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In 1921, Washington native Jean Toomer was invited to serve as the principal of a black school in Sparta, Georgia. While there, he gathered vignettes and impressions that would eventually form the core of Cane. Part prose, part poetry, Cane was lauded upon its publication in 1923 as a work of profound lyricism, written in a distinctly modern voice. In the foreword to the first edition, Waldo Frank wrote, “Cane is a harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader of this book will be in doubt. The result is that abstract and absolute thing called Art.” [1] Rather than a linear narrative, Cane weaves together the stories of African Americans in the South, Washington, DC, and New York. In particular, Toomer focused on the experiences of rural African American women.
The Arion Press publication of Cane in 2000 is the result of a collaboration between artist Martin Puryear and the founder of Arion Press, Andrew Hoyem. For the project, Puryear produced ten new woodcut prints and a limited edition of fifty wooden slipcases for the bound book. Puryear recalls that Hoyem “introduced himself at a New York print fair … and immediately invited me to think about what book I might want to develop a visual response to. I suggested Cane, and it turned out to be something he had a special interest in as well.” [2] Puryear remembers that he had read Cane when he was teaching at Fiske University in Nashville, Tennessee. “I was living in the South for the first time. It was good to read the book in context, being there. My experience was similar to Toomer’s. He came as an outsider and was looking at what so defines the South as an outsider. Washington, DC, where I grew up, as did Toomer, is a very southern city, but it is not the South. I had read about the deep South and knew it intellectually, but I hadn’t experienced it. That year I traveled around the South, went to Alabama, Mississippi. It hadn’t changed much from Toomer’s time. This is the work of mine that is most connected to a region and to the experience of being a black man in America.” [3]
Puryear found that developing a visual response to Cane was a challenge. “Early on, I decided to make images inspired by the female characters as a way to organize the work, given the complex nature of the book. The women are such strong, pivotal characters. In retrospect, I see that I was making portraits of these women, but not likenesses. They are abstract, with some reality flowing through.” [4] Puryear chose woodcut prints for the project, since he frequently works with wood in his sculptures. “I’d worked with woodcuts when I was a student,” he said in an interview about the project. “It was a chance to revisit something I was involved with early on. They force decisiveness. There’s nothing black and white in a woodcut. It’s very tedious to get middle tones.” [5]
Arion Press produced four hundred limited edition copies of Cane in 2000. Three hundred and fifty are bound simply in linen. For fifty special editions, Puryear crafted a wooden slipcase of four different types of wood meant to suggest a range of skin tones: African wenge, Swiss pear, American walnut, and sugar maple. The choices of wood also connect to the places that formed Puryear as an artist: Africa, Europe, and America.
Puryear also produced ten woodcut prints for the publication. Seven represent the female characters in Cane. Three smaller prints are Puryear’s reinterpretations of the graphic arcs that Toomer himself created for the original publication. In the “portraits” that Puryear creates for Cane, the artist’s organic imagery—seedpods, sunbursts, tree-rings—mirrors Toomer's lyrical treatment of women in his story.
In Toomer’s text, Becky, a white woman, had two Negro sons. Refusing to confess the identity of her sons’ father or fathers, Becky is shunned by both the whites and blacks in her town, but some in the community aid her in secret: “When the first was born, the white folks said they'd have no more to do with her. And black folks, they too joined hands to cast her out. The pines whispered to Jesus. The railroad boss said not to say he said it, but she could live, if she wanted to, on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road. John Stone, who owned the lumber and the bricks, would have shot the man who told he gave the stuff to Lonnie Deacon, who stole out there at night and built the cabin. A single room held down to earth. … O fly away to Jesus…by a leaning chimney. … Six trains each day rumbled past and shook the ground under her cabin.” [6]
Puryear renders Becky’s cabin as a simple square and triangle placed upside down on a small hill. From the hill spring two slender stems representing Becky’s two sons. The roots are deeply planted in the ground; leaves and seeds sprout from the ends of the stems. At the far left edge, parallel lines suggest train tracks curving past the hill and cabin. The stark contrast of black and white are emblematic of the divisions between the black and white citizens of Toomer’s fictional town, and the dark forces that eventually led to Becky’s demise.
Notes:
[1] “The Arion Press Announces the Publication of Cane by Jean Toomer.” Promotional brochure. San Francisco, CA: Arion Press, 2000, 4.
[2] Kenneth Baker, “Carving Novel Images of Black Experience/Sculptor Martin Puryear,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Carving-Novel-Images-Of-Black-Experience-3238439.php
[3] “The Arion Press Announces,” 12.
[4] “The Arion Press Announces,” 12.
[5] Baker, “Carving Novel Images.”
[6] Jean Toomer, Cane (New York, London: Liveright, 1923, reissued 2011), 8–9.
