The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light

By Rachel Berenson Perry

A biography of the artist and first African American man to become a professional conservator for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Felrath Hines was born in 1913 and raised in the segregated Midwest after his parents left the South to find a better life in Indianapolis. While growing up, he was encouraged by his seamstress mother to pursue his early passion for art by taking Saturday classes at Herron Art Institute. In 1937, he moved to Chicago, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago in hopes of making his dreams a reality.

The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light chronicles the life of this exceptional artist who overcame numerous obstacles throughout his career and refused to be pigeonholed because of his race. Rachel Berenson Perry tracks Hines’s determination and success as a contemporary artist on his own terms. She explores his life in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s, where he created a close friendship with jazz musician Billy Strayhorn and participated in the African American Spiral Group of New York and the equal rights movement. Hines’s relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, as her private paintings restorer, and a lifetime of creating increasingly esteemed Modernist artwork, are part of the story of one man’s remarkable journey in twentieth-century America.

Featuring exquisite color photographs, The Life and Art of Felrath Hines explores his life, work, and significance as an artist and as an art conservator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253037329

Book preview

the life and art of

FELRATH HINES

the life and art of

FELRATH HINES

from dark to light

Rachel Berenson Perry

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS | INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Indiana Historical Society

© 2018 by Rachel Berenson Perry

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Perry, Rachel Berenson, author.

Title: The life and art of Felrath Hines : from dark to light / Rachel Berenson Perry.

Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press : Indiana Historical Society, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021722 (print) | LCCN 2018022077 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253037336 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253037312 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Hines, Felrath, 1913–1993. | Painters—United States—Biography. | African American painters—Biography.

Classification: LCC ND237.H633 (ebook) | LCC ND237. H633 P47 2018 (print) | DDC 759.13 [B] —dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021722

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donors

Heartfelt thanks to the following donors for supporting this project:

Patrons

Doctor Steven Conant

Dorothy C. Fisher, Holly Sanford, and Charlotte Sanford Mason

Sponsors

Eckert and Ross Fine Art

The Honorable Clayton A. Graham and Christine Garrott Krok

Jim Fuller and Ken Cornette

Suzanne Jenkins

Kevin and Rhonda Waltz

Donors

John Antonelli

Mark and Nancy Ruschman

Chris and Ann Stack

Bret Waller and Mary Lou Dooley Waller

Rosamond W. Westmoreland

To Dorothy C. Fisher

contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: A SENSE OF WONDERMENT: THE ABSTRACT PAINTINGS OF FELRATH HINES BY JENNIFER McCOMAS

1 | PIVOTAL DECISION: NEW YORK CITY, 1946–1959

2 | BACK TO BEGINNING: INDIANAPOLIS, 1913–1937

3 | GETTING THE SPARK: CHICAGO, 1937–1946

4 | BECOMING A CONSERVATOR: NEW YORK CITY, 1960–1965

5 | SPIRAL AND BLACK ART: NEW YORK CITY, 1965–1971

6 | COMING INTO HIS OWN: CHIEF CONSERVATOR AND WORKING ARTIST, WASHINGTON, DC, 1972–1980

7 | FULL-TIME PAINTER: WASHINGTON, DC, 1980–1993

8 | LIFE AFTER DEATH: 1993–2017

EPILOGUE: PERSPECTIVES ON FELRATH HINES BY FLOYD COLEMAN WITH JULIE L. MCGEE

PLATES

Notes

Appendix 1: Chronology

Appendix 2: Felrath Hines CV

Index

foreword

Rachel Berenson Perry

I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF PAINTINGS BY FELRATH Hines in 2003, when I became the fine arts curator for the Indiana State Museum. One of Hines’s mature paintings, Arctic (1986) (see insert, plate 01), had been donated to the museum’s permanent collection the previous year. The more I looked at the asymmetrical painting of pale blue and gray shapes, the more intriguing it became. A trapezoid outlined in white and halved by subtle shades of ash, appears to lead into a squared-off chute. Cold stillness, suggested by the title, brings to mind an ice jam. Every decision in the composition, from the trapezoid points that project off canvas, to the unexpected asymmetry of every shape, reveals precise yet playful consideration.

Six years later, in 2009, then Indianapolis gallery owner Mark Ruschman put me in touch with Dorothy Fisher, Hines’s widow. Dorothy was in the process of dispersing her deceased husband’s work to selected public institutions throughout the nation. Impressed by the quality inventory, well organized into digital images accompanied by exhibition information, I was thrilled to be able to select five large oil paintings for the museum: Quarry (1952), Moon Craig AKA Trinity (1958), The Wave (1961), Focus (1982), and Northern Light (1983).

In my brief correspondence with Dorothy, the intriguing idea of writing a biography of Felrath Hines came up. At the time I was covered up—writing a book, T. C. Steele and the Society of Western Artists, for Indiana University Press; working full time (which involved a three-hour commute); and caring for my elderly mother.

Fast forward to 2013. Retired from the ISM, I had written and published a biography of William J. Forsyth, among other projects. While reviewing old notes in search of a new project, I became so enthused about the idea of writing a book about Hines that I wrote a letter to Dorothy, hoping her address was still accurate. She called within three days.

Writing a biography about Hines (or Fel, as he was known by colleagues and friends) involved copious research (with a lot of help from family and dedicated Fel fan and researcher, Suzanne Jenkins) and steep learning curves. A very private person, Hines did not talk about his personal life to many, and he never wrote about it. Although he carefully documented conservation projects, and kept painstaking notes about oil colors and compositions during his painting process, he was not interested in recording the trials and tribulations of his personal journey.

Howard University art historian and artist Floyd Coleman interviewed Hines for many hours during the last two years of his life, and he mentioned to me that the amount of time Fel spent talking about himself (and not about art or his paintings) added up to about half an hour. Tapes of those interviews were subsequently lost, most acquaintances (particularly those from his early days in New York) are gone, and the artist seldom wrote (or saved) letters. What remained were some family anecdotes, detailed reference notebooks of exhibition reviews and relevant newspaper articles (compiled by Jenkins and later augmented by stepdaughters Holly Sanford and Charlotte Mason), and the undeniably significant body of Hines’s artwork in public and private collections.

Though an art curator by profession, my area of expertise—the impressionistic paintings of early twentieth-century Hoosier Group artists—hardly qualified me to write about abstract artwork. More of a public historian, I have always been wary of formulating art-history theory. I had assured Coleman, who had been working on an art history treatise about Hines for many years, that I was primarily interested in writing a biography.

Added to the dearth of personal information about Hines was the elephant in the room—the fact that I am a senior white woman writing about a black man’s life. The comment of Indianapolis Crispus Attucks Museum curator, Robert Chester—What can you possibly have to say about the black experience?—offended me at first. Later it became clear that his question was justified. As I learned more and more about racism, white supremacy, and the still-existent apartheid America, as Coleman called our country during a 2015 interview, I slowly began to get it.

How, indeed, can a white woman, who grew up in a small Indiana town with few blacks and limited awareness of her own privileged academic upbringing, possibly imagine a life of unrelenting marginalization? Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient John Hope Franklin wrote in his autobiography, In my early years there was never a moment in any contact I had with White people that I was not reminded that society as a whole had sentenced me to abject humiliation for the sole reason that I was not white.

How could I write about the life of an African American? Reading books written in the 1950s and 1960s (such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Black Like Me, Invisible Man, Really the Blues, and Cane) and histories of African Americans (such as Black Saga: The African American Experience; Mirror on America; A Lynching in the Heartland; Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis; and Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century) filled me with overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt.

It became obvious to me that things have not improved in America. Again, Franklin noticed the difference in the 1960s and 1970s, after being abroad, that De jure racism had fallen, only to be replaced by de facto racism. The resistance to any significant modification of the age-old patterns of race relations seemed only to increase with every suggestion of real change…. The dream for blacks was always deferred. Franklin did not live to see the elections of 2016 and resulting giant step backward in race relations.

In the spring of 2017 I was in the Brown County Art Gallery near closing time, waiting for a friend who works there. A swarthy man came in with his small daughter and I welcomed them, explaining about the video showing each artist’s photograph, along with one of their paintings. We chatted and I discovered that he was Moroccan, recently hired to teach Arabic and French at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. After a few minutes, he lowered his voice and said, Do you mind if I ask you something? Is it okay for us to be here? Some people have warned us about small towns in Indiana.

A disturbing story about Hines was his late-life admission to his stepdaughter, Holly Sanford. Even after becoming well established and highly respected, he said that, in a room full of people he always felt that someone might tap him on the shoulder and ask him to leave.

After my first year of research and interviews, it became obvious that, despite his buried fears, the story of Hines is a story of a man who refused to let race define his life. He did not dwell on obstacles that were put in his way. Fel always wanted to go beyond [the margins], Coleman said. He had the attitude that he could compete with anyone—that there were no limitations on himself as an individual.

How did Hines develop this attitude? Where did he get the confidence (and generosity of spirit) to live his life to the fullest, maintaining his dignity? It could be that he was just made that way. Looking at pictures of Fel as a youth, he appeared to be the consummate eldest son—always serious, never glib—the responsible one. Perhaps he was like his friend, artist Lilian Burwell, who said, When I grew up it was taken for granted that you had to be twice as good to get half the credit. And it was not a burden. It was a fact.

Hines and his siblings were lucky—they grew up in a two-parent, two-income household, and their mother, who worked from home as a seamstress, was always there. Stories emerged about Estelle, who taught her children to just turn around and leave if ignored or scorned. She found strength in her superior talent and skills, and she never allowed her children to feel less than.

I learned about Crispus Attucks High School, where Hines graduated in 1931. In August 2016 I sat in an audience, which was super-charged with love and enthusiasm, at the film screening of Attucks: The School that Opened a City in Indianapolis’s Madame Walker Theater. I learned of the school, a source of extreme pride in the black community, which graduated such luminaries as Major General Harry W. Brooks Jr., Brigadier General Norris Overton, and opera singer Angela Brown. And I learned about the stimulating jazz scene on Indiana Avenue that Fel observed as a teenager.

In 1920s Indianapolis, where the Ku Klux Klan dominated local politics, and white supremacy was openly accepted as the norm, there were few positive events for black youths. The small triumphs for Hines, when he received praise from the adults in his life, always involved his artwork. His prize-winning soap sculpture in grade school, his scholarship to Saturday classes at the Herron Art Institute, and his art contributions to the high school yearbook, showed him a path that became the driving force for his ambitions.

Hines’s memory of painting a chair as a child, and the very strange sensation of something running down my arm as I was working the brush was the beginning of his fondness for the visceral and engaging sensation of painting. The feel of the brush intrigued him, and the calming effect of his alone time in the studio persisted throughout his life. As his painting became increasingly meditative and complex, it also centered him.

Despite Hines’s jaundiced view of Indianapolis as an adult, experiences in his formative years helped shape his outlook, including how he dealt with people and events. He made his own opportunities, as he so adamantly voiced in an interview, but he had to have the temerity to do that. Hines lived his life with head held high, doing the best that he could in every situation. He learned early on to distinguish between people as individuals, not based on color. His awareness of the continuing struggles for African Americans, and his worldview, despite his ability to ignore or rise above racial prejudices as an adult, was shaped early in his life.

One cannot come away from the story of Hines without feelings of profound respect and admiration. The argument can be made that the legacy of artwork that Hines left has nothing to do with race. To come across one of his paintings in the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery or the Indianapolis Museum of Art, one can relate to (and admire) his skillful compositions and the universal language of his work without thinking about the artist or his background.

But as an historian, I believe that Hines’s paintings reflect his personality and give us clues into his thinking. His compositions and titles, such as It’s about Time, Party’s Over, What Way the Wind, Kellylike, and Mahler, all refer to his influences and sentiments.

Burwell, during the memorial service for Hines on October 9, 1993, said, One of our favorite topics [when talking to Fel in his last year] was the importance of discovering and encouraging scholars of quality and integrity to come forth to write and document the work of serious artists of color…. To fill in and flesh out history before all that richness is lost.

Perhaps this book, with its many shortcomings, will add to that richness. The title, From Dark to Light, is from Hines’s painting in the first and only Spiral exhibition. About this choice, he said, There’s an element of hope and forward motion implied in the title. Hines somehow kept this optimism alive, as an example to us all.

It is said that everyone dies twice—once when they leave their physical body and the second time when their name is mentioned for the last time. For good artists, the second death may never occur. My hope is that the name Felrath Hines will live in perpetuity.

acknowledgments

EVERY ART BOOK BENEFITS FROM THE PARTICIPATION of many generous people who take the time and trouble to assist in research, answer questions, provide images and reproduction rights, copy and send documents, donate funds, and in many other ways proffer their support and expertise. In addition to these important resources, my research for From Dark to Light:The Life and Art of Felrath Hines also depended significantly upon more than fifty in-person interviews and/or e-mail correspondence with people who had known Hines or knew about some aspect of his life.

I am extremely grateful to all those who spoke with me about Hines; their insights greatly enhanced the story I hoped to tell. The book was a labor of love for me, and I had the impression that Hines’s friends and acquaintances talked to me because of their love and respect for him. Everyone wanted to see him get his due. These generous individuals include Jim Allen, Anne Barger, Patricia Berryhill, Kurran Bogin, Lauri Bourgeois, Wilfred Brunner, Lilian Thomas Burwell, Tom Carter, Floyd Coleman, Susan Conway, Holiday T. Day, John E. Dowell Jr., David Driskell, Katherine G. Eirk, Dorothy Fisher, Jacqueline Francis, Jon D. Freshour, Warner Friedman, Emmett R. Griffin Jr., Eleanor (Harmony) Hines, John Himmelfarb, Donna Hughes, Ella Motley Jackson, Robert Jackson, Cyrisse Jaffee, Anna Jaffee, Michael Jeffries, Suzanne Jenkins, Joyce Jewell, JoAnn Jones, Franko Khoury, Charlotte S. Mason, Philip Mason, Richard Mayhew, Julie McGee, Charles Millard, David Miller, Claire Munzenrider, Frank Ozereko, Erika D. Passantino, Harold Francis (Bud) Pfister, Jean Portell, Jock Reynolds, Thomas Howard Ridley Jr., Sue Sack, Holly Sanford, Donna Spicer, Ellen B. Stavitsky, Susan Stedman, Constance Taylor, Ellen Frances Tuchman, Deborah Velders, Jean Volkmer, Harriet Warkle, Rosamond (Roz) Westmoreland, David Williams, and Earl Zubkoff. Columbia University professor David Hajdu kindly shared his 1993 interview transcripts with Hines, initiated for his book, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn.

Hines’s wife, Dorothy C. Fisher, and her family went beyond all reasonable expectations to aid the project in every way possible. Dorothy, her daughters, Holly Sanford and Charlotte (Toddy) Mason, and Toddy’s husband, Philip Mason, all put up with my periodic Brookline invasions, offering access to family archives, allowing photography of their paintings, lending a high-resolution scanner, sharing memories and advice, and providing luxurious bed-and-breakfast accommodations (not the least of which was a life-giving post-Thanksgiving turkey/parsnip soup).

A formidable amount of research and documentation had already taken place when I began this project. Retired Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery registrar Suzanne Jenkins (who had worked with Hines and became his friend) had inventoried and organized all extant studio paintings and had also researched and written a detailed chronology of Hines’s life for the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s 1995 solo Hines exhibition. A bound accumulation of references, including copies of all exhibition reviews and relevant articles, had been compiled by Jenkins, and a subsequent addendum has been kept current by Holly Sanford. Jenkins continued to be my research angel, uncovering essential particulars, discovering relatives of Hines’s key acquaintances (many of them deceased), undertaking copious genealogical research, discussing manuscript progress and racial attitudes, and serving as a steadfast cheerleader.

When first beginning this project, I solicited and received encouragement and advice (which I did not always follow) from Eric Sandweiss, Nancy Hiller, and James Madison, who also read a draft chapter and gently made excellent suggestions. I also extend thanks to Janet Berry Hess, author of The Art of Richard Mayhew, who helped me locate Mayhew; Jane Creveling Devoe, who put me in touch with documentary filmmaker extraordinaire, Ted Green; and Green for sharing resources, providing encouragement, and introducing me to Ella Jackson and her family; Wendy Greenhouse, who kindly sent obscure records from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson Library; David Brent Johnson, jazz expert at WFIU, who met with me to discuss Indiana jazz; and Warren and Julie Payne for ancestral research help. Thanks also to Sarah Jacobi at Indiana University Press for shepherding my book proposal; Ray Boomhower, senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press, for consistently encouraging and supporting my projects; Chris Krok for her unwavering support and excellent fund-raising advice; and Ashley Runyon at IU Press for her patient help with my various requests. Floyd Coleman, art history professor emeritus at Howard University and a Hines expert, and Julie L. McGee, associate professor of Black American Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware, both helped me to get an idea of the enormity of this endeavor, and encouraged its completion. My personal editor, Linda Baden, retired editor from the Eskenazi (IU) Museum of Art, provided her invaluable expertise in manuscript cleanup, making brilliant and insightful suggestions. I am indebted to Jenny McComas, curator of European and American Art at the Eskenazi Museum, who wrote a perceptive essay that adds art historical heft to the biography.

