Cliff Joseph (1922-2020):
Southern Comfort
Flipping the Script
The familiar patriotic song, Yankee Doodle, was actually written by a British surgeon named Richard Shuckburgh before the American Revolution (around 1755) while campaigning in Rensselaer, New York. It was sung by the British officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial “Yankees” with whom they served in the French and Indian War. The British saw the American soldier as a simpleton who believed they could be stylish if they merely stuck a feather in their cap. By 1775, the feud came to a head, when 700 British soldiers marched out of Boston on a mission to seize weapons and ammunition they believed was hidden around the countryside by the Americans. Two colonial spies, Paul Revere and William Dawes, rode out to call the alarm that the British were coming. Reports say that along the route, British fifers and drummers teased the colonists by playing Yankee Doodle. American Minutemen were spread throughout the countryside, and in the town of Lexington, a confrontation occurred, leaving eight Americans fatally wounded. The British Army began to march back to the safety of Boston, but the Americans, using “guerrilla warfare” tactics (fighting in small groups or singularly, and using the geography to their advantage, hiding behind trees and rock walls) enjoyed surprising success against the rigid columns of marching British soldiers. In a reversal of fate, and the beginning of the American Revolution, the Americans seized ownership of the song, Yankee Doodle, and began singing it loudly at the British. The song became the unofficial anthem for the American Continental Army for the duration of the revolution. As Kevin Swalby of The Heavy sings, How You Like Me Now?
“Contemporary artists utilize the appropriation of the Confederate flag in various ways, but consistently with a sense of empowerment. By taking ownership of the image rather than avoiding it or hiding from it, they overcome the symbolism. ”
Sonya Clark, a fiber artist and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, recently staged her performance art piece, Unraveling (2015), in several museum venues, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and the Speed Museum in Louisville, KY. The project involves literally unraveling a woven Confederate flag by hand. The artist invites members of the audience to assist her.
In 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a guest speaker at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. His purpose was to encourage Blacks to register to vote. Before him, Booker T. Washington spoke there in 1909. On June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist shot and killed nine people inside the church in an act of racism and hatred. After the killings, Stereo Williams addressed in a blog post for The Daily Beast some of the issues being discussed throughout the country regarding certain aspects of Southern white culture, specifically the continued flying of the Confederate flag at the state capitol in South Carolina. He also addressed the current appropriation of the flag by black rappers, citing examples: OutKast’s Andre 3000 wore a Confederate flag emblem on his belt buckle in the video for Ms. Jackson; Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz featured the rapper draped in the Confederate flag on their album cover for Put Yo Hood Up; and Ludacris performed his hit, Georgia at the VIBE Awards wearing a Confederate flag outfit. He points to Kanye West wearing a jacket of his own design and a line of couture he offered bearing Confederate flag motifs.
Williams cited Ludacris’ explanation:
Racism is just as prevalent now, and if we are not constantly mindful of our history and take charge of it, history is destined to repeat itself because of ignorance. In order to move forward, we must never forget where we were. I hope people continue to question and challenge authority, media, and themselves because questioning and challenging can only lead to enlightenment.
Cliff Joseph executed two well-known paintings utilizing the symbolism of the Confederate flag: Southern Comfort (1965) and The Superman (1966); the latter is now in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art. The subject matter of these works serves as both a reminder, as suggested by Ludicris, and a throwing it back in your face as the revolutionaries did with Yankee Doodle. Ironically, The Superman was part of an exhibition themed around criticism of The Whitney and now finds its home at The Whitney. To its credit, the museum had the courage to own its past shortcomings and assume an active role in furthering the artist’s message.
Southern Comfort is the sole remaining work available by Cliff Joseph to address this meaningful topic.
Lot 119, Southern Comfort, 1965
oil on board
16 x 16 inches
Signed and dated
Literature:
Stromberg, Robert, "Artist Finds Black Beautiful", The Jersey Journal, Jan. 8, 1969.
"Cliff Joseph: Artist and Activist", Thom Pegg, 2018. pp. 28-31.https://blackartauction.squarespace.com/cliff-joseph
Cederholm, Theresa Dickason. "Cliff Joseph."
Afro-American Artists; a Bio-bibliographical Directory, 161. Boston: Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1973.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. (1936). Lint Shaw, killed by a mob near Royston, Georgia
It has been debated whether depictions of lynchings in art create or exacerbate racial hatred. Editors of The Crisis (Feb, 1937) discussed readers’ letters in response to a published picture of the lynching of Lint Shaw at Royston, Georgia (April, 1936), and the general opinion of the readers was that it did. The magazine’s stance was the opposite, declaring, “very often the sheer horror of lynching serves to rouse ordinarily lethargic people into action.” The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Afro-American regularly illustrated both photographs and cartoons of lynchings using various strategies to denounce the crime.
The prominent imagery in Southern Comfort, however, is not the lynching, but the central abstract compositional element in the foreground, namely the cross of the Confederate flag and the hooded icons substituting for stars. The flag depicted by Joseph is the Second National Flag of the Confederacy, also known as the Stainless Banner, used from May of 1863- March of 1865. This flag is square, with a red field, a wide blue saltire (St. Andrew’s Cross), bordered in white and thirteen mullets, or five-pointed stars representing the number of Confederate states.
The perpetrators of this crime have no power as individuals without the support of institutional racism, symbolized by the Confederate flag. Their faces are cartoon ghouls, owning no human identity. Anonymity is vital to their success and that is maintained only by the tolerance of institutional racism. People do not fear “Joe” or “Bob”; they fear faceless symbols that appear to be greater than human, and those symbols, such as a flag or a white triangular hood have only the power which is allowed them—thus, the “comfort” alluded to in the title is a sham.
The Superman
1966; oil and mixed media (pennies) on board, 48” x 24”, signed and dated.
Exhibited: Afro American Artists New York and Boston, The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, The Museum of Fine Arts, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, May 19-June 23, 1970
Counter Currents: The New Humanism, The Humanist Center at Aida Hernandez Gallery, NY, 1974
Rebuttal to Whitney Museum Exhibition, Acts of Art Gallery, NY, 1971 (illustrated)
Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, NY, 2018
Black Artists in America: From the Civil Rights to the Bicentennial, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN, Oct 22, 2023 - Jan 14, 2024; (illustrated p. 57).
Illustrated: Stromberg, Robert. “Artist Finds Black Beautiful.” The Jersey Journal, 8 Jan. 1969.
Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
“In the years leading to the US Bicentennial (1976), (Dana) Chandler, Joseph, Charles White (1918-1979), Ringgold, Hammons, and many other black artists pursued similarly politicized representations of the American flag. As Ringgold remarked, ‘The flag is the only truly subversive and revolutionary abstraction one can paint.’”
Gordon Parks (1912-2006), American Gothic (Ella Watson), 1942 (printed 1980); silver print.
Grant Wood (1891-1942), American Gothic, 1930; Collection of Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, 1930.934.
Superman is an important image for Joseph. It was the work he chose to include in the Rebuttal to Whitney Exhibition in 1971. It is a difficult image for most people: the spectral figure of a Klansman and his props: a cross, matches and gasoline; a whip, shackles, his sheet and a gun. He stands before the Confederate flag on top, with the stars constructed of abstracted hooded figures, and the American flag on the bottom, upside down. The stars of this flag made of Lincoln pennies glued on to the surface and painted white, each (also) upside down.
The composition is remarkably similar to Gordon Parks’ photograph from 1942, American Gothic, Washington, D.C. Parks was given a fellowship by the FSA to document black lives in the region, and photographed government cleaning woman, Ella Watson. Parks took the image to his supervisor, Roy Stryker, who “told me I’d gotten the right idea but was going to get all the FSA photogs fired, that my image of Ella was ‘an indictment of America.’ Parks’ image was done as a parody of Grant Wood’s famous painting from 1930, American Gothic , and Joseph’s Superman acknowledges both earlier works, and was without a doubt, “an indictment of America.”