Art critics were not alone in their confusion over works such as Motley’s Lawd, Mah Man’s Leavin’. During the two-year run of “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” (an exhibition I curated in 2014 for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and which subsequently traveled to museums in Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), I repeatedly responded to exhibition-goers about this painting. Visitors who were otherwise enthralled by Motley’s consummate portraiture, lively genre scenes, and sophisticated, colorful compositions were, like Kimmelman, troubled by the exaggerated black bodies and stereotypic settings in which they were placed. “You know, I just love Motley’s paintings,” is how many people would begin their comments, but as they turned to Lawd, Mah Man’s Leavin’, they would continue their remarks with, “But what about those big red lips on that fat ugly woman, and the nappy hair on that raggedy little black girl?”
Like centrifugal, double bull’s-eyes, the woman’s lips and little girl’s hair drew viewers deep into the bizarre pastorale of Lawd, Mah Man’s Leavin’, where barnyard critters and their human attendants seemingly share the same lineage. Standing barefoot on the steps of a diminutive wooden hut straight out of a Russian folktale, the woman in this painting—serpentine, pendulous, and exultant—comes across as more chimerical than realistic: a remotely human creature, flaying about in a shimmering, fungus-covered underworld. And her partners in corporeal outlandishness—a hulking idler in overalls, his recumbent doppelgänger in the far distance, and a pickaninny straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—embodied the worst racial stereotypes imaginable that, in tandem with the pecking hens, aggressive geese, a lusty dog, a lazy cat, and a backside-revealing, knee-knocking mule, all conjured an African American phantasm of major proportions: an image of rural black life so outrageous and ridiculous as to single-handedly campaign, by negative example, for the mass migration of self-respecting southern blacks to the urban North, with nary a look backward.
Taken at face value, these grotesque figures—from the creative mind and skilled hands of an accomplished black artist—are either unadulterated stereotypes, the signs of racial self-hatred, or simply inexplicable. But if one considers Motley’s painting in the broader contexts of African American popular culture in the introspective years of the late 1930s, leading up to the 75th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Motley’s professed, career-long mission to “truthfully represent the Negro people,” there might be another, more tactical reason for his broad and outlandish characterizations. Rather than limiting his portrayals to a visual version of literary or historical naturalism—an approach that relies upon documenting the social conditions to help compose, script, and, eventually, to propagandize the picture—Motley deployed narrative-producing strategies of an insubordinate kind and, at times, a symbolic character. The anxieties that blacks felt in these years concerning racial discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and social hierarchies within their communities were such that, for a truth-seeker like Motley, painting realistically was only marginally effective in capturing a profound, subcutaneous black reality. Instead, what Motley’s paintings executed were complacency-jarring renderings of African Americans that, through their fictive settings and expressionistic configurations, opened floodgates of racial memories, phobias, and fantasies, so visceral and inescapable that, upon experiencing them, more authentic concepts of the race could emerge.