AS AMERICA observes Black History Month, I decided to take a closer look at one of our Guyanese artists whose work played an integral part in our black history.

Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) was a Guyanese painter who lived in Britain in the 1950s. During this time Williams was exhibiting his dense, chromatic canvases in various galleries and exhibition spaces in London. His work was also prominent in the London-based Caribbean Artists’ Movement in the 1960s and ‘70s. Williams gained recognition in 1965, when he was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for painting, and exhibited his latest, abstract composition, Guyana (1965), in London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
The painting Revolt was produced in Britain and given by Williams as a gift to the Guyanese people in 1960. The piece stirred up much controversy when the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society (RACS) in Georgetown, which housed the Guyana Museum, refused to exhibit the piece. This action prompted Jan Carew, a London based journalist and writer (like Williams, from Guyana) to write: ‘This august and antiquated body was striking a traditional posture of resistance to Guianese freedom. The colonial mentality cannot stand art and literature which smells of the earth and interprets truthfully the dreams of the people. For art and literature are like lightning, and lightning can never be timid.’ Revolt would not be allowed a showing until 1970 at the Guyana Museum at a Retrospective Exhibition of Guyanese Artists, organised by an art sub-committee chaired by Williams himself.

Williams is said to have painted himself as a representation of the slave. His self-identification in Revolt is also the key to understanding its historical impact in Guyana. The slave in Revolt is given a similar stance to the pose that the artist would have struck when standing to paint his mirror image. With raised hand to the canvas he placed a blade, in a technical procedure of metaphorical substitution: a weapon for a paintbrush. Equally, Williams plays with the observer’s point of view, by orienting the slave in Revolt toward his target of aggression, the Dutch planter, perhaps Governor Hoogenheim himself, and his household. As spectators, we stand in the same relation to the frame of his canvas as would the mirror in which he studied himself for a portrait so that he takes our view of him as his own view.

Williams once met fellow artist Pablo Picasso who only viewed him as a subject for his own work rather than a fellow artist. As a stereotypical encounter, the meeting was a basis for Williams’s ongoing complaint that black subjects have featured throughout modernism primarily as objects of interest, rather than as artists themselves. The need to resist such a situation would add urgency to his self-portrait in Revolt.

Relinquishing an authorial position through self-portraiture became a dominant concern in Britain by the early 1980s when black artists developed similar realist approaches to that of Williams several decades earlier. By putting their own bodies in the frame in a variety of new encodings, they aimed to identify both their both British and artistic presence. Williams self-identification runs beyond Georgetown and Berbice, toward self-assertion of his place within a genre of 1950s and 60s – neo-figuration in Britain. As such, the painting entwined two histories: the leading preoccupations among British post-war art, and the cultural politics of Guyana leading up to independence.

Revolt is typical of the work Williams continued to produce throughout his life in which he delivered figurative references in order to disclose some sharply critical outlooks. The painting is now a part of the National collection at the National Gallery of Art, Castellani House.

The information in this column was taken from a written piece entitled Aubrey Williams’s Art of Transnationalism: Entwining History at the End of Empire by Leon Wainwright in the Arts Journal Volume 2 Number 2