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Only Collect
John Haberin New York City
Betye Saar
Betye Saar is a collector of African American histories, only some of them her own. You may be well into her show at the Morgan Library when you feel that you have discovered her secrets. Where else should you discover them but after so much of her artistry and obsessions? As a postscript, I look back to a show just a year before of her best-known work.
Two dresses
Cream contains of a fine white dress, with even finer cream buttons. They must have belonged to a child, like the lock of hair and hand prints—perhaps a bridesmaid at a ceremony that brought her into the adult world. They must have belonged, too, you may feel certain, to family, and the work itself looks like a page out of a family album. 
The collage lies almost flat as a page, with a touch of paint that ages it like a sepia print. Saar makes it a field for faded family photos as well. You may look to the faces for clues to her.
Only then might you remember how the Morgan's show began, with another white dress facing the entrance. It, too, belongs to a long-gone child's world, suspended over a small chair with another photo at its base. It belongs to a harsher world as well, for Saar overlays the dress with terms for a black girl—terms that I would not willingly repeat. The work is A Loss of Innocence, and the artist now in her nineties must have lost hers a long time ago. What taken alone seemed so precious and personal drew on similar objects with a collective history. It sums up an art that sought at once the practical, the personal, and the political.
People often compare Saar to Robert Rauschenberg. How could Rauschenberg's collaborations and combines not have influenced her—or any artist alive? Like his, her assemblage solicits both a smile and a shock. That may be why her adoption of Aunt Jemima became all but her signature. She was claiming cultural icons and figures of scorn for her own. The New-York Historical Society stuck to that theme in 2019, and the Museum of Modern Art brought out her debt to Rauschenberg later that year, with works from its collection to mark MoMA's expansion.
Bear in mind, though, that she was born just months after Rauschenberg, in 1926, and her art is all about a black woman's independence. His idea of history is whiter, mostly male, and all but born yesterday, like a moon shot or JFK in silkscreen. It also has nothing to do with him beyond his ambitions. Those silkscreens easily fill a wall. She must have held everything she touched in her hands. The daughter of a seamstress, she must still feel the weave in a white dress.
She differs, too, as a collector. As a scavenger, Rauschenberg acted on impulse—an impulse that reinvented the "readymade" but also led to the blandness of his late work. One cannot image Rauschenberg's tire hung on a goat's neck as part of a collection of automobile parts and embalmed animals. One cannot imagine those motifs returning in his work, and a good thing, too. Saar in contrast finds something that grabs her eye, turns it into an idea, makes that idea the basis of further collecting, riffs on it in her notebooks, and finally remakes it as art. The material presence in her hands reshapes the idea.
All of Saar's collections speak of family and African American history, and it is hard to know one from the other. They include the dresses, but also windows, clocks, and washboards. They include goodness knows how many tributes to Aunt Jemima. When she exhibits a bird cage, she can only go on to a second. One encages a black man in chains, the other a minstrel figure, as two kinds of prisoners to their blackness. At the same time, she as an artist and African Americans as a people will refuge to be caged.
The Three P's
Of the three P's, including the personal and the political, Morgan privileges the practical. It sees Saar's career as "Call and Response": objects and their history are calling, and she and her sketchbooks are responding. She favored ring binders small enough to take with her all over the world, starting in the 1970s. For another artist, sketches might be a refuge, where the imagination runs free. Saar knows exactly what she is doing, picking out needed objects and identifying them in ink for what they are.
Does she add the sun, the moon, and a dozen eyes to a cocktail tray? For Saar as a black woman, the spiritual is a practical matter, too—and so is the visual. At times she covers a sketchbook page in watercolor, edge to edge. Black dolls in a museum show that she caught become an accordion book, a triumph of book art. Again in the 1970s, she also illustrated A Secretary to the Spirits, poetry by Ishmael Reed. Still, the majority of her sketchbooks are private and practical.
The visual impulse informs all her assemblage as well, where another artist might see only conceptual art. The cages cast darkly intricate shadows. Appearances matter, too, for a figure out of folk tradition, a Brazilian slave with dark hair but piercing blue eyes. The curators, Carol S. Eliel of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the Morgan's Rachel Federman, commissioned a work with the most piercing visuals of all. A cot covered with glass bottles rests on a bed of coals, lit from below by blue neon lights, as Woke Up This Morning, the Blues Was in My Bed. It seems on fire—a cold, simmering fire.
