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| Eldzier Cortor, Still-Life: Past Revisited, Oil on canvas, 1973. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The John Axelrod Collection - Frank B. Bemis Fund and Charles H. Bailey Fund, 2011.1821. Photograph courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC. |
Still-Life: Past Revisited
Text by Thomas B. Cole, MD, MPH
Excerpt:
Still-Life: Past Revisited was painted when Cortor, in his sixth decade of life, could pause and look back on the flourishing African American communities of the early 20th century. In some ways this period was a golden age, and Cortor was part of it. His family moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Chicago when he was about a year old to participate in the Windy City's economic expansion. He had to drop out of high school and get a job to help support his family, but he took drawing classes in the evening at the Art Institute of Chicago and was finally able to enroll as a full-time student there at the age of 25. After graduating from the Art Institute, Cortor was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to draw scenes of Depression-era Bronzeville, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side not far from where he grew up. Bronzeville thrived between 1910 and 1920, at the peak of the Great Migration of African Americans from southern states to northern cities, but like the rest of America the community was hit hard by the Great Depression, and after World War II it fell on hard times. Cortor may have been thinking of Bronzeville when he chose the setting for Still-Life: Past Revisited.
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