Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  Some comparisons are useful here. The most prominent portrait paintings of the English court by Sir Anthony van Dyck, for example, exhibit a keen sense of place; they denote their distinctness from the paintings of the Tudor court through the artist's ability to locate individuals within their milieu. The genius of Van Dyck, the English art historian Ellis Waterhouse once noted, was his ability to understand the temperament of the individual along “the lines of prevailing taste” and to direct his sensibility “towards nations and classes of society.”66 Waterhouse observed that a Van Dyck portrait gestured to its context powerfully, carefully pointing to the identity of the model: “Given the national temper and the national costume, he devised a series of patterns appropriate to these various classes. The individual appears only in the features of the face, which Van Dyck studied and drew with meticulous fidelity.”67 In contrast, even when they present expressive gestures and movements, American portraits from the same period lack a sense of character and background. Colonial American portraits, whether in New England or New Amsterdam, seem flat, belated, seeking proper models and contexts (often Elizabethan and Jacobite) that are far removed from the American experience. Famous colonial American portraits are fashioned after a certain European style, but one either remembered vaguely or mastered poorly.

  An excellent example of this kind of portrait is an anonymous portrait of Elizabeth Freake and her child (fig. 4.8) now at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Commentators on this portrait have admired the anonymous artist's mastery of the Elizabethan-Jacobite style, evident in the frontal-posture presentation, the rigidity of the human form, and the attention to details, especially in the dress and ornaments won by the subjects. However, the portrait's focus on surface details is achieved at the expense of the human form: the artist is almost oblivious to human anatomy so that although the subjects are sitting, they have no laps. The portrait was evidently produced without any concern for “modeling and realistic anatomy.”68 This colonial American portrait seeks to master a European style but ends up impoverishing its context and thus diminishing “the recognizable image of a particular person” that is supposed to be the enabling condition of portraiture.69 The anonymous Freake painter represents the best of his time, but the limits in which he functions invite closer reflection.

  4.8 Anonymous, Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary. Circa 1671 and 1674. American School. Oil on canvas.

  There are two issues here, and both lead, directly and indirectly, to the aura of blackness embodied in the figure of the slave. The first issue concerns the belatedness of the Freake portrait. Although painted in New England at the end of the seventeenth century, the portrait reflects an Elizabethan and Jacobite style, which was already out of date even in England. The second issue is the portrait's lack of a dynamic relation to its context. In this picture, as in many others of its time and genre, there is no acknowledgment of colonial difference as the informing condition of the work of art or as a gesture to the objects that make up the fabric of colonial American life. When early colonial American portrait painters sought to commemorate the greatness of their subjects without inscribing or acknowledging the source and nature of this greatness in the painting, they deprived this picture of its auratic power, what Walter Benjamin famously called “the authority of the object.”70 And one of the things that was excluded from the world picture of colonial America, especially the antebellum South, was the figure of the slave, the subject/object that made the region distinctive from the Europe it worked hard to imitate.

  Paradoxically, when the slave was allowed into the American world picture, either as an icon of American difference or as a symbol of the new-world context, an iconographic revolution would take place. A vivid illustration of this transformation can be found in the works of Justus Engelhardt Kühn, a German migrant painter who worked in Maryland. Sometime around 1710, Kühn, who specialized in paintings intended to enhance the status of “affluent colonialists in the developing landed aristocracy,” painted a portrait of Henry Darnall III as a child (fig. 4.9). As in other Kuhn portraits of the time, this representation was attuned to the client's need to be presented in a manner that mimicked a formal European style, one in which color, fashion, and ornamentation embodied wealth and status in society. The portrait gestured back to a seventeenth-century style of portraiture, especially in its use of ostentatious ornamentation to capture the regality of royalty and ennoblement. Kuhn's painting of Henry Darnall, then, reflects the same sense of color and “romantic interpretation” that we have come to associate with the great European painters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including Van Dyck and his contemporaries.71

  Young Darnall was idealized in the Kuhn painting; his status as a young gentleman was enhanced by his elegant and extravagant royal robes and exotic props, including the bird and the bow, all significant elements of what would later come to be known as the colonial Baroque.72 The painting is a perfect fusion of color and aristocratic bearing and what Guy C. McElroy aptly calls the international Baroque: “Henry Darnall is dressed in a brocaded coat and lace scarf, jeweled platform shoes and a cape of lush fabric—finery that befits his wealth and status. Adopting the conventions of the international Baroque to satisfy the need of his clientele to see themselves as transplanted European gentry, Kuhn used costume, physical accoutrements, and the palatial dwellings that serve as a backdrop to suggest wealth that was in fact rarely seen in eighteenth century America.”73

  This baroqueness emerges out of the artist's desire to inscribe his subject's rank and social standing within the colonial sphere, and it is this inscription that makes Kuhn's painting similar to English court paintings from the end of the seventeenth century, such as Gerard Soest's painting of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore. However, what ultimately gives Kuhn's Darnall painting a sharper sense of person and setting than earlier colonial portraits is what is located on the margins of the frame rather than its center—namely, the figure of a black boy, considered to be “the earliest known depiction of an African-American subject in American painting.”74 It is this black boy who both enhances young Darnall's rank and character within colonial society and symbolizes the cultural and social context in which colonial-American notions of being and selfhood were established and elaborated. He is the mark of the American difference that was lacking in the Freake portrait discussed earlier.