I owe thanks to several Indianapolis art collectors for allowing me to invade their space to view and talk about Hines’s paintings, including Claudia Chavis, Michael Moriarty, DeAnne Roth, Ann Stack, Bret and Mary Lou Dooley Waller, and Anna and James White. Mark Ruschman, chief fine arts curator at the Indiana State Museum, has provided considerable help and encouragement, not the least of which is his knowledge and expertise about Hines’s work.

Of course, projects like this would not be possible without the generous funding support of many Hines enthusiasts, who are acknowledged with much gratitude on the donor page.

Many others accommodated my requests in numerous ways. Thank you to Wilma Moore, Indiana Historical Society William Henry Smith Memorial Library senior archivist of African American History; Valerie Oliver, senior curator at Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas; Alison Clemens, archivist at Beinecke Library, Yale University; Tori Duggan, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center associate; Robert Chester, Crispus Attucks Museum curator; Craig Pfannkuche and Frank Carlson of the Chicago and North Western Historical Society; Alison Hinderliter, Newberry Library, manuscripts and archives librarian, modern manuscripts section; Alexandra Reigle, Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery reference librarian; Heidi Stover, archives technician at Smithsonian Institution Archives; Vanessa Thaxton-Ward, Hampton University Art Museum director; Glory June Greiff, Civilian Conservation Corp expert and researcher; Adam Torres, School of the Art Institute of Chicago assistant director of registration and records; Donna Noelken, National Archives archivist specialist; Samantha Norling, Indianapolis Museum of Art Library archivist; Brett Dion, Brooklyn Historical Society Oral History Project archivist; Dorit Yaron, David C. Driskell Center deputy director; Natalia de Campos, Emma Amos Studio manager; Carolyn Cruthirds, Boston Museum of Fine Arts coordinator of image licensing; Leah Reeder, registrar, and Sachi Yanari, curator of prints and drawings, at the Fort Wayne Museum of Fine Arts; Meredith McGovern, fine arts collection manager, and Kisha Tandy, assistant curator of social history, at the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites; Kim H. Hanninen, Dennos Museum Center registrar; Riche Sorensen, Smithsonian American Art Museum rights and reproductions coordinator; Allison Nicks, Delaware Art Museum rights and reproductions manager; Lee Nisbet, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University associate registrar; Robbi Siegel, Art Resources Inc., research/permissions associate; Anne Young, manager of rights and reproductions, and Annette Schlagenhauff, curator of special projects, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Scott Hankins, Ackland Art Museum University of North Carolina registrar; Colleen Hollister, Baltimore Museum of Art image services and rights coordinator, and anyone whose names I may have overlooked! I’m grateful to Steve Happe, Indiana State Museum photographer, and Massachusetts photographer Steve Gyurina for their impeccable work.

No extended endeavor is accomplished without the love and support of friends and family with whom one interacts regularly. My longtime soul mate, Bill Weaver, scanned slides, digitalized videos and tapes, and listened to my frustrations. Dear friends Kris Iltis and Karen Cooper closely monitored my progress with interest, periodically offering perspective and sage advice. Doctor Steven Conant and John Antonelli provided moral support at crucial intervals. My brother, David J. Perry, jumped on board at the very beginning, and twice accompanied me to Boston, boosting my confidence and resolve to keep my eye on the prize.

Rachel Berenson Perry

the life and art of

FELRATH HINES

introduction

A Sense of Wonderment | The Abstract Paintings of Felrath Hines

Jennifer McComas

"LYRICAL, GLOWING, MEDITATIVE, AND JOYOUS" ARE JUST some of the superlatives that have been used to describe the geometric abstractions Felrath Hines painted during the last two decades of his career.¹ While we often associate geometry with logic and clarity, curator Jorge Daniel Veneciano