Richmond Barthé (1901-1988)

November 19, 2007 
/ Contributed By: Martin Summers

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Richmond Barthé

Photo by Carl Van Vechten

Born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi in 1901, Richmond Barthé moved to New Orleans, Louisiana at an early age. Little is known about his early youth, except that he grew up in a devoutly Roman Catholic household, he enjoyed drawing and painting, and his formal schooling did not go beyond grade school. From the age of sixteen until his early twenties, Barthé supported himself with a number of service and unskilled jobs, including house servant, porter, and cannery worker. His artistic talent was noticed by his parish priest when Barthé contributed two of his paintings to a fundraising event for his church. The priest was so impressed with his art that he encouraged Barthé to apply to the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois and raised enough money to pay for his travel and tuition. From 1924 to 1928, Barthé studied painting at the Art Institute, while continuing to engage in unskilled and service employment to support himself.

Even though he mainly studied painting, Barthé’s talent as a sculptor was recognized by his fellow students and local critics in Chicago. In 1928, he put on a one-man show that was sponsored by the Chicago Women’s Club. He eventually moved to New York City, New York, locating his studio in Greenwich Village and creating art – and socializing – with central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Augusta Savage, and Carl Van Vechten. While he rejected the circumscription of his art within racial boundaries, his most well-regarded work had a strong racial content. Feral Benga and African Dancer, the latter of which was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art, celebrated the black body and African culture, while The Mother contemplated the horrors of lynching. Of particular inspiration to Barthé’s art was the black male body, a reflection of his comfort with his homosexuality, according to one of the foremost scholars of Barthé.

Barthé continued to create sculpture well into the 1960s, some of which was commissioned as public art. He sculpted an American eagle for the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. and a bas-relief for the Harlem River Housing Project. In 1949, the Haitian government commissioned him to create monuments to the revolutionary leaders Toussaint L’Overture and Jean Jacques Dessalines in Port-au-Prince. In addition to spending time in Haiti, Barthé lived in Jamaica before returning to the United States and settling in southern California. He died in 1989.

About the Author

Author Profile

Martin Summers, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Boston College, received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University in 1997. He taught at the University of Oregon and the University of Texas before moving to Boston College. Professor Summers teaches courses in African American history as well as the history of gender, race and sexuality in the U.S. His publications include Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), “Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle Class Masculinity,” in Gender and History (November 2003); and “’This Immoral Practice’: The Prehistory of Homophobia in Black Nationalist Thought,” in Toni Lester, ed., Gender Nonconformity, Race, and Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Summers is currently researching race and mental illness in the nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Summers, M. (2007, November 19). Richmond Barthé (1901-1988). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/barthe-richmond-1901-1988/

Source of the Author's Information:

Mary Ann Calo, Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-1940 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); A. D. Macklin, A Biographical History of African-American Artists, A-Z (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Margaret Rose Vendryes, “The Lives of Richmond Barthé,” in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000).

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