Rauschenberg’s "Untitled, (Asheville Citizen)" c. 1952: Black Pain at Black Mountain

In Playing in the Dark (1992), her trenchant redirection of the American literary critical gaze, Toni Morrison observed that her “early assumptions as a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers.” Reading closely, she discovered that not only black people or characters but black history and idioms, what she calls the “Africanist” presence, did in fact play a crucial role in shaping America’s nationalist literature. This paper argues that the same can be said of the ‘Africanist’ presence in the work of a (B)lack painting by an iconic white modernist. But first, it asks: how is it possible to discover the significance of people of color in the imagination of white artists who conveniently eschew figurative modes and represented bodies? Configuring Morrison’s strategies to the histories of art, I take as a case study Untitled (Asheville Citizen) c. 1952, an early work by Robert Rauschenberg. Executed in the same year as Ellison’s Invisible Man, Rauschenberg’s diptych arguably documents the racism of the North Carolina town that was also home to Black Mountain, ‘Progressive’ art school founded by color theorist Josef Albers. Here I contend that in view of the work’s origins in an integrated Southern college at the height of Jim Crow, Rauschenberg uses white on black to render both literal and abstract the experience of segregation, pointing to its systemic causes and aestheticizing its very personal effects in this remarkable early canvas.