially persuasive as there seem to be few portraits of emboldened, anachronistic, or dynamic bodies that might be exempt from this characterization. Rather it can be found in any kind of figural representation that addresses itself to the viewer using the specific set of physical and sartorial visual codes that Powell has ascribed to it. Powell begins his investigation with a heterogeneous group of images that are chosen for their ability to function as “interlocutors” of self­expression. Powell briefly returns to work he published previously by including a compressed discussion of Nathaniel Jocelyn’s 1839 portrait of Cinqué (Sengbe Pieh, 1813–1879), the hero of the rebellion earlier that year on the slave ship Amistad (Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11 [Fall 1997]: 48–73), before moving on to an elucidating examination of the possible subversive elements found in German­born painter Christian Mayr’s 1838 genre scene Kitchen Ball at White Sulpher Springs, Virginia. He transitions into an iconologic explication of the connections of nineteenth­century diasporic African women’s head coverings, focusing on the importance to both abolitionist aesthetics and the minstrelsy tradition of scarves for actively visual subjects, such as the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1455#.WXuY4ZIrJ0I 1/3 7/28/2017 Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture Truth. He then turns to the question of whether the adaptations of Western fashion by free black men of that era constituted a type of dandified costuming or a bold mode of subversive resistance. He briefly analyzes the self­styling of image­conscious men like abolitionist Frederick Douglass and his political successors Marcus Garvey and New Negro philosopher Alain Locke. The latter discussion yields some interesting points about the impact of prejudice and preconception on the veristic status of certain garments and the bodies they adorn. However, the former discussion, which argues convincingly for the visual ubiquity and the personal importance of the head scarf in maintaining the dignity of black women sitters in the nineteenth­century, suffers in its unsupported conclusion that this particular sartorial statement was a real weapon for the subject to wield within representation itself. Further evidential support is needed to affirm that the head scarf did in fact enable the images of these women to “cut the figure” in a personally transformative or politically radical way. Comparing the images of these kerchief­wearing women to those of black women whose hair was unbound might have highlighted the period associations of uncovered hair with sexual promiscuity or low­class origins. In concluding this section of the book, Powell asserts that these representations all share in the common “conceptual challenge of self­awareness and self­agency, especially as it impacts (and functions within the portraiture of) peoples of African descent, who have struggled with this challenge under the real­life constraints of vilification, dependency, and an all­consuming desire for freedom.” In this way Powell confers upon his subjects a hard­won ability to “critically discern the notion of a race on display” that elevates their self­fashioning from mockery to a “cutting of the proverbial figure” (77; emphasis in original). A significant portion of the book discusses images produced by two lesser­known African American artistic figures whom Powell finds irresistibly interesting. First, Powell makes it his mission to rescue the career of the fashion model Donyale Luna from the dustbin of history. Luna’s meteoric ascent into the pages of international fashion magazines and art films, including Andy Warhol’s Camp (1965) and Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon (1969), during the late 1960s and early 1970s was cut short by her (dare I say, tragic) early death in what Powell implies was the voguish world of Rome’s artistic (and heroin­addicted) avant­garde counter­culture. At the start of the chapter Powell states that his attraction to Luna’s visuality has its roots in a childhood encounter with her mesmerizing visage on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. The Fanonesque “primal scene,” which Powell recalls with the sub­heading “Look, Momma, a Negro on TV,” goes a long way in explaining both his attraction to Luna as a research topic and the social importance of her emergence at the peak of the Civil Rights Era for re­ forming standards of beauty that African American subjects (like Powell) partook of in their daily consumption of mass media images (86). Her iconic “look,” a highlighting of her almond­shaped eyes through the strategic placement of her hands, was a pose that provided an arresting visual punctum for the young Powell as he sat enraptured by the mysterious and beautiful “Negro” on his parent’s TV set (101). The argument that Powell makes for the transformative cultural impact of Luna’s striking features is persuasive. Surely, few other black fashion models (other than perhaps the Somali­born Iman or the Jamaican Grace Jones, both of whom appeared in the wake of Luna’s death) have been able to “cut a figure” with as much singular authority as Luna did at the peak of her career. In the end the reader is impressed by the contribution of the visual construction that was Donyale Luna at the height of her powers. Through Powell’s recuperation of her life and his discussion of the images that were made of her body, he shines a light on the visual space that Luna excavated for the superstars confected of today’s black beauties. Readers are left with little doubt that her blessed and bedeviled life in all its tragedy prepared our collective eyes for the self­ assured black visuality of a Tyra Banks or a Beyoncé Knowles. At times the biographically focused approach of chapter 2 reads like the heart­rending demise of a beautiful black queen, at war with her own self­image, driven to disassociative madness and subsequent death. In this way, it is far from providing a harmonious proximity with the preceding medley of close reads that are featured in chapter 1. As if to counter this imbalance, Powell follows his discussion of Luna by opening a window onto the technically superb artistic practice of the would­be king of the “cutting the figure” genre: the boldly macho and commercially savvy Barkley L.