Bill Traylor: American Artist

“No movements. Only artists,” the late art historian Eugene Goossen always insisted. It was his way of calling attention to the dangers of relying on generalizations and neat categories to come to terms with works of art, instead of paying attention to the special, perhaps unclassifiable qualities of the things made by special, perhaps unclassifiable individuals. It is particularly helpful to keep Goossen’s admonition in mind when we think about self-taught artists. Because these gifted but unschooled men and women came to art-making by “unofficial” paths, their work, by its very nature, stands apart from established groupings or art historical movements. Certainly it resists being categorized in any predictable way. The labels most often used in the recent past for their efforts, such as “folk art” or “outsider art,” with their faint odor of condescension, today seem less and less appropriate, even inaccurate. The increasingly common terms “vernacular art” or “self-taught art” at least have the virtue of seeming more like an effort to describe than to judge.

However we choose to name it, the best work made by these artists requires neither special categories nor special pleading. If it is powerful enough, it demands that we confront it simply as art, without any qualifiers—solely as something eloquent and expressive made by singularly gifted men and women. Period. Over the past century and a half, modernist artists, who more or less abandoned illusionistic form and space in favor of expressive simplifications and exaggerations, helped make it possible to value highly works of art that depended for their impact not on conventional skills but on sheer inventiveness and intensity of feeling; with eyes trained by modernism, we now admire African and Oceanic carvings, which were once seen as ethnic curiosities or termed “primitive.” The early supporters of modernist art took the work of self-taught artists from Henri Rousseau to the African-American visionary sculptor William Edmondson very seriously. They collected it and exhibited it in progressive institutions—in 1936, Edmondson became the first African-American to have a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art—but more recently, the vernacular art of the self-taught has been relegated to an isolated category. That this attitude is gradually disappearing is attested to by today’s long overdue but burgeoning movement among enlightened art world professionals to integrate the work of outstanding self-taught, vernacular artists with that of their trained peers, in exhibitions or museum installations, or, what is even more encouraging, in this country, to treat the work of outstanding self-taught, vernacular artists simply as part of the complex, multifaceted history of American art.

Yet it would be disingenuous to say that the circumstances of some of the most acclaimed self-taught artists, such as the African-American draftsman Bill Traylor, are not part of their work’s allure. There’s no question that Traylor’s best drawings can hold their own with the efforts of the majority of his trained modernist peers. His concisely presented figures, animals, and emblematic, multi-character images compel our attention because of their inventive compositions, their eloquent, essential shapes, and their pared-down but wholly convincing characterizations. Yet even though Traylor’s drawings can be enjoyed entirely for their formal excellences, it’s impossible to deny that knowing something of the artist’s history makes those formal excellences all the more impressive. Traylor (1854–1949) was born a slave in rural Alabama and worked most of his adult life as a sharecropper. About 1936, in his 80s and nearly destitute, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he lived mainly on the street, sleeping in the back room of a funeral parlor and, during the day, drawing images of his recollections on scavenged scraps of paper. Traylor was “discovered” and befriended in 1939 by a young, white artist, Charles Shannon, who began to supply his newfound colleague with paper and other supplies. Shannon also established a kind of cultural center in Montgomery where the first exhibition of Traylor’s work—about a hundred drawings—was held in February 1940. In 1942, the director of education...