  4.9 Justus Engelhardt Kuhn, Henry Darnall III. Circa 1710. Oil on canvas. Maryland Historical Society.

  How are we to read this difference, and what cultural work is it performing here? Most observers of Kuhn's portrait of Henry Darnall III have focused on what McElroy calls the black boy's “position of obeisance”: “His humble expression, inferior position within the composition, and the obvious disparity in rank vividly illustrate the chasm that existed between the landed aristocracy and the African-Americans whose enforced servitude allowed this system to flourish.”75 Other commentators have been struck by “the presence and the diminution” of the “slave boy.”76 The collar on the black boy's neck is often read as “a symbol of his servitude” while the palatial foreground of the picture represents the social ambitions of the Darnall family.77

  These are accurate and powerful descriptive terms, but what I find fascinating in this picture is not the subservient status of the unnamed black boy in relation to Master Darnall, but the more vexing question of the sudden entry of slaves into the American world picture. Why did the Darnall family desire the representation of a slave in a composition whose goal was to enhance the status of their son? Why not settle for the dog that Kuhn used in his painting of Henry's sister, Eleanor? Or a map of Maryland? Or simply foreground the palatial setting of the painting to point toward the Darnall's aspiration for grandeur?

  There are two possible answers to this question. The first explanation is simply that by the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the conventions of portrait painting had come to incorporate the black slave as a mark of wea
lth and prestige. From this perspective, the black was just another figure of ornamentation, a substitute for the dog or parrot that had always been an essential component of the aristocratic portrait. A second explanation is that blackness added a certain aura to the picture and transformed the function that art was asked to perform in the social imaginary. In the colonial sphere, the black slave would operate in a changed context and represent a bifurcated narrative. Located inside the frame of the painting but off center, he or she was necessary in endowing the American aristocrat with value and meaning; outside the picture, however, the enslaved was associated with abjection and danger and was often considered to represent whatever was distasteful in antebellum or colonial culture.78 One of Kuhn's signal achievements in the Darnall painting was to recognize the value and aura of black marginality and to deploy it effectively in realizing the baroqueness of the colonial gentleman as deeply connected to the colors and riches that enslavement enabled. This is the lesson that Kuhn passed on to his American successors, such as John Hesselius, who, in a 1760 painting of young Charles Calvert, another future Lord Baltimore, deployed the slave as part of the aura of mastering and mastery.

  The claim that the slave on the margins of the portrait enhanced the standing of the master is not in itself unusual, nor was it a uniquely American phenomenon. Within the conventions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the obligatory black in the portrait was the sign of a certain kind of eroticism, but one represented in the same splendor and color as that of the master or mistress. Occasionally a black would appear on the margins of the aristocratic portrait, not as a figure of status or standing, or even contrast, but of visual continuity. Black pages sit on the margins of paintings of Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth and mistress of Charles II, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Pierre Mignard, and other prominent artists, but here, as in most European portraits of the time, these figures are there for purely decorative purposes, disconnected from any meaningful context.

  Like Kneller and Mignard, Kuhn and Hesselius located their black subjects in a supplicant relationship to their masters; they used broadly similar colors; and the master's lace scarf and the slave's color of bondage were as elegant as the silk robes that draped the Duchess of Portsmouth or any aristocratic figure in a European painting. There is, however, a subtle difference between the Americans' aristocratic portraits and those of their European peers. The insignias of subordination may be similar in color or hue, but in terms of social or cultural value, the black children in these works were being asked to perform dissimilar tasks. In Pierre Mignard's portrait of Louise de Keroualle (fig. 4.10), for example, the black boy wears a string of pearls around his neck; in the Kuhn portrait, the black boy wears a collar around his neck. The change here is not simply one of ornamentation, but of a transformed context; the slave's collar was a powerful symbol of bondage, one that affirmed enslavement as the condition that made the young master's world of play and leisure possible.

  But bondage was not what painters such as Kuhn and Hesselius had in mind when they set out to incorporate the figure of the slave in their paintings. Indeed, if the American painters seemed keen to make the slave visible in their pictures, it was because they understood how blackness endowed aura and status to the self-made American aristocrat. Here, it was the presence of the slave that separated the slave owner from ordinary white subjects, making him an aristocrat worthy of a portrait as demanded by eighteenth-century theories of painting. And it is not an exaggeration to say that it was the presence of the slave in the frame that enabled the coming of age of the American portrait. Unlike the Freake painting discussed earlier, the Kuhn paintings had a sense of character and context; the artist understood that the status of the young masters who occupied the center of the picture did not depend on inheritance and peerage alone; on the contrary, social rank depended on one's location at the heart of antebellum culture and its properties. Here, rather than being mere exotic subjects, slaves were the true sources of the wealth of the nation and hence the bedrock of status and character.

