For most of the twentieth century, the South was not
a happy place for the arts. One appraisal came from H. L. Mencken's
"Sahara of the Bozart," an overstated, but trenchant, assessment of
southern culture that he prefaced with the immortal J. Gordon Coogler's
immortal couplet: "Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer— / She
never was much given to literature." Mencken’s examples are dated, but
they haven’t lost their sting. "Georgia," he asserted, "is at
once the home of the cotton-mill sweater, of the Methodist parson turned
Savonarola and of the lynching bee." (Savonarola — as Mencken was certain
none of his southern readers would know — was a fifteenth-century friar and preacher
most famous for his "bonfire of the vanities," a comprehensive book,
manuscript, objet d'art, and
all-around-cultural conflagration). White male academics spoke to what Mencken
called “Baptist and Methodist barbarism” through discussions of cultural
identity, poetry theory, and ideology. Black artists first dealt with the
cotton mills and the lynching bees. Then they made their art.
When Benny Andrews was five he started picking cotton to earn money to buy winter clothes. Raymond Andrews did the same when he turned five. And in cruel symmetry, five dollars was what their father took home weekly from his WPA job. Their mother worked in the fields and bore ten kids. Both parents loved the land; they wanted to be farmers. Raymond records the inevitable result of this combination of a natural desire and his family’s privation in his memoir The Last Radio Baby. "This automatically sent us to the only type of farming available to us 'po' folk' kind. Sharecropping. Thus in 1943, on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves, we moved across the hill from Mister Jim's place to the old Barnett Farm to become sharecroppers." Few escaped sharecropping's downward financial spiral. The landowner took half the farmer's crops; with the other half, the farmer bought supplies (on credit from the landowner). The meager leftovers, if any remained, comprised the family budget. Mere survival. Benny would echo Raymond's slavery reference in his own autobiography:** "Ever present in the sharecropper's mind is that he is only whatever his labor is worth, not a hair more. He belongs to his master, and can never have a word of disagreement with him." One such point of disagreement that wasn't allowed, for example, was the understanding that males from age 11 and up would work in the fields. Benny was 13 in 1943, Raymond was 9. Only through their mother's courageous intervention were they allowed to attend school . . . and only on days when it rained.
During these years, Benny practiced his drawing in Georgia dirt, with a nail. He also copied images from magazines and newspapers on whatever was available and drew stories on pieces of "clean on one side" paper or on brown paper sacks. He and Raymond experimented with making paints from blackberry juice, fingernail polish, even chocolate candy — paints that he would apply with straw, weeds, rags tied to sticks, and finally homemade hog bristle brushes. Meanwhile, Raymond read everything he could buy with his monthly dime-to-spend, borrow, or sometimes filch; boxes under the bed he shared with his brother held his reading stash: newspapers (especially the comics and sports pages), magazines (radio, movies, and more sports), and paperback books (westerns, mysteries, detective stories). "By age nine,” he wrote later, “I had no interest in toys, only the printed word, film, and radio."
In the late 1940s, Benny and Raymond left a town and the region that had offered them a paltry foundation for their careers: training for black painters that was negligible at best and a library for black readers that was sparse and seldom open. After separate military stints, they ended up at the Chicago Art Institute and Michigan State University respectively, and it's hard to imagine two individuals more ill-prepared for their eventual fields of endeavor. Benny, at age 23, had never been in an art museum; essentially he had never seen an original work of art. Raymond, at age 24, listed among his favorite authors Luke Short, Zane Grey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Ben Traven, and Harold Robbins (whose Dream Merchants he pronounced a classic).
Yet against the odds and obstacles, they succeeded in leaving behind a true and vivid picture of southern country life, especially the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Benny Andrews never stopped painting his home places and people. As he said in a 1975 interview, "I left Georgia when I was nineteen. . . . My interpretation of things — how I saw things — and my ideas about things had already been formed." His work has been in dozens of solo and group exhibitions and is represented in major museums throughout the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Philadelphia Academy of Art. From 1982 to 1984, he was visual arts director at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, he launched the Benny Andrews Foundation to assist young minority artists and institutions dedicated to African American art.
Likewise, Raymond Andrews' monumental Muskhogean County trilogy, originally published by Dial (1978-1983) and reissued by the University of Georgia Press (1987-1988), reveals life in the rural, Jim Crow south. Three other books continue his program, which he laid out in his preface to the reprint of Appalachee Red, the award-winning first book in the trilogy: "My American roots (like those of most Afro-Americans) are southern rural. This particular land and the individuals who have lived and died on it are what my books are about."
