Heralded as a cultural prophet in life and dying, James Baldwin and his legacy have transcended actuality and spiraled into fantasy. The Black American author was many issues: aesthete, flaneur, playwright, essayist. Disciples cling to his phrases as gospel, mining textual content for magic till its creator is absorbed by our exaltation and buried inside our interpretations. Within the face of such deification, how does one conceive a trustworthy portrait of a person as enigmatic as Baldwin?
Cultural critic Hilton Als has made vital efforts to humanize and memorialize the pathbreaking author, most not too long ago in an art-essay hybrid ebook, God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin. The challenge is born out of a 2019 exhibition curated by Als for David Zwirner gallery in New York and contains reproductions of a number of the featured artworks, alongside temporary essays about Baldwin by Als, critic Teju Cole, filmmaker Barry Jenkins, and novelist Jamaