Bill Traylor’s Blues – Putting the Pain in Painting

by Frank Matheis

Preface

In 1982, I first saw the art of Bill Traylor as part of an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. titled “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980”, a show featuring over 325 works by twenty black folk artists. I had the privilege to revisit his work during a private tour of the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation art collection in Mount Kisco, New York, in 2016. Arts educator Elizabeth Marwell led us into a room where we encountered dozens of Bill Traylor’s paintings. The memory of my first encounter with him at the Corcoran came back vividly. 

Folk Art and Outsider Art 

It’s highly debatable if Bill Traylor is expressing cultural traditions. If the above quote is true, then Traylor is definitely not a folk artist because his work is clearly idiosyncratic. His unbridled originality and free style are hardly defined by a simple label. Many interpreters have connected his work with everything from Dahomean textiles from Benin in West Africa^[2] to African Hoodoo^[3] practices. Yet, he is so individual that it is far fetched for anyone to associate him directly to an arts community, beyond the broad label of his being African American. There are no direct artistic traditions to connect him with. 

Nobody painted like Bill Traylor!

He transcended conventions and formed his own utterly unique and freeform style – just like nobody else played guitar and sang like the Bahamian Joseph Spence and nobody played the piano like Thelonious Monk. 

Both of these common “Outsider” and “Folk art” definitions imply a form of delusional superiority of mainstream arts. Traylor’s work is high art, somewhat reminiscent of Picasso, or the lesser-known Danish artist Gert Mathiesen, not in direct style but in their own purposeful quest to reach that very child-like, pure and innocent expression of art, free of conventions and limitations. Traylor had that inherent simplicity that Paul Klee, Marc Chagall and Picasso sought over their entire lifetimes, and sometimes attained. Except, for Traylor it was intrinsically veiled simplicity. Hidden in his work is actually a vast complexity, the sad story of man’s inhumanity and subjugation of other human beings. It is the self-validating painting of a sufferer. 

He was undervalued in his own time and only achieved posthumous fame. By the time the former slave from Benton, Alabama, started to paint in Montgomery in 1935, he was already 82-years old, his body tired from years of toiling. For most of his life as an artist, until his death in 1949 at age 95, he was impoverished and often homeless. 

He is to visual art what country blues players like Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Big Joe Williams and Short Stuff Macon are to mainstream pop music – rough-hewn, edgy, deep and emotive, but hardly primitive or naïve.^[4] Traylor was an authentic and artistic truth-teller. Like blues music, his artwork is a valuable documentation of the inner human turmoil expressed artistically. 

While Traylor is self-taught and outside of the mainstream, the imposed Outsider definition is snobbish. The renowned American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, has the best answer, 

“…Traylor’s own refined sense of style and elegance always manages to mitigate the potentially compulsive and neurotic qualities of his work. Thus, we do him a disservice by dismissing his work as the chance musing of the “outsider” and the naïve”. When the mainstream art world is ready to admit the practitioners of forms is has so shamelessly appropriated over the last century to full citizenship, it is clear that Bill Traylor will lead the way.”^[5]

A brief biography

Bill Traylor was born in 1854 into slavery on a 400-acre cotton plantation near Benton, Alabama, a place where he spent most of his life. Even after slavery officially ended, he stayed on as a laborer, serving his former slave master George Hartwell Traylor, and later he remained as a sharecropper. At age 82, he left for the city of Montgomery, Alabama, taking shelter in the segregated black part of town, then called “Dark Town,” where he first took on painting. He remained there until his death. Bill Traylor sat near a blacksmith shop on Monroe Avenue and painted prolifically on used carboard sheets. Traylor did not engage in art for commerce. Most people, black and white, did not recognize his genius during his lifetime. He painted for the sake of painting and essentially never recognized any financial gain during his lifetime. 