  4.10 Pierre Mignard, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. 1682. Oil on canvas.

  In focusing on this process of turning the black into an object of art, I have sought to shift interpretative interest from a now dominant concern with positive and negative images of the black in Western culture.79 My contention is that irrespective of whether the images are positive or negative, the deployment of black subjects in the iconographic tradition is a symbolic activity that is often at odds with the real condition of the slave in the modern world but also transcendental of it. With specific reference to colonial slavery, it is interesting to note that the black body, broken down in holding pens, exhibited in slave markets, and considered to be chattel under the law, entered the European and American imaginary in elevated terms.

  By calling attention to the aesthetic function of the slave in the economy of slavery, I am not suggesting that black bodies existed solely as figures of antebellum or planter desires. On the contrary, I have been trying to figure out the nature of the relationship between slaves as objects of art and the materiality of their lives—namely, their presence as an integral part of the fabric of American life. The figure of the slave exists in the aristocratic portrait as paraergon: “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work, neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below.”80 In this condition, however, the presence of the subjected body would inscribe “something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field,” and its location on the margins of the frame would call attention to the exteriority that was absent from the picture, that which was “lacking in something and…lacking from itself.”81

  What is lacking in the artwork is, of course, the political economy of slavery, which is elided when the slave is turned into an object of art. The paradox of Kuhn's portrait, then, is that it would give the slave the aura and standing he didn't have in real life but would also distract the viewer from the violence that was attendant to enslavement. In this context, the portrait would seem to have been playing what Walter Benjamin, in his famous discussion of aura, called a ritualistic role. Against the pressures of slavery, the masters could ennoble themselves by commissioning works in which the cult of power and authority would be enhanced by the ritualistic function of the slave; in turn, this secularized ritual would avert the crisis associated with slavery as a perverse mode of mechanical reproduction, one in which the human had been turned into chattel.82 In short, the painters of slave masters would deploy the aura of blackness to defeat the logic driving dehumanized labor. And it is at this juncture—at the point where the auratic black body marks the absence of plantation labor within the frame of the picture but also calls attention to its transcendental presence as what enables the dreams of the masters—that violence becomes an essential counterpart to the work of art.

  5

  Violence was, of course, the dominant theme in the literature on slavery. Indeed, the perverse and systematic nature of the violence intended to enforce enslavement and subjection would appear to have acquired an aesthetic character of its own.83 From the crude yokes that constituted the coffle in Africa as witnessed by Mungo Park and Rene Claude Geoffroy de Villeneuve in Africa in the 1780s and 1790s, to the iron shackles that now grace our exhibit museums, the act of enslavement conditioned the emergence and perfection of modes of subjugation.84 Instruments of torture became works of art. As Marcus Wood has elaborately shown in Blind Memory, slavery, torture, and art went hand in hand.85 The questions I want to raise in this section will focus on the direct relation between violence and what one may call the guilty pleasures of slavery and the modes of identity it generated: How did the violence that enabled and enforced enslavement become transformed into art itself? Was aesthetic pleasure possible in the scene of the horror that was slavery? Did the violence that was attendant to enslavement present any dangers to the slave owner's identity as a modern subject?

  These are vexed questions for a number of reason
s. For one, people involved in the slave trade, from agents to owners, tended to approach the task of enslavement as just another form of exchange in a world that considered trade to be part of good social relationships. John Newton, for example, saw the purchase and packaging of African slaves as a most ordinary and banal commercial transaction, where bags of rice and hog skins of rum intermixed with bodies of black men, women, and children. The entries from his journal denote this banality with frightening meticulousness:

  Saturday 23rd February. At 3 a.m. the yaul came on board, brought 4 slaves, 1 girl, 2 boys and an old woman. At daylight took the remaining goods out of her, pulled down her quarter deck and wash boards and fitted her with 6 oars to tend the ship. At 10 Mr Tucker came on board. Sent the yaul in shoar, brought of Joseph Tucker with a girl (4 foot) and a boy (3 foot 9 inches), bought them and sent the goods on shoar in the yaul in the afternoon. Received of Mr Harry a tooth, weight 37 lbs, on account. Buryed a man slave (No. 33), having been a fortnight ill of a flux, which has baffled all our medicines. Put more goods and provisions in the longboat and sent her away in the evening for St Pauls, there being some encouragement there, and the Kittam trade seems quite exhausted.86

  Here we have an early example of what Hannah Arendt, in a different context, has called the banality of evil.87