ProvenanceFrom 2000 to 2001
Michael S. Oruch, New York, NY, Purchased from Arion Press (publisher), San Francisco, CA, on September 26, 2000. [1]
After 2001
Purchased by Reynolda House from dealer Michael S. Oruch, New York, NY on September 17, 2001. [2]
Notes:
[1] Invoice from September 26, 2000
[2] Invoice from September 17, 2001
Exhibition History2005-2006
Paper, Leather, Wood: Materials and African American Art of the Twentieth Century
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (Nov. 15, 2005 - April 16, 2006)
Published References
DepartmentAmerican Art
Becky
Artist
Martin Puryear
(born 1941)
Date2000
Mediumwoodcut on Kitakata paper
DimensionsFrame: 21 1/8 x 23 1/4 in. (53.7 x 59.1 cm)
Paper: 17 x 20 1/2 in. (43.2 x 52.1 cm)
Image: 10 1/2 x 12 3/4 in. (26.7 x 32.4 cm)
SignedM. Puryear
Credit LineMuseum purchase
Copyright©Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Object number2001.4.3
DescriptionMartin Puryear’s Cane reveals the artist’s ongoing interest in African American history and culture. Sculptures in the artist’s oeuvre, such as Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth, 1978, collection of the artist, and Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 1996, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, pay tribute to significant African American figures. Cane is Puryear’s response to an important literary work from the Harlem Renaissance, Cane by Jean Toomer.In 1921, Washington native Jean Toomer was invited to serve as the principal of a black school in Sparta, Georgia. While there, he gathered vignettes and impressions that would eventually form the core of Cane. Part prose, part poetry, Cane was lauded upon its publication in 1923 as a work of profound lyricism, written in a distinctly modern voice. In the foreword to the first edition, Waldo Frank wrote, “Cane is a harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader of this book will be in doubt. The result is that abstract and absolute thing called Art.” [1] Rather than a linear narrative, Cane weaves together the stories of African Americans in the South, Washington, DC, and New York. In particular, Toomer focused on the experiences of rural African American women.
The Arion Press publication of Cane in 2000 is the result of a collaboration between artist Martin Puryear and the founder of Arion Press, Andrew Hoyem. For the project, Puryear produced ten new woodcut prints and a limited edition of fifty wooden slipcases for the bound book. Puryear recalls that Hoyem “introduced himself at a New York print fair … and immediately invited me to think about what book I might want to develop a visual response to. I suggested Cane, and it turned out to be something he had a special interest in as well.” [2] Puryear remembers that he had read Cane when he was teaching at Fiske University in Nashville, Tennessee. “I was living in the South for the first time. It was good to read the book in context, being there. My experience was similar to Toomer’s. He came as an outsider and was looking at what so defines the South as an outsider. Washington, DC, where I grew up, as did Toomer, is a very southern city, but it is not the South. I had read about the deep South and knew it intellectually, but I hadn’t experienced it. That year I traveled around the South, went to Alabama, Mississippi. It hadn’t changed much from Toomer’s time. This is the work of mine that is most connected to a region and to the experience of being a black man in America.” [3]
Puryear found that developing a visual response to Cane was a challenge. “Early on, I decided to make images inspired by the female characters as a way to organize the work, given the complex nature of the book. The women are such strong, pivotal characters. In retrospect, I see that I was making portraits of these women, but not likenesses. They are abstract, with some reality flowing through.” [4] Puryear chose woodcut prints for the project, since he frequently works with wood in his sculptures. “I’d worked with woodcuts when I was a student,” he said in an interview about the project. “It was a chance to revisit something I was involved with early on. They force decisiveness. There’s nothing black and white in a woodcut. It’s very tedious to get middle tones.” [5]
Arion Press produced four hundred limited edition copies of Cane in 2000. Three hundred and fifty are bound simply in linen. For fifty special editions, Puryear crafted a wooden slipcase of four different types of wood meant to suggest a range of skin tones: African wenge, Swiss pear, American walnut, and sugar maple. The choices of wood also connect to the places that formed Puryear as an artist: Africa, Europe, and America.
Puryear also produced ten woodcut prints for the publication. Seven represent the female characters in Cane. Three smaller prints are Puryear’s reinterpretations of the graphic arcs that Toomer himself created for the original publication. In the “portraits” that Puryear creates for Cane, the artist’s organic imagery—seedpods, sunbursts, tree-rings—mirrors Toomer's lyrical treatment of women in his story.
In Toomer’s text, Becky, a white woman, had two Negro sons. Refusing to confess the identity of her sons’ father or fathers, Becky is shunned by both the whites and blacks in her town, but some in the community aid her in secret: “When the first was born, the white folks said they'd have no more to do with her. And black folks, they too joined hands to cast her out. The pines whispered to Jesus. The railroad boss said not to say he said it, but she could live, if she wanted to, on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road. John Stone, who owned the lumber and the bricks, would have shot the man who told he gave the stuff to Lonnie Deacon, who stole out there at night and built the cabin. A single room held down to earth. … O fly away to Jesus…by a leaning chimney. … Six trains each day rumbled past and shook the ground under her cabin.” [6]
Puryear renders Becky’s cabin as a simple square and triangle placed upside down on a small hill. From the hill spring two slender stems representing Becky’s two sons. The roots are deeply planted in the ground; leaves and seeds sprout from the ends of the stems. At the far left edge, parallel lines suggest train tracks curving past the hill and cabin. The stark contrast of black and white are emblematic of the divisions between the black and white citizens of Toomer’s fictional town, and the dark forces that eventually led to Becky’s demise.
Notes:
[1] “The Arion Press Announces the Publication of Cane by Jean Toomer.” Promotional brochure. San Francisco, CA: Arion Press, 2000, 4.
[2] Kenneth Baker, “Carving Novel Images of Black Experience/Sculptor Martin Puryear,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2011, http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Carving-Novel-Images-Of-Black-Experience-3238439.php
[3] “The Arion Press Announces,” 12.
[4] “The Arion Press Announces,” 12.
[5] Baker, “Carving Novel Images.”
[6] Jean Toomer, Cane (New York, London: Liveright, 1923, reissued 2011), 8–9.
ProvenanceFrom 2000 to 2001
Michael S. Oruch, New York, NY, Purchased from Arion Press (publisher), San Francisco, CA, on September 26, 2000. [1]
After 2001
Purchased by Reynolda House from dealer Michael S. Oruch, New York, NY on September 17, 2001. [2]
Notes:
[1] Invoice from September 26, 2000
[2] Invoice from September 17, 2001
Exhibition History2005-2006
Paper, Leather, Wood: Materials and African American Art of the Twentieth Century
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (Nov. 15, 2005 - April 16, 2006)
Published References
Status
Not on view