“Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist,” a wildly uneven exhibition devoted to the African-American painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981), is bookended by two Major Statements, pictures strong in tenor if different in focus. Upon entering the retrospective, viewers encounter Self-Portrait (Myself at Work) (1933), a take-it-or-leave-it avowal of artistic purpose. Motley faces us holding in his left hand a palette imbued with an otherworldly purple and in his right a brush that conjures forth a nude woman from a canvas. The composition is compartmentalized and clear: a crucifix hangs on the back wall; a neoclassical sculpture is placed next to the painter’s palette; and, hanging from a window is a grotesque profile bust similar to those seen in Leonardo’s sketchbooks. With movie-star good looks and unflinching gaze, Motley is every inch the bohemian. This may have been a pose—an adjacent self-portrait depicts a stodgier personage—but the resulting picture radiates authority.
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The conclusion of “Jazz Age Modernist” is The First One Hundred Years, a canvas begun around 1963 and completed in 1972. Good luck getting a look at it. The days I attended the show, there was a logjam of viewers around the painting. Who can blame them for taking their
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