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  • Blog

Realization by Augusta Savage

4/4/2016

17 Comments

 
Picture
Realization with sculptor Augusta Savage
I want to blog about the sculpture “Realization” by African American sculptor Augusta Savage for two reasons:  1) It has affected me deeply and permanently, and I find myself haunted by its image for a number of reasons I hope to be able to explore.  2) It is very difficult to find information about it online.

In fact, it is difficult to find detailed information about Augusta Savage. There are several internet sites, but most of them appear to be reposting the same biography. There are significant gaps in her history, and especially about her later years.  The only published biography I could locate turned out to be an illustrated children’s book.
In terms of the sculpture, I could only find one photograph. It turns up on several sites in various cropped, tinted, or photoshopped permutations—but always the same photo. All I could find out about it was that it was commissioned in 1938 by the Work Projects Administration of the New Deal. I couldn’t locate any information about the current ownership or whereabouts of the statue, or even if it still exists. Sadly, it seems that many of Savage’s sculptures have not survived, because she lacked resources during her lifetime to cast them more permanently in metal, and also because she destroyed much of her work.
 
What do we know about Savage? She was born in 1892 in Green Cove, Florida, and her childhood was fraught with terror and violence. Early on, she had discovered that she could shape the figures of animals from the clay near her home. Her father, a Methodist minister, considered these “graven images,” and he would stomp on them and then batter the little girl in his efforts to control her. Savage later said, “My father licked me four or five times a week, and almost whipped all the art out of me.”
Picture
PictureRobert Lincoln Poston
We know she married at fifteen and gave birth to a daughter within a year. Her husband died shortly after this, and she married again, divorcing the second husband before she was thirty. Leaving her daughter with her parents, she moved to New York in 1921 to study art at Cooper Union.
 
Around the time of her graduation, she was selected to attend a summer art program outside of Paris with a hundred other young American women. When it was discovered that she was African American, her application was refused by the French. A scandal ensued, but the decision was not revoked.

This same year, Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston, an associate of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic Jamaican radical who had founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Harlem in 1916. Garvey also founded the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line, and promoted the dream of using these Black-owned ships to return African Americans to their ancestral lands. Poston had been sent with a delegation to secure lands in Liberia for these settlements, but sadly, he died of pneumonia on his return voyage, just one year after marrying Savage. She was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance and sculpted busts of both W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey. Savage was one of the first artists in any genre to consistently work with black physiognomy.

PictureSavage working on The Harp
In 1929 and 1931, Savage won fellowships to study in France. She also won a Carnegie fellowship for eight months of travel in Europe. Returning during the Depression, she founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem, and five years later she was appointed the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. She took a two-year leave-of-absence to work on a commissioned sculpture for the 1939 World’s Fair. This sculpture, The Harp, received much press, but was ultimately destroyed at the end of the fair. Savage found that during her leave-of-absence, she had been replaced at her job. She attempted to found another art center and a small gallery, but after a series of frustrations, she retired to the town of Saugerties in the Catskill Mountains of New York. About twenty years later, she returned to New York, to live with her daughter.
 
So that’s what we know through biography. There is another encyclopedia of knowledge encoded in Realization.
 
Unable to find anything Savage wrote or narrated about the piece, I am going to share my subjective response.

PictureThe Greek Slave
First, it appears to be about enslavement. The title, in my understanding, refers to the moment when the last shreds of denial, distraction, or wishful thinking are stripped away, and these two are confronted with the absolute horror and helplessness of their situation. Because of the placement of the woman’s arms, it appears that her shirt or the top of her dress has been intentionally stripped away, and that she is attempting to protect herself.
 
The male could be either her son or her partner. In either case, he is posed in a position suggestive of a frightened child. This is a radical choice on the part of Savage.
 
Unquestionably, Savage was familiar with the sculpture The Greek Slave, by American sculptor Hiram Power. Completed in 1844, it went on to become one of the best-known and critically acclaimed artworks of the nineteenth century. Unlike Savage, Powers’ words about his creation have been preserved:

"Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God. Gather all these afflictions together, and add to them the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, and no room will be left for shame."
 
When the statue went on international tour, the pamphet read: “It represents a being superior to suffering, and raised above degradation, by inward purity and force of character.”
PictureFace of The Greek Slave
In fact, the victim appears to be calm and complacent, and I suspect that the great popularity of the sculpture had more to do with its pornographic implications than with an abolitionist sentiment.
 
Without any knowledge of Savage's grandparents, one could reasonably conclude that, if they were in Florida in the mid-1860’s, they were most probably enslaved on a plantation. Savage’s work reflects a perspective that, in my eyes, is uniquely female and, unlike Powers’, deeply identified with the victims of enslavement. It is impossible to “pornographize” Realization. In fact, I find it difficult to imagine that anyone viewing the piece could do anything except empathize with the suffering represented in the figures. Also, it is important to remember that Savage's childhood was that of a captive, forced to endure multiple beatings every week.

PictureThe widely publicized 2000 Yard Stare
Trauma is difficult to depict in art, because trauma is about having to accept the unacceptable. One can depict the adjustment after acceptance (which Powers claimed he was doing), or one can depict the post-traumatic dissociation (The 2000 Yard Stare by war artist Tom Lea, a 1944 portrait of a Marine at the Battle of Peleliu)… but to capture that moment, that fragile and terrifying moment of utter freefall after denial is ripped away and before the mind can split or numb itself… that is the genius of Realization.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." There is no formal feeling in the moment that Savage is capturing. I try to imagine the work of creating this: conception, armature, models, drawings, calculations, grids, the clay- sculpting of thousands of tiny carvings and shapings. Savage probably spent two years on it—holding that moment, that nanosecond too fleeting for a camera to catch, that second when the bubble bursts, before it dissipates.

