R0BERT S. DUNCANSON (1821-77), the first African-American artist to win international fame, has provoked in posterity more sympathy for his life than for his work. As a black landscape painter in the Middle West before and after the Civil War, Duncanson was a pioneer in a pioneer culture, blazing a rough, winding and curious trail. He experienced hard times, both historical and personal.
Even so, the path of Duncanson's career has always seemed more original than the individual paintings with which it was carved. He was a prolific painter, but only 163 confirmed works survive and they fit firmly within the Hudson River School as interpreted by second-generation lesser lights like William L. Sonntag and T. Worthington Whittredge. Duncanson was a minor figure to his contemporaries and, until recently, barely a footnote in the specialized monographs. Before the cenetary of his death in 1972, when the Cincinnati Art Museum mounted a retrospective, he was virtually unknown.
During the 1990's, however, a few younger art historians have begin to find new significance in what had previously appeared to be bland stock subjects, figures and prospects in the work of Duncanson and other 19th century African-American painters. Influenced by literary research into the double-coding of slave songs, whereby words and gestures could mean different things to black and white audiences, they have speculated that similar hidden messages could be detected in Duncanson's pastoral images.
David Lubin of Colby College floated this theory in his 1993 book "Picturing a Nation: Arty and Social Change in 19th-century America," which included a chapter on Duncanson. A rereading of the African-American pictoral landscape also informs the 1993 biography of the artist by Joseph Ketner, director of the Washingto Gallery Museum of Art in St. Louis, who has put together a touring exhibition entitled "Lifting the Veil: Robert S. Duncanson and the Emergence of the African-American Artist." After winding up its stay at the Cincinnati Art Museum today, it travels to Washington University, where it opens on Jan. 26, and then to the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth and the Clark-Atlanta University Art Gallery during the Olympic Games.
The extent to which Duncanson's art can be said to reflect the circumstances of a black man in mid-19th-century America is now of some contention in African-American art history. Should the boats crossing rivers in some paintings be seen as metaphors for the flight to freedom, analogus to slave hymns about escaping over the River Jordan? Or is such a passage a cliche of the landscape tradition that Duncanson could have inherited from Poussin, Claude, Turner and Thimas Cole? Did these paintings, which seem to rely on white pictorial conventions, have different meanings for black audiences? Or do these rereadings have try too hard to square 19th-century conventions with the cultural politics of the moment? "Lifting the Veil" moves some of the questions fom the back pages of art history into a more public arena, where Mr. Ketner can argue not only that Duncanson was a more interesting painter than commonly thought but hat the motifs and themes of his work contain much more than meets the eye.
Duncanson's life was anything but conventional. A grandson of a freed Virginia slave, son of a house painter and carpenter, he was entirely self-taught as an artist. Born and raised in the Finger Lakes region of New York, he had hired himself during the 1830's as an itinerant portraitist and decorator in the Middle West before settling in the commercial and cultural hub of Cincinnati, where, after 1840, he began to receive the patronage of wealthy abolitionists. He also colored daguerreotypes for James Ball, a black photographer who operated a thriving portrait studio.
By 1853, Duncanson was successful enough to afford a grand tour of Europe. He visited the sculptor Hiram Powers in Florence and, in London, studied original Turner landscapes, which he had known only through reproduction's in John Ruskin's books.
To avoid the upheaval of the Civil War, Duncanson exiled himself to Canada and teaching exhibitions deeply the development of landscape paintings there. On his next trip to England, in 1865, he was accepted by some critics as an American master of landscape on a par with Church and Bierstadt. Duncanason moved in tony society among the English abolitionists; he met Tennyson and sketched the Scottish Highlands. The King of Sweden bought a major work, "Land of the Lotus Eaters," for the royal collection.
But after his return to Cincinnati, in 1866, Duncanson grew increasingly eccentric. he had always been a manic personality, obsessed with painting "a great picture." Whether poisoned by lead paint in childhood as Mr. Ketner thinks, or afflicted with schizophrenia as an adult, Duncanson believed toward the end of his life believed that he was possessed by the spirit of a female master artist who guided his brush. His dementia became a topic of gossip in the local newspapers. Violently insane, he was eventually confined by his wife to a Michigan sanitatrium. He died there from a seizure at the age of 51and was buried in an unmarked grave.
"Lifting the Veil" brings together more than 50 paintings, many of which had, since Duncanson's death, become nearly as obscure as his final resting place. (His champions included Romare Bearden, who helped track down "Land of the Lotus Eaters" in Stockholm 1972.) The show ranges from the earliest datable work, a mother-and- daughter portrrait from 1841 executed in the naive style of a 20-year-old tyro, to the better known landscapes of his maturity and such late canvases as "Landscape With Cows Watering in a Stream," from 1871, one of the two Duncansons owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In addition to tracing the influence of painters like Sonntag and Church on Duncanson, Mr. Ketner has also taken a riskier, less traditional stance toward several of the paintings. The Roman ruins in the Italianate landscapes, Mr. Ketner writes in his book, would have been understood by black audiences as a message about "the ultimate fate of slave-holding nations." He sees in the luminist visions of faraway places, like "Vale of Kashmir," the artist's "subconcious desire to escape the oppression experienced by a `free colored person' in antebellum America."
Judith Wilson, who teaches art history and African-American studies at Yale University, has both supported and critized many of the interpretations offered by Mr. Ketner and Mr. Lubin. "I'm excited that scholars are taking different analytic approaches to 19th- century African-American art, which stylistically looks so conventional," she says. " But in the case of Duncanson I think that both historians are working from a false set of assumptions."
Ms. Wilson suggests that Mr. Ketner's diligent biographic research sometimes contradicts his readings of the artworks. That Duncanson was a happy collaborator with Ball and an artistic hero to journalists at black abolitionist newspapers defuses the idea that he suffered personal racial anguish and put it into his paintings. "There isn't any evidence that Duncanson was in conflict about his mixed raeial status," she says. "That's the lingering power of the 'tragic mulatto' myth."
The belief had been that Duncanson tried to pass for white to succeed in the art world. "Now we know, from Mr. Ketner's own research, that both his parents were black," Ms. Wilson says. "But in spite of this new data, both Mr. Lubin and Mr. Ketner have continued to work in the old assumption that Duncanson was in internal conflict about race."
Mr. Ketner, who believes that any black man at that time would have experienced "terribie fear about his racial status," is on
Iess contentious ground when he presents "Land of the Lotus Eaters" as Duncanson's coommentary on the South. This salon-scale
picture, all illustration of a scene from "The Odyssey'' via Tennyson's poem "The Lotus Eaters" in which Odysseus and his men have succumbed to the decadent pleasures of a slave culture on the lotus island, was shown four weeks after the Civil War began; Duncanson soon added two other works, "Prarie Fire" and "Ellen's Isle," to the exhibition.
"I know of no other 19th- century painter who used thc theme of the Lotus Eaters," Mr Ketner says. "It was a popularly held notion among Northerners that Southern society had grown lazy and decadent because of slavery. The South is also a semi-tropical climalte. And all three pictures that he exhibited at the time have to do with war. I don't think it's accidental." (He admits, however, that he has no written proof for his claim.)
Highlighting the show in Cincinnati are Duncanson's newly restored Belmont murals, which Mr. Ketner calls the "most ambitious and most domestic mural paintings in antebellum America." Nicholas Longworth, one of the wealthiest men in the country and an abolitionist, commissioned Duncanson to decorate the main foyer of Belmont, his Federal-style mansion (later sold to the Taft family and now home of the Taft Museum, where part of the "Lifting the Veil" exhibition has been housed). The eight 9-foot-by-6-foot panels in trompe-l'oeil frames offer a succession of bucolic scenes, proceeding from a classical European landscape of calm waters and stone bridges to a more agitated American wilderness of waterfalls and frontiersman.
The views may depict Longworth's vast land holdings, but more likely they are purely imaginary. A fascinating case study in the mingling of the decorative and the fine arts, they are American paintings in imitation of French and English wallpaper from pattern books, which in turn were based on 18th-century rococo painting. The murals were covered by English wallpaper before Duncanson's death and not rediscovered until 1933.
"The murals can be seen as a metaphor for where we are now in 19th-century African-American art history," Ms. Wilson says. "They seem transparent. But as scholars have looked behind them, they're a hall of mirrors. We're just now beginning to understand the context in which these artists worked, and how different audiences might have reacted to what they made."
Before the revisionists are discounted for "reading too much" into the seemingly routine canvases of an obscure and unhappy figure, more research into the social circumstances of African-American artists at the time of the Civil War seems in order. After all, you don't need a Ph.D. to realize that black and white audiences can draw different conclusions from the same evidence. The O.J. Simpson trial, if nothing else, has taught America that lesson. 


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