Death is a statue by Isamu Noguchi, depicting a dead body of a person who had been lynched, inspired by the 1930 lynching of George Hughes in Texas. The almost life-sized statue was exhibited at one of two 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions, where its bad and overtly racist reception caused its creator to change career direction. [1]
The statue was a 3-foot (0.91 m) high monel metal sculpture of a lynched man, hung via a rope with a noose from a metal mount, a slightly smaller than life-sized depiction of a body of a man who had been hanged and then his body burned. [2] [3] The arms and legs had been contorted as though the ligaments had contracted as a result of fire. [2] Before making it, Noguchi had seen a picture of the body after the lynching of George Hughes in 1930, which had been widely published in the northern Black press. [4]
Noguchi presented it in the first of the 1935 exhibitions (the NAACP one), having removed it from his solo exhibition at the Marie Harriman Gallery. [4] Despite having smoothed over details of the body to give it a more abstract form, it was one of several items whose gruesome realism reviewers of the NAACP exhibition found shocking. [5] Indeed, it was particularly singled out for its grisly realism by reviewers, criticized (for example) for "aesthetic opportunism", and as "macabre" and "bizarre" by ARTnews . [6] Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times considered it disastrously realistic, evoking extreme horror at the agony of a lynching, and more sensational than of actual artistic value. [6] The reviewer for The Christian Century put it more mildly, saying that if the purpose of art was to magnify its materials, then Death "hits the mark" and "intensifies the horror of a lynching". [6]
Comments by The New York Sun critic Henry McBride were deemed overtly racist. [7] Previously a supporter of Noguchi, McBride had occasionally used descriptions such as "wily" and "semi-oriental" for him, but for Death he was more direct, saying that "this gruesome study of a lynching with a contorted figure dangling from an actual rope, may be like a photograph from which it was made, but as a work of art it is a little Japanese mistake". [7] [8] Noguchi was being viewed as an "outsider", who was not permitted to comment on United States barbarisms. [7] In immediate response to this Noguchi removed it from the NAACP exhibition on its fourth day and instead displayed it at the Artists' Union exhibition. [9]
In his autobiography written 30 years later, Noguchi cited this as in part why he stopped exhibiting in galleries and took to designing stage sets instead. [7]
Bride of Frankenstein is a 1935 American science fiction horror film, and the first sequel to Universal Pictures' 1931 film Frankenstein. As with the first film, Bride of Frankenstein was directed by James Whale starring Boris Karloff as the Monster and Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein. The sequel features Elsa Lanchester in the dual role of Mary Shelley and the bride. Colin Clive reprises his role as Henry Frankenstein, and Ernest Thesiger plays the role of Doctor Septimus Pretorius. Oliver Peters Heggie plays the role of the old blind hermit.
Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
The Haniwa are terracotta clay figures that were made for ritual use and buried with the dead as funerary objects during the Kofun period of the history of Japan. Haniwa were created according to the wazumi technique, in which mounds of coiled clay were built up to shape the figure, layer by layer. Haniwa can also refer to offering cylinders, not the clay sculptures on top of them as well as the "wooden haniwa" found in Kofun tumuli.
Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.
Jesse Washington was a seventeen-year-old African American farmhand who was lynched in the county seat of Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916, in what became a well-known example of lynching. Washington was convicted of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in rural Robinson, Texas. He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. He was then paraded through the street, all while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco's city hall.
Dorothy Hale was an American socialite and aspiring actress who died by jumping off of the Hampshire House building in New York City. Her husband's death, followed by several unsuccessful relationships, had left her financially dependent on her wealthy friends. The artist Frida Kahlo created a famous painting commissioned by Clare Boothe Luce, titled The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hazel "Hayes" Turner and his wife, Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.
The Leonardo da Vinci Art School was an art school founded in New York City (1923–1942), whose most famous student was Isamu Noguchi and whose director was sculptor and poet Onorio Ruotolo.
Laura and L. D. Nelson were an African-American mother and son who were lynched on May 25, 1911, near Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. They had been seized from their cells in the Okemah county jail the night before by a group of up to 40 white men, reportedly including Charley Guthrie, father of the folk singer Woody Guthrie. The Associated Press reported that Laura was raped. She and L. D. were then hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. According to one source, Laura had a baby with her who survived the attack.