The Andrews brothers’ stories of escape from indigence and rise to success are at once inspiring and impressive. But perhaps more significant is their return, both artistically and physically, to the region that treated them so shabbily. Much of Benny's work deals with things southern; all of Raymond's does. And Benny built a studio outside Athens, Georgia, fewer than thirty miles from the old sharecropper's shack where they grew up. He and Raymond would trade off: one working in Athens while the other worked in New York. The art they made there is a testament to their character — never vindictive or angry (as well it might have been), often funny, always engaging, compassionate, and wise.
When Benny Andrews was five he started picking cotton to earn money to buy winter clothes. Raymond Andrews did the same when he turned five. And in cruel symmetry, five dollars was what their father took home weekly from his WPA job. Their mother worked in the fields and bore ten kids. Both parents loved the land; they wanted to be farmers. Raymond records the inevitable result of this combination of a natural desire and his family’s privation in his memoir The Last Radio Baby. "This automatically sent us to the only type of farming available to us 'po' folk' kind. Sharecropping. Thus in 1943, on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves, we moved across the hill from Mister Jim's place to the old Barnett Farm to become sharecroppers." Few escaped sharecropping's downward financial spiral. The landowner took half the farmer's crops; with the other half, the farmer bought supplies (on credit from the landowner). The meager leftovers, if any remained, comprised the family budget. Mere survival. Benny would echo Raymond's slavery reference in his own autobiography:** "Ever present in the sharecropper's mind is that he is only whatever his labor is worth, not a hair more. He belongs to his master, and can never have a word of disagreement with him." One such point of disagreement that wasn't allowed, for example, was the understanding that males from age 11 and up would work in the fields. Benny was 13 in 1943, Raymond was 9. Only through their mother's courageous intervention were they allowed to attend school . . . and only on days when it rained.
During these years, Benny practiced his drawing in Georgia dirt, with a nail. He also copied images from magazines and newspapers on whatever was available and drew stories on pieces of "clean on one side" paper or on brown paper sacks. He and Raymond experimented with making paints from blackberry juice, fingernail polish, even chocolate candy — paints that he would apply with straw, weeds, rags tied to sticks, and finally homemade hog bristle brushes. Meanwhile, Raymond read everything he could buy with his monthly dime-to-spend, borrow, or sometimes filch; boxes under the bed he shared with his brother held his reading stash: newspapers (especially the comics and sports pages), magazines (radio, movies, and more sports), and paperback books (westerns, mysteries, detective stories). "By age nine,” he wrote later, “I had no interest in toys, only the printed word, film, and radio."
In the late 1940s, Benny and Raymond left a town and the region that had offered them a paltry foundation for their careers: training for black painters that was negligible at best and a library for black readers that was sparse and seldom open. After separate military stints, they ended up at the Chicago Art Institute and Michigan State University respectively, and it's hard to imagine two individuals more ill-prepared for their eventual fields of endeavor. Benny, at age 23, had never been in an art museum; essentially he had never seen an original work of art. Raymond, at age 24, listed among his favorite authors Luke Short, Zane Grey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Ben Traven, and Harold Robbins (whose Dream Merchants he pronounced a classic).
Yet against the odds and obstacles, they succeeded in leaving behind a true and vivid picture of southern country life, especially the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Benny Andrews never stopped painting his home places and people. As he said in a 1975 interview, "I left Georgia when I was nineteen. . . . My interpretation of things — how I saw things — and my ideas about things had already been formed." His work has been in dozens of solo and group exhibitions and is represented in major museums throughout the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Philadelphia Academy of Art. From 1982 to 1984, he was visual arts director at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, he launched the Benny Andrews Foundation to assist young minority artists and institutions dedicated to African American art.
Likewise, Raymond Andrews' monumental Muskhogean County trilogy, originally published by Dial (1978-1983) and reissued by the University of Georgia Press (1987-1988), reveals life in the rural, Jim Crow south. Three other books continue his program, which he laid out in his preface to the reprint of Appalachee Red, the award-winning first book in the trilogy: "My American roots (like those of most Afro-Americans) are southern rural. This particular land and the individuals who have lived and died on it are what my books are about."
The Andrews brothers’ stories of escape from indigence and rise to success are at once inspiring and impressive. But perhaps more significant is their return, both artistically and physically, to the region that treated them so shabbily. Much of Benny's work deals with things southern; all of Raymond's does. And Benny built a studio outside Athens, Georgia, fewer than thirty miles from the old sharecropper's shack where they grew up. He and Raymond would trade off: one working in Athens while the other worked in New York. The art they made there is a testament to their character — never vindictive or angry (as well it might have been), often funny, always engaging, compassionate, and wise.
*Photograph: Appalachee Red's haint lording it over
some bronze guy in Athens, Georgia. Based on a Benny Andrews illustration for his brother's book, the foam-core cutout was made by the
University Press of Georgia marketing department for the launch of Appalachee
Red.
**Benny Andrews' unpublished memoir "Mine, or
Forty Years of Being Here" is quoted in J. Richard Gruber's American
Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997.
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