She is still funny, with Buddha sporting images of Aunt Jemima and resting on a postal meter, to assess an African American's weight. As the subtitle has it, she is Contemplating Mother Wit and Street Smarts. She is still stubborn, too. A white sheet labeled KKK hangs behind an ironing board with an old-fashioned flat iron, as I'll Bend but I Will Not Break. It took a woman like Saar's mother to keep the oppressor clean and neatly pressed. No wonder she is singing the blues.
Three museum shows within a year would be a triumph for any artist. Between Saar's age and blackness, they may feel like a bitter victory as well. Taken together, they amount at last to the retrospective she deserves (so do check out my past review of Saar at MoMA, and I would remiss if more on her most famous motif did not follow here). But what if she were younger? Would her dealing in Aunt Jemima draw protests, like plantation stereotypes for Kara Walker? For another bitter irony, Saar was among Walker's critics.
In all fairness, Walker has survived quite well, thank you—from her monumental sugar baby in a plant in Brooklyn to a superb show of drawings this fall at her gallery. Political art can be all the more powerful for not being politically correct, and Saar sure is not. The Morgan covers almost fifty years, but its heart is an outpouring of collecting and creativity in the late 1990s. As a 2005 assembly of clocks protests, she is Still Ticking, but of course the clocks have long since stopped. Art is often like that, transcending the moment while marking time.
Stereotypes and survivors
I caught Saar at the New-York Historical Society on a short, dark day in a waning year, and here I was writing on a New Year's Day, which is also the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Should I remember the darkness or the promise of freedom? Saar can never separate the two, in an art with many survivors but no larger than life heroes. It does, though, have its heroines, because, as she titles one work, Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines. They just happen to look much like African American stereotypes, washer women, or both. If America cannot always tell the difference, she can still ask why.
Something of a role model herself, Saar pictures African American identity at the intersection of gender, race, and class. She has appeared in shows of art and Black Power, art and the feminist revolution, black radical women, "Witness," black Los Angeles, and "Circa 1970," along with the Morgan's contemporary drawing for those treacherous times. Just what, though, is she asking you to witness—the promise or the burden of history? Born in 1926, she called her best-known work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, in 1972. Sure enough, it centers on the plump, smiling commercial fiction, in bright lipstick, still brighter clothing, and a head scarf befitting the servant in Manet's Olympia. Smile back while you can.
The figurine holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. A postcard in her lap redoubles her presence, but there holding a bawling white or biracial child—and with a raised black fist standing in for her skirt. Behind her, repeated logos from the pancake batter, in three-quarter profile, serve as wallpaper. This aunt is subject to packaging, but she is not going away. She also cannot stop working, whether she likes it or not. And while she stands in a wooden box, like assemblage for Joseph Cornell, the current show builds on soap and washboards, as "Keepin' It Clean."
Saar began the series more when washboards were already a lost art, and here, too, she makes it hard to know where a collector's instinct ends and her work begins. The show opens with a handful that she has not used for art, at least not yet. Then come just twenty-three more, in no particular order because her vocabulary has not grown much since the 1970s, apart from adding clocks to mark the urgency and the hours. She still has her Liberation, her head scarves, and her rifle, although more often an automatic weapon. A bullet turns up, full size, looking every bit like a guided missile. An old photo picks up the theme of caring for white children, who seem happy to have a black at their backs. The latter, though, looks recalcitrant or uncomfortable.
This is not the place for the casual heroics of young black males for Titus Kaphar, glitzy women for Mickalene Thomas, Barak and Michelle Obama for Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, or a black Napoleon for Wiley. Men appear only as a banjo boy or as faint silhouettes rippling across the corrugated surface, for Birth of the Blues. Women have their pride but often little more. A lily white dress bears racial slurs—and an ironing board the vintage print of a slave ship. Behind it, a sheet fresh from the laundry carries the initials KKK. As one title has it, We Was Mostly 'Bout Survival.
These were extreme times, they insist, and these are extreme times now. And maybe these times do call for heroines, but just as much for a sense of humor, a sense of danger, a sense of empathy, and a sense of loss. The museum finds an inspiration in "Song to a Negro Washer-Woman," a poem by Langston Hughes that speaks of "Soul washed clean, / Clothes washed clean"—and it quotes Saar as demanding that America come clean. Still, text in the largest work, a washboard triptych, asks for only "The Strength of Tears," "The Fragility of Smiles," and "The Fierceness of Love." As another title puts it, I'll Bend, but I Will Not Break. You are reading long after, past that winter and a pandemic, when I can only hope for warmer days and brighter skies.
Betye Saar ran at The Morgan Library through January 31, 2021, and at the New-York Historical Society through May 27, 2019. Kara Walker ran at Sikkema Jenkins through September 30, 2020. A related review looks at Saar in the collection of the Museum of Modern art.