The anti-lynching movement was an organized political movement in the United States that aimed to eradicate the practice of lynching. Lynching was used as a tool to repress African Americans. The anti-lynching movement reached its height between the 1890s and 1930s. The first recorded lynching in the United States was in 1835 in St. Louis, when an accused killer of a deputy sheriff was captured while being taken to jail. The black man named Macintosh was chained to a tree and burned to death. The movement was composed mainly of African Americans who tried to persuade politicians to put an end to the practice, but after the failure of this strategy, they pushed for anti-lynching legislation. African-American women helped in the formation of the movement, and a large part of the movement was composed of women's organizations.
Hideo Noda, also known as Hideo Benjamin Noda and Benjamin Hideo Noda, was a Japanese-American modernist painter and muralist, member of the Shinseisakuha movement in Japan, student of Arnold Blanch, and uncle of Japanese printmaker Tetsuya Noda, as well as alleged communist spy recruited by Whittaker Chambers.
Saburō Hasegawa was a Japanese-born American calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher. He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.
A lynching postcard is a postcard bearing the photograph of a lynching—a vigilante murder usually motivated by racial hatred—intended to be distributed, collected, or kept as a souvenir. Often a lynching postcard would be inscribed with racist text or poems. Lynching postcards were in widespread production for more than fifty years in the United States; although their distribution through the United States Postal Service was banned in 1908.
James Harvey and Joe Jordan were two African-American men who were lynched on July 1, 1922, in Liberty County, Georgia, United States. They were seized by a mob of about 50 people and hanged while being transported by police from Wayne County to a jail in Savannah. Investigations by the NAACP showed that the police involved were complicit in their abduction by the mob. Twenty-two men were later indicted for the lynching, with four convicted.
The Law Is Too Slow is a 1923 lithograph by American artist George Bellows (1882–1925), depicting the victim of a racist lynching. Originally commissioned to illustrate an anti-lynching story by Mary Johnston, the image came to be used by publications and organizations including the NAACP to advocate against lynching, and for federal anti-lynching legislation.
This Is Her First Lynching is a 1934 anti-lynching editorial cartoon by American artist Reginald Marsh. It shows a white crowd attending a lynching; a woman in the crowd has a young child on her shoulders, and says to her neighbor, "This is her first lynching". The cartoon was shown in one of two 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions that aimed to support anti-lynching legislation. Scholars regard it as showing a young white girl's initiation in a communal process of racist violence.
The 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions were two separate but consecutive art exhibitions held in early 1935 by two different organizations, both in response to a 1934 bill in the United States Congress that dealt with lynching. The organizations involved were the NAACP and the Artists Union, the latter in conjunction with groups including the John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Labor Defense.
The lynching of George Hughes, which led to what is called the Sherman Riot, took place in Sherman, Texas, in 1930. An African-American man accused of rape and who was tried in court died on May 9 when the Grayson County Courthouse was set on fire by a White mob, who subsequently burned and looted local Black-owned businesses. Martial law was declared on May 10, but by that time many of Sherman's Black-owned businesses had been burnt to the ground. Thirty-nine people were arrested, eight of whom were charged, and later, a grand jury indicted 14 men, none for lynching. By October 1931, one man received a short prison term for arson and inciting a riot. The outbreak of violence was followed by two more lynchings in Texas, one in Oklahoma, and several lynching attempts.
Aaron Goodelman was an American sculptor. He graduated from art school in Odessa, fleeing Eastern Europe for the United States in 1904 because of antisemitic violence.. He attended a number of major art schools in New York and Paris, and at the outbreak of World War I returned to New York and became a sculptor there. He joined the Communist Party, and took part in an important exhibition denouncing the lynching of African Americans. Following World War II, he began to make art related to the Holocaust, and taught art at City College of New York.
Norris Dendy was an African-American man who was taken from his jail cell and lynched by a group of white men in Clinton, South Carolina. The son of Martha and Young Dendy, Norris was college-educated and married with five children at the time of his murder.