First published in Chicago Review Issue 59:4/60:1, 2016.
Eldzier Cortor died on Thanksgiving Day, 2015, about seven months after I interviewed him. He was ninety-nine years old. According to his son Michael, Cortor worked as an artist up until the day he died.
The New York Times ran a generous obituary of Cortor, which included a photograph of him, sitting upright and bow-tied, taken by the photojournalist Gordon Parks in 1949. This photograph presented Cortor just after winning a Guggenheim fellowship, which would take him to Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti. The Times also ran a front-page story titled “Black Artists and the March into the Museum,” in which Cortor was featured, and which included several short video-interviews with black artists. An assessment of black art in the twentieth-century art market, the Times piece underscored a bittersweet irony in the age of modernist formalism during which Cortor and other artists developed their careers. If a black artist chose to work in a figurative mode, then his or her work was likely to be pigeonholed by the white establishment as expressive of the “black experience.” But if he or she chose to work in abstraction, then this work did not fit the category of “black art” as conceived by the country’s leading museums.
Has the art world caught up with the idea that modernism was many things? Cortor—whose range of work is difficult to classify—remained skeptical.