This photograph is itself a work of art. The creator is part of the grouping. She is touching the shoulder and the foot of the male victim, putting herself into the work.  Savage's face  says, “I bear witness.” I cannot imagine the fortitude it took to create this piece. The world that celebrates The Pietà  and The Greek Slave will never be able to look this work in the face. It should rank as one of the great sculptures of the world.
 
I wrote this blog to say, “I see you, Augusta Savage. I see what you have done. I will live with the impact of this work for the rest of my life. You have given me and the world a great gift, and I know it came at incalculable cost to yourself. Thank you.”
Picture
Augusta Savage
17 Comments
Jamie link
4/5/2016 10:12:38 am

Beautiful. Thank you.

Reply
Jendi link
4/5/2016 01:15:55 pm

Thank you for recovering this important piece of history. You might like Robin Coste Lewis' poetry book "Voyage of the Sable Venus" (National Book Award winner 2015), about the objectification of the black female figure in Western art.

Reply
Eileen Floros
4/5/2016 04:03:03 pm

Carolyn, have you seen the film Rosenwald? Augusta Savage benefitted from a Julius Rosenwald fellowship. Powerful sculpture and your thoughts are, as usual, well...powerful.
EIleen

Reply
Carolyn Gage link
4/5/2016 06:50:25 pm

Thanks, all... Eileen, she actually received two Rosenwald fellowships. Says much about the fellowship that they did not discriminate by race or gender in that era.

Reply
Eileen Floros
4/6/2016 12:17:45 am

Julius Rosenwald escaped the Nazis in Europe. When he got here, he noticed that America treated the descendants of the enslaved Africans in much the same way that the Jews were being persecuted in Europe.
Rosenwald (president of Sears,Roebuck) built many schools in African-American communities and underwrote African-American artists on purpose, to mitigate as much as he could, the pathology of American racism.
Hopefully, the film Rosenwald will be more widely viewed. It was 90 minutes of American history that we have never seen in the history books!

I forwarded your newsletter to a friend and wonder if "Harriet Tubman..." will be produced here in Portland again.

Diane Adam
4/6/2016 02:42:05 pm

I grew up in Saugerties NY where Augusta Savage lived from 1945-1962. The Augusta Housee and Studio is on the historical register. If you Google Augusta Savage in Saugerties NY there is a NYTIMES article that includes information about why she had to leave New York City and disappear into rural NY. There is also a Hudson River blogspot. The House and Studio page has photos.

Reply
Catrina Primeaux
8/26/2016 08:07:16 pm

Thank you for this informaton, i am doing an art essay on this artist and the artwork and can't seem t find any information on her. So again Thank You.

Reply
Algenee
2/1/2017 03:39:43 pm

WOW!! Well said!!

Reply
Gail Tanzer
1/8/2018 06:32:24 pm

I am writing a historic fiction book about Augusta Savage. Your blog reinforces the fact that many people are interested in this woman's art and her valiant struggle to have the work of Black artists in the 1920s and 30s be recognized.

Reply
Theresa Leininger-Miller link
1/10/2019 10:00:58 pm

I've researched and published on Savage extensively. You might check out my chapter on her in my book, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934 (Rutgers, 2001). With a NEH Fellowship and O'Keeffe Fellowship, I am writing a monograph on her.

Reply
Carolyn Gage link
1/10/2019 10:42:21 pm

Theresa, thank you for posting here. I am ordering your book tonight. Thank you for researching this woman. I also have written a play where Robert Lincoln Poston is one of the major characters. Happy to email you a PDF. Sheryl Lee Ralph is producing a reading of it next month in NYC. https://carolyngage.weebly.com/black-star.html

Reply
Carolyn Gage link
1/22/2019 07:41:18 pm

Dear Theresa Leininger-Miller... I just finished your chapter on Savage... and most of the book... Thank you for such a difficult and meticulous job researching... and so heart-breaking how much of the art has been "lost." I hope that some of it will resurface some day. I will keep an eye out for your monograph. I have written a play about Henrietta Vinton Davis, a fascinating woman, who was a member of UNIA's Liberian delegation along with Robert Poston. Most of the play features the two of them. Sheryl Lee Ralph is producing a reading of it next month in NYC. In the play there is a reference to Savage's infant daughter's death. https://carolyngage.weebly.com/black-star.html

Reply
Brigid l Whipple
7/21/2019 06:52:13 pm

Thank you for writing this tribute.

Reply
Gail Tanzer link
3/19/2020 02:52:11 pm

You did an excellent job of researching Augusta Savage. I have recently written a historical fiction book about her that was published by Taylor and Seale. I did extensive research myself on her and went to all of the places where she lived. My book is entitled Graven Images and is on Amazon. I think your readers will like it. I could not get to the bottom of where Realization is either. Since it is made of bronze, I don't know how it could have ended up in a garbage dump.

Reply
carolyn gage link
3/19/2020 06:08:24 pm

Hi, Gail... I'm fascinated that it was actually cast... I had assumed that it existed only in clay and that it had been destroyed. Where did you find that it was cast? And your book sounds fascinating.

Reply
Thomas Creeley
11/1/2020 09:29:05 am

Great post. I saw the photograph of "Realization" this morning and recognized it as a great American sculpture. I've been trying to locate its physical location. How horrible to contemplate that it may have been lost. At the very least we have it documented in this wonderful photograph. I hope that if "Realization" is located, its discovery will be widely published.

Reply
Yachi Battle link
4/13/2021 12:57:44 pm

Awesome! I came across this blog, because, I myself am trying to find information on Miss Savage for a project for class and am baffled that there is hardly any information on her pieces or the artist herself. Thank you for this profound depiction of this piece.

Reply



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    Carolyn Gage

    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

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