Muscle, Soul, and Vision

In politics, the activist artist Charles White (1918–79) was a revolutionary. His subject matter was radical. But his style was retrograde—figurative in a premodernist, representational mode. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective, on display through June 9, features roughly 100 drawings, paintings, and prints that demonstrate why the content of White’s art is still disruptive to the status quo and why his tour de force realist technique makes him one of the finest draftsmen America has ever produced.

This first major exhibition of White’s work in more than 30 years is long overdue. Installed chronologically, tracing White’s journey from Chicago to New York City to Los Angeles, the works have a coherent trajectory even as they show White’s technique evolving from overt accessibility to covert ambiguity. What remains the same throughout his transit from stylized realism to naturalistic realism to what might be called mysterious realism is White’s commitment to social justice.

An African American whose life spanned the Jim Crow era and the civil rights upheavals, White experienced plenty of racial discrimination firsthand. Art school administrators rescinded scholarships when they learned his race. In 1940s New Orleans, he was beaten when