Peter Schjeldahl noted, “Traylor never learned to read or write, which perhaps explains his own visual language. He had three wives and at least fifteen children. He subsisted on odd jobs and a small welfare stipend, often sleeping in the back room of a friendly undertaker’s funeral parlor. The welfare ceased when Traylor was found to have a local daughter—who, however, hardly welcomed him. Nearly all his other children had joined the northward migration of African Americans.”^[6]

In 1939, he came to the attention of the white artist Charles Shannon, who was fascinated by Traylor’s art. Shannon became a combination of friend and advocate, providing art supplies and arranging for his work to be seen in a wider forum, including two exhibitions, one in Montgomery in 1940 and in Riverdale, New York in 1942. Later the Bill Traylor estate sued Charles Shannon, accusing him of exploiting Bill Traylor. The New York Times reported^[7] in 1993, 

“Soon after he met Mr. Traylor, Mr. Shannon took on the role of preserver and promoter of the older man’s work, but it was not until the early 1980’s that Mr. Traylor’s work caught the attention of the art world. Mr. Traylor is now widely thought of as a leading folk artist… The descendants of a former slave who was recognized, long after his death, as a great folk artist, have agreed to drop their lawsuit against a white man whom they had accused of taking the bulk of the black man’s work. In a joint statement released yesterday by both sides in the dispute, relatives of the artist, Bill Traylor, said that based on several months of investigation, they now believe that, rather than exploiting Mr. Traylor, Charles Shannon actually contributed greatly to his support and his later recognition.”

As time went on, the art world recognized Traylor’s work, some of which sells for six figure sums nowadays. Roman Kurzmeyer summarized^[8] , 

“The history of the reception of Traylor’s art shows that as knowledge of the circumstances of his life has increased, the understanding of his work has gradually changed as well. Although Traylor was underprivileged, homeless, poor, old and infirm, traces of a secret grudge are nowhere apparent in his work. A certain distance to his own fate gave his drawings a unique wit and freedom of expression, but also an element of black humor. The story of Bill Traylor’s life does not explain why he began to draw, but it may account for the simplicity of his drawings …”

Bill Traylor was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in Montgomery in 1949. A proper headstone was not erected until 2018. He died as he had lived – poor, unknown, in hardship, never imagining that someday his work would be shown in a retrospective in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or that just one of his passionate and dramatic paintings would sell for multiple times more than he earned in his entire lifetime.

“It just comes to me”

Traylor was taciturn and worked in relative silence. We don’t have much of a foundation record of his own words to sufficiently define what the artist’s intentions and inner motivations were. There is a dearth of first-hand transcriptions of what he said and felt. Numerous sources cite that Charles Shannon posed a question to Traylor about how he gets his ideas. Traylor allegedly replied, “It just comes to me.” This void of clarity leads to interpretation and cerebration by art scholars and historians. Much has been said and written about Bill Traylor by academia and museum curating experts. Some of the interpretations are seemingly sensible, while some appear to be a bit overreaching. Pundits have alleged, for example, that Bill Traylor’s art reflects symbolism of everything from African hoodoo practices and conjure, to freemason symbolism, to a reaction to white sexual predation and metaphysical spiritual powers. These may all hold validity. Unfortunately, Traylor didn’t say much. Who knows what he would have said about all this conjecture. 

Pictorial reactions to a cruel world

Bill Traylor’s life encompassed brutality. He lived in perilous times through the sad and dehumanizing history of slavery and post slavery indentured servitude. He experienced the white backlash to emancipation under reconstruction. He worked as a sharecropper in the almost feudal system of the early 20^th century Southern agricultural economy, which was dominated by a small group of white landowners. Thereafter, he endured the harsh Jim Crow segregation era. He lived as a subjugated human being, considered by the white dominant class as inferior because of his racial caste position. In his time, black folks were treated as subhuman, sold in the town square like livestock. He experienced terrible chapters in history: the great influenza epidemic of 1918, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. Traylor died before the Civil Rights movement, so for his entire life he lived with the dual fate of being black and poor in the deep south under a repressively racist society. His symbolic paintings naturally chronicle these life experiences and trauma, consciously or subconsciously. 

Ironically, while he did not read or write, someone taught him to sign his name on the art. On each painting he signed the same last name as his slave master.

Violence was pervasive in his world. It far exceeded the whippings and abuse of the plantations. He not only witnessed lynching^[9] but his own son lost his life in that barbaric fashion, an event that surely had a profound impact on the artist. Lynching was a constant method of social and racial control meant to terrorize black Americans into submission. This barbarism was often based on some accusations, frequently fabricated. Victims were subjected to every imaginable physical torment, with the torture usually ending with being hung from a tree and sometimes set on fire, even while live. These horrendous events were often major social events, a form of savage entertainment, complete with photographers who later sold macabre postcards to the audience. The cruelty of it all is virtually unfathomable. 

As Al Smith wrote in his song lyric^[10]: 
They had a hunting season on the rabbit 
If you shoot ‘em you went to jail 
Season was always open on me 
Nobody needed no bail

Bill Traylor’s art is the self-validating painting of a sufferer. 

Within his own community, violence was a part of life. The police were not seen as protectors but as oppressors. Without the protection of the white police force, which was a tool of the dominant power structure, disputes were settled among each other, often by force. Killings were a regular part of life. Bluesman J.B. Lenoir documented his feelings and perspectives about Alabama in this song, which perhaps reflects the sentiments of many African Americans who left the south during their Great Migration to the north. 

Alabama Blues

I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me
I never will go back to Alabama, that is not the place for me
You know they killed my sister and my brother
And the whole world let them peoples go down there free

I never will love Alabama, Alabama seem to never have loved poor me
I never will love Alabama, Alabama seem to never have loved poor me
Oh God I wish you would rise up one day
Lead my peoples to the land of peace

My brother was taken up for my mother, and a police officer shot him down
My brother was taken up for my mother, and a police officer shot him down
I can’t help but to sit down and cry sometime
Think about how my poor brother lost his life

Alabama, Alabama, why you wanna be so mean?
Alabama, Alabama, why you wanna be so mean?
You got my people behind a barb wire fence
Now you tryin’ to take my freedom away from me

Living an entire life under the boots of others in this harsh existence is plenty of fodder for a creative outlet. Traylor kept it all in for more than eight decades. When he started to release his images, he sat silently and painted prolifically, if not obsessively, all day into the night. 

It is sometimes claimed that Bill Traylor was “protest painting.” That designation is understandable because many of the depictions may symbolically represent injustice, violence and conflicts – chasing, possibly even lynching, and threatening dogs. Can it be protest? The act of protesting is usually a conscious decision to confront some kind of injustice, to speak out in opposition. This does not seem to fit to Traylor, who was more than likely in “the zone”. Artists and other creatives will understand the meaning and implication of that. Musicians, writers, dancers and visual artists often work in a transfixed state, almost a concentrated creative trance, an otherworldly state where the external reality is shut out and they become one with the creative process. It seems more likely that Traylor was visualizing as a form of emotional and psychological catharsis in a natural stream of consciousness. He said himself, “It just comes to me.” Why can’t people accept that? 

His painting was perhaps a way to release the inner pain. Everything he existentially endured, suffered and witnessed in his life came pouring out, particularly the lynching of his own son. I think Traylor was not a typical protest painter. We will never really know his multitudinous thoughts and feelings. He was a truth teller, a visual chronicler, who went with the natural creative flow, exposing his innermost feelings. Yet, he was whimsical, a bit mischievous and fantastically free in his expression. This has confused some viewers who wonder whether such humoresque images could actually be representative of inner rage.

The blues

He was an artist whose paintings cry out a mournful, wailing moan like blues music. It’s easy to reason that much of the music that Traylor heard in his life would be African American spirituals, gospel and blues, and the pop music of the era that might have played through a nearby radio. Several pundits have alleged direct correlation of his work to “the blues.” It fits if the definition is “feelings of melancholy, sadness, or depression”. The importance of “blue” in Traylor’s work is not blues music as much as it is the color blue, which he loved, and particularly a rich hued cobalt blue. It is one of his most widely and prominently used colors, a clear favorite of his. As noted by Leslie Umberger, “…Blue is widely documented as a spiritually healing color, an African association that survived in America.^[11]” To Traylor, cobalt blue is what yellow was to Vincent Van Gogh. The strongest connection of Traylor’s art to traditional rural country blues music is that both art forms are rooted in the powerful expression of feelings. The connection fits and is undeniable. They go together. Traylor’s deep blues are both vivid cobalt blue and deep-blues melancholy. Blues music and Traylor’s art are an emotive expression of the anguish, suffering and hardships of African Americans during that era.

Allegory, Symbolism and Abstraction

Deciphering Traylor’s veiled meanings is influenced by the preconceived perspectives of the viewer. Different interpreters have varying narratives, which often diverge widely. Some scholars have gone way out in decoding his imagery. The paintings are mysterious and compelling, but ambiguous. Here are some possible interpretations, not absolute elucidations, but merely this writer’s subjective personal analysis: 

Traylor used a limited color palette, mostly black, brown and blue, drawn with pencils, charcoal and poster paint. His figures are essentially flat, two-dimensional, seen from the side, often as silhouettes. Traylor’s figures were not encumbered by gravity, dimension or perspective. He filled the picture plane with fantastic configurations and spatial freedom, often without up or down.

His subject matter are people, both black and white, indistinguishable by race. Indeed, he purposely hides race. There are no black or white faces. He had to veil his illustrations so that white pedestrians passing by his stall, and the authorities, would not be able to decipher his imagery. Instead, he identifies the dominance and subordination of his characters through symbolism and composition. It is indiscernible if a person is a white man beating or chasing a black man, in large part because overt depictions of racial violence and abuse would certainly have had harsh repercussions during Traylor’s time. Retaliation would be swift and dangerous. 

Violence is a repeated thematic in Traylor’s artwork. Scenes and actions include fierce dogs fighting or attacking. There is lots of hitting, with one person beating another with a stick or whip. Frequently, people are being chased by other people with guns or cudgels, or by gnarling, angry dogs, which are frequently seen attacking people. Bottles of alcohol are shown and the drinker is being punished in some way, almost always by being hit with a club or whip. These scenes are drawn playfully, yet they are filled with violence unbefitting to the almost fun characters he depicts. There are scenes titled “hunting” but it is indeterminate if the prey is a human being or an animal, even if the animal is depicted. People are shown on trees, sometimes they look startled and afraid. Sometimes they seem lively, other times motionless. The artwork “Man with Yoke” is particularly tragic. Yokes are used by beasts of burden. When seen on a man, it depicts a form of subjugation reminiscent of slaves bound in neck chains.

For an example of violence, take the drawing ‘Possum Hunt’. Traylor clearly shows a small animal being chased up a tree, as is typical in opossum or racoon hunts. Two characters with top hats and guns are below, clearly interested in what is on top of the tree. Two dogs join the hunt. If the imagery ended there, it would be a normal hunting scene. Yet, there are three humans on the tree, looking both fearful and excited. He creates ambiguity. These appear to be black folks escaping, being hunted and possibly captured by armed individuals intending to cause them harm. The opossum is a mere distraction. The real subjects are the poor souls in the tree. Human beings are in immediate peril, being hunted like an animal. 

He liked to paint animal iconography representative of his environment: snakes, dogs, birds, horses, cows, rabbits and fish, often as solitary figures. The subjects are out of proportion and elastic in shape, bending into supernatural positions. People and animals are seen depicted together, sometimes in some form of structure, organic or architectural elements which could be interpreted as buildings, homes, or even a gallows platform or a stage in slave markets. Trees are a common theme. 

What do these various characters and subjects symbolize? Are the rabbits emblematic of runaway slaves? Do the birds represent freedom? What about the angry fighting dogs? Are they possibly police dogs or vigilante mobs chasing down a black person? What does the frequent imagery of snakes represent? Perhaps the slave masters, perhaps the violence that was so pervasive in Traylor’s life? Only Traylor would have known for certain, and even he might not have been consciously aware of the deep intrinsic motivators that could have influenced these images. Despite the many interpretations, there are no absolutes. We can only speculate and reason what he could have meant.

Traylor, who was illiterate, did not actually name his own work. Shannon aided him in that process, after asking Traylor what he was depicting. Many of Traylor’s images are named “Exciting Events.” Shannon reported that he once asked what was going on in a particular drawing, and Traylor simply replied, “That’s an exciting event.” ^[12]From this, his animated, multi-figure compositions have come to be known as “Exciting Events,” action filled scenes with apparent commotion and movement. 

In his lifetime, Traylor was someone’s legal property, a slave. As an artist, he was homeless and poor, working in the streets, not respected, misunderstood and ignored. He is by now celebrated as one of America’s greatest 20^th Century artists, with his work hanging in some of the most respect galleries in the world.

Perhaps because Traylor was unfree in his life, he found unbridled freedom in his brilliant art. 

Like blues music, Traylor’s work induces tears in many viewers, attaining human peak emotional response to his art. Perhaps people are moved simply because his art has soul.

—

Many thanks to the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and Elizabeth Marwell 

All artworks by Bill Traylor Ⓒ Bill Traylor Family Trust

The author thanks all for the limited, scholarly use of Bill Traylor’s Images:

The Bill Traylor Family Trust

The William Louis-Dreyfus Collection

The Estate of Charles Shannon 

The T. Marshall Hahn Collection

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Collection of Penny And Allan Katz

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Modern Art In New York

The Collection of Judy A. Saslow

The High Museum of Art, Atlanta Georgia

The Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Dr. Siri Von Reis Collection

The Robert M. Greenberg Collection

Bibliography:

Sims, Lowery Stokes- Bill Traylor: Inside the Outsider. Pg.95. Deep Blues. Bill Traylor 1854-1949. Yale University Press 1999.

Sobel, Mechal. Painting a Hidden Life. The Art of Bill Traylor. Louisiana State University Press. 2009.

Schjeldahl, Peter. The Utterly original Bill Traylor. The New Yorker. Oct.1, 2018.   

Pena, Richard Perez-Pena, Settlement Over Artwork By an Ex-Slave, the New York Times. Oct. 7, 1993.

Kurzmeyer, Roman and Josef Helfenstein. Deep Blues. Bill Traylor 1854-1949. Yale University Press 1999.

Smith, Al. Down in Mississippi. Song lyric. Recorded first by Jimmy Reed in 1964.

Umberger, Leslie. Between Worlds, The Art of Bill Traylor. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, in association with Princeton University Press. 2018

—-

There is a mound of excellent scholarship about the life and times of Bill Traylor. This short essay cannot reflect his entire biography. Instead, this is merely a short vignette, an impression, a personal connection to this artist. For readers who wish to learn more about Bill Traylor, Frank Matheis recommends the book by Leslie Umberger. Between Worlds, The Art of Bill Traylor. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, in association with Princeton University Press. 2018. This large format art book features a large collection of Traylor prints and is perhaps the most extensive biography of his life and times. It is an exceptionally good value, at only $37. 

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^[1] https://folkartmarket.org/about/what-is-folk-art/

^[2] Sims, Lowery Stokes- Bill Traylor: Inside the Outsider. Pg.95. Deep Blues. Bill Traylor 1854-1949. Yale University Press 1999.

^[3] Sobel, Mechal. Painting a Hidden Life. The Art of Bill Traylor. Louisiana State University Press. 2009.

^[4] Guitarist John Fahey’s acoustic instrumentals were often called “American Primitive” which is a combination of country blues fingerpicking with nontraditional harmonic and melodic material. The term is dying out because it is fundamentally flawed and long outdated. 

^[5] Sims, Lowery Stokes- Bill Traylor: Inside the Outsider. Pg.95. Deep Blues. Bill Traylor 1854-1949. Yale University Press 1999.

^[6] Schjeldahl, Peter. The Utterly original Bill Traylor. The New Yorker. Oct.1, 2018.   

^[7] Pena, Richard Perez-Pena, Settlement Over Artwork By an Ex-Slave, the New York Times. Oct. 7, 1993

^[8] Kurzmeyer, Roman, Plow and Pencil. Pg.11. Deep Blues. Bill Traylor 1854-1949. Yale University Press 1999.

^[9] Official counts estimate that between 1882-1968, 299 African Americans were lynched in Alabama. Actual numbers are far higher as states actively tried to whitewash these statistics. The archives at the Tuskegee Institute, tabulated that 4,743 people died at the hands of US lynch mobs between 1881 and 1968. According to the Tuskegee numbers, 3,446 (nearly three-quarters) of those lynched were black Americans.

^[10] Smith, Al. Down in Mississippi. Recorded first by Jimmy Reed in 1964.

^[11] Umberger, Leslie. Between Worlds, The Art of Bill Traylor. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, in association with Princeton University Press. Pg. 125. 2018

^[12] Associated Press. High Museum to feature folk artist Bill Traylor. Deseret News. Feb.2, 2012.