John Thomas Biggers (1924-2001)
1983
conte crayon on paper
27 x 22-1/2 inches
signed; signed, titled and dated verso, with small artist's tag
Provenance: the artist to a significant private collection, Chicago, IL
$30,000-50,000
Olive Jensen Theisen, in her book, A Life on Paper, The Drawings and Lithographs of John Thomas Biggers (2006), includes a chapter titled, Developing and Integrating the Iconography: 1974-1983, and tells us that at this point in his career, the artist was “on a quest to integrate his understanding of African mythology and art with his life as a black Southern male of the mid-twentieth century.”
Biggers’ imagery always began with drawing; whether it eventually manifested itself as a lithograph or a giant public mural, it always began with a drawn design—and many times the drawing was also the completed form of the concept. He began his mural Family Unity for the student center at Texas Southern University in 1974, and that project marked a stylistic change to his work. Upper Room was the first drawing he completed for the project, and that image begins to reveal the geometric abstraction which was to soon dominate his work. By the second drawing, Holy Family, his concern with both geometry and symmetry was obvious.
Theisen writes,
“Biggers reduced the family to its simplest, most essential geometric forms.”
His new approach was heavily influenced by African sculptural forms, and his message was conveyed in symbolism rather than narration.
Biggers completed a series of works, including different versions of Holy Family, with a common idea and composition: House My Father Built, Holy Child, Star Gazers, and Family Ark. He created a lithograph based on this image, sharing the title, Holy Family.
Born in North Carolina in 1924, John Biggers’ body of work experienced a constant evolution throughout his career. He was an accomplished draftsmen as well as muralist - adept at weaving southern African-American and African culture together - incorporating sacred geometry and complex symbolic elements. Biggers attended Hampton Institute (University) in the early 1940s, and befriended Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. Much of his early work was social realist - depicting the everyday hard work and perseverance of the African American community.
In 1949, Biggers moved to Houston, TX and chaired the art department at Texas State University (later Texas Southern). The artist yearned to penetrate the invisible but very real curtain which seemed to separate American blacks from Africans. In 1957, he received a UNESCO grant which provided seven months of living and traveling through Ghana and western Nigeria.
“I had a magnificent sense of coming home, of belonging,” he says - and he doesn’t mean it sentimentally.
“I recognized at once the Africanisms in our life in America, which we simply had not been able to recognize and to claim,” Biggers asserts. The sight of African men and women building their own houses, hewing and shaping their own ax handles, weaving their own quilts, making their own chairs, impressed him deeply. “And it reminded me of my own childhood times in North Carolina.”