“I get to see two of his paintings on my walls every day, which makes me happy and fortunate,” says John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball. “When I informed my three sons that upon my (not imminent!) demise, each in turn would have the choice of one of my possessions, my eldest, with first choice, instantly spoke for Wolfe’s Away Game,” in which the jaunty, fluidly delineated members of the Pittsburgh Crawfords are seen exiting their tour bus and entering the ballpark.
Homestead Grays (National Anthem) depicts the fabled Negro League team of that name, proudly raising the flag before a game. But as is generally the case with Wolfe’s narrative paintings, there is more going on than initially meets the eye. The Mobilgas sign on the outfield wall, with its winged Pegasus, subtly underscores the mythical status of the Grays, whose games and exploits in the era of segregated baseball went largely unrecorded and unremarked by the white world. And look at the flag: we’re seeing it from the reverse side, with the blue square of stars at the right – it’s the flag of the other America, the black America, shadow companion to the “official” white one.
“Actually, I’m not a big sports fan,” says Wolfe, noting that he was first exposed to the “whole culture of baseball” when his sons were enrolled in Little League. His attraction to the Negro Leagues had a different source: “It always seemed to me a strange phenomenon that people brought here as slaves from Africa would end up playing baseball.”
Or, for that matter, creating America’s most distinguished homegrown music, blues and jazz. In Wolfe’s painting Slave Music, he again condenses a wealth of associations into an otherwise straightforward depiction of three musicians and a woman singer, all black, at a jazz club. They are performing on stage, but the stage, pictorially, has a dual function: it is also the deck of a ship, and under that deck the slaves are stacked in rows. Wolfe alludes here to the diagrams of the old slavers, painting a row of cookie-cutter human figures packed closely together; unlike those diagrams, though, he has personalized these figures, giving them different shapes, weight and color tones, except for two that are featureless. The row of figures almost suggests a melodic line, with the first three bodies as three notes, then a slanted, yellow, featureless body as the interval between those figures and the next three, and so on. And rising up from below decks, onto the walls of the jazz club, are the blue shadows – the ghosts informing the music.
Juxtaposing the beauty of jazz and the horrors of the Middle Passage, Slave Music is one of many works in which Wolfe contemplates the best and the worst of what it means to be human. In his own life, he has had ample experience of the worst: as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division, he lost his right leg in Vietnam.
In Capt. Nissoson’s Triage, Wolfe unflinchingly revisits this profoundly significant crossroads in his own life. He depicts himself on a wooden table in a Quonset hut, his back to the viewer, arms bloodied to the elbows, facing the team of medics who would amputate his leg and save his life by reviving his stopped heart three times. The calm focus of the doctors is a counterbalance to the horror of the scene, which includes the arrival of another bloodied soldier on a stretcher and a hallucinatory pair of tiny dancing devils in the foreground.
The war took something away from Wolfe, but it gave him something else. The primitive, stylized, oneiric images that pervade his paintings stem, he has said, directly from his Vietnam experience. So, too, his understanding of what it means to be an artist and a person.
In an essay published in War, Literature & the Arts (1998), Wolfe wrote, “Through a slight inversion of logic, I have come to see my war experiences and subsequent difficulties as a positive, enabling episode. As an artist, I have a responsibility to examine human existence on all its frontiers and to discover just how deep is deep. Furthermore, if all the unfathomable desolation I came to encounter was ‘all’ – was the total matrix of human experience, if it filled the whole circle – then man’s plight would be an uninterrupted succession of Buchenwalds and Cambodias. It is not.
“So I see my journey not as around the circumference of human experience,
not necessarily even along the radius, but along a chord into myself, the length of which constitutes its own nourishing message as much as it does its darkness.”
The Sunday, May 4 opening reception for John Wolfe and Crossroads is from 4 to 6 p.m. The show runs through May 31 at Unison Gallery, 68 Mountain Rest Road, New Paltz.
