Hughie Lee-Smith, The Walls

0:00:04.8 Steven Zucker: We’re at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art looking at a painting by Hughie Lee-Smith. It’s called [The] Walls, and it dates to 1954. It’s a gorgeous image, but it’s also bleak.

0:00:16.4 Julia Mun: One way to approach this painting is to look at the foreground first, where there is a shadowed figure staring off into the right, where he stands on a patch of grass. Towards the middle, perhaps where most of our attention is drawn, is a figure climbing onto a wall. He is a person of color, he is wearing a tank top, and is directly confronting a wall with cracks and peeling paint. And his shadow is the only one to accompany him. And in the background, we see additional walls and a housing settlement, and three white figures either stand or sit on top of the walls in contrast to the two figures in the front. And in the skyline, we can see these rolling clouds, and most curiously, these four floating balloons of red and yellow colors.

0:01:11.7 Steven Zucker: The light is so carefully constructed so that the figure in the foreground is completely in shadow, as is that patch of grass. Then we have this very stark light in the middle ground with stark shadows and bright plains that offer us these incredibly rich surfaces. Look at the way that the artist has painted the wall directly in front of the young man whose legs are straddling the wall. If you look at his shadow and the cracks that divide it, and then the areas of yellows and taupes and blues, that wall is like a palette.

0:01:49.6 Julia Mun: In other sections of the walls, you can see the white paint peeling away to reveal the brick foundation. And speaking of palette, the exposed brick mirrors the figure in the foreground where a Black man is wearing a striped shirt of white and red, and so it draws a parallel between this figure and the walls that we are confronting.

0:02:12.7 Steven Zucker: But it also is an unmistakable reference to the American flag, and that’s a reminder that for me, when I look at this painting, I can look at it as a representation of an actual place with physical forms and people and their interaction, and I can get lost in whatever that somewhat ambiguous narrative is. On the other hand, I can also look at it more symbolically.

0:02:36.5 Julia Mun: And I think we can look at Hughie Lee-Smith’s biography to really think about this painting. He was a tenured professor at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Before that, he had been working with artists in Cleveland and Detroit, but his time at Claflin was a bit of a difficult one. He was struggling not only with the more harshly enforced Jim Crow laws and segregation, but he was also observing and dealing with tensions within the Black community, especially between Black communities from the North and Black communities from the South. And so we can maybe see that tension play out with the figure in the foreground.

0:03:19.7 Steven Zucker: If I had to use one word to summarize the feeling that I get when I look at this painting, it would be alienation. And that’s a powerful word, both within the context of racial strife, as you were mentioning, which is clear within this painting, with the white figures at the top of that wall really owning that space. But it also speaks to a broader historical moment. The Second World War had ended. This was now the atomic age, and people were extremely aware that it was now possible for humans to destroy the world. And we’re looking at a painting that is of a world that is in decay. And so I think in some ways, this space, even the racial tensions that are depicted here, are speaking to a larger kind of alienation.

0:04:05.3 Julia Mun: He often spoke about how his experiences as a Black man in the United States felt like a sense of rejection and a sense of isolation and an existence as an outcast from society. These conditions are only exacerbated by Cold War conditions where there’s this powerful culture of distrust.

0:04:25.3 Steven Zucker: And despite that bleak outlook, or perhaps because of it, we have these balloons that populate the sky. They float over the scene. They seem disconnected and yet somehow essential and create a kind of lyricism. But also, it is an innocence and an opportunity that has been lost.

0:04:46.7 Julia Mun: He does not assign a specific meaning to these balloons, but they were drawn from his memories of not being able to go to the circus during his childhood because his grandmother would not let him attend. And so these balloons could signify an inability to obtain or chase after desires.

0:05:06.3 Steven Zucker: And characteristic of the artist, there’s twisted wire. There’s also a very stark light that suggests the influence of metaphysical painting of the work, for instance, of the Italian artist de Chirico, and the melancholy that results from that.

0:05:21.8 Julia Mun: A lot of scholars have tried to pinpoint what exactly the style may be described as. There have been names like magical realism, neo-surrealism, and even social surrealism. And so there’s certainly a different sense of reality. And I think another critical point of this painting is that we as viewers are standing in the shadow. We are also distant from that sunlight. And I think a critical aspect of Hughie Lee-Smith’s work is that while he does draw on autobiographical elements, he does try to create these universal psychic elements like isolation and alienation.

This work at Art Bridges

Oral history interview with Hughie Lee-Smith

Hilton Als, Steve Locke, Lauren Haynes, and Leslie King-Hammond, Hughie Lee-Smith (New York: Karma Publications, 2023).

1945–80 in the United States, an introduction