Paulette Nardal on Augusta Savage
A translation of Paulette Nardal’s “Une Femme sculpteur noire,” a profile of the American artist Augusta Savage.
I’m making available here my translation of the Martiniquaise writer Paulette Nardal’s 1930 profile of American sculptor Augusta Savage, who was working then in Paris. The profile is cited constantly in work on Négritude and Pan-Africanism, but I have been unable to find a complete English version, so I prepared this one for the students in my class on the history of African thought.
The profile appeared in the Paris-based La Dépêche africaine, a journal closely associated with Nardal and her younger sister, Jane. It is so widely referenced because it bundles together a key set of ideas about art, Africanness, and Black consciousness. It also demonstrates exactly how Nardal and other intellectuals thought Black consciousness could be promoted.
To simplify, Nardal identifies a Black experience or feeling rooted in a common past in Africa. This sensibility was conveyed most intensely in art, and American artists (and writers) had already tapped into it and could serve as models for the rest of the world. The development and dissemination of these ideas would happen through many different genres (reviews, profiles, short stories, essays, etc.), and new venues (like La Dépêche africaine and La Revue du monde noir) were created for this purpose. In addition to writing fiction and criticism and founding journals, Nardal hosted a regular salon that brought together an international group of Black thinkers and artists. These pan-African ideas would become particularly associated with the Négritude writers, most familiarly Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas, all of whom participated in the Nardals’ salon and wrote for their journals. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Négritude Women is a guide to the remarkable life and thought of Nardal, her sister, and others at the forefront of this intellectual movement.
My thanks to Anne Thompson for saving me from one unconscionable error and several smaller ones. A pdf of the French version, complete with images of the sculptures described and taken from Gallica, can be found here.
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A Black Woman Sculptor
Among our artists of color, we have had up to now musicians, dancers, singers, painters (mostly Americans). Do our fellow citizens know that, for the past year, we have had here in Paris Miss Augusta Savage, the first black woman sculptor?
Augusta Savage is a “self-made woman” in every sense of the phrase. The seventh daughter of 14 children, she felt irresistibly drawn to art from an early age. At a stage when most children are still making mud pies, she was already striving to accurately depict the shapes and forms of the world around her. Soon she left West Palm Beach to return to Jacksonville in her native Florida. She wanted to become a sculptor within six months. Solon Borglum presented her work to the school of art at Cooper Union, which deemed it worthy of attention. But her meager finances ran out, forcing her to leave the school. Undaunted, she went to work at a laundry, and later factories. Her schoolmasters, seeing the surest signs of talent in this valiant woman, asked her to return and gave her a scholarship that allowed her to hold on for another year.
In 1923, she, along with 99 other students, all white Americans, won a scholarship allowing her to pursue her studies at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. When the committee discovered she was of the black race, however, they revoked the award. We remember reading some indignant words about this, accompanied by a picture of the artist, in an issue of Eve at the time. In 1925, she was unable to use a scholarship, which she received thanks to the intervention of W.E.B. du Bois, to continue her studies in Rome. But in 1929, an association of white Americans, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, gave her a grant of $1,800 after pressure from Mrs. John E. Mail and Eugene Kinckle Jones of the National Urban League. The award now allows her to perfect her skills in Paris.
Augusta Savage is famous throughout the American world. Her works have been exhibited in many of the great public institutions of the New World: the 135th Street Branch Library of New York, which possesses no fewer than 15, the Douglas School of Baltimore, and the Sesqui-Centennial of Philadelphia.
She has also taught young students of color, in whom she inculcates a taste for a racial art. The exhibitions of their works that she organizes have had very great success in New York. The American press, both white and black, has dedicated laudatory articles to her: The Crisis, The Amsterdam News, The New York Times, the New York News, The New York World, The Baltimore Afro-American, The Pittsburgh Courier.
We visited Augusta Savage in Paris at her modest studio on the impasse de l’Astrolabe. She is a thin young woman with an unusually soft voice and an open manner that makes her immediately likable.
She was about to go out and had already covered her statues in damp sheets. She very graciously uncovered them and showed us several that she was close to finishing.
Miss Savage is one of those artists who readily breaks free of classical rules to let her originality blossom. Her inspiration is, above all, racial, a rarity among the conquered and transplanted races. This is why she succeeds easily in modern art, so infused with blackness. “Tête de jeune fille” and “Danseur nu” are remarkable.
The statue reproduced here in photograph is a black deity born of an imagination fed by African legends and stories. Everything about it is symbolic. The four women’s heads, carved from the same block as their bodies, hold up the globe of the earth, supported by their four raised arms. The four folded legs form a star. The whole is rendered in sharp angles with a simplicity of detail that gives it life, intense and contained.
Augusta Savage has also made a set of sculpture-in-the-round busts of Amazons, whose story seems to be an obsession for her. Let us admire the powerful form of this bust, which at the same time expresses femininity through imperceptible details.
But Augusta Savage would not truly be black if she didn’t have a sharp sense of humor. Her “Green Apples,” which depicts a child stricken by a stomachache after eating too many green apples, owes its great success to its remarkable vividness.
All people of color will recognize in “Gamin,” shown here, a darker version of the Parisian street urchin. Augusta Savage has a keen eye for the real and the talent to reproduce it. Our readers will appreciate the cheeky, in-your-face feistiness; the dishevelment; the I-couldn’t-care-less swagger in the bust and child’s head, in the line of his mouth and his chin.
Augusta Savage has also made many heads and busts of white models, and these are of absolutely remarkable craftsmanship and very great sensitivity. But we are astonished to hear her say that people of color and especially black models refuse to pose for her. Is this the effect of a prejudice that is even more absurd among black people than among white?
We don’t doubt that Augusta Savage’s stay in Paris will be very profitable, and that the charming artist will meet with all the success her originality, her wonderful talent, and her sincerity deserve.
Paulette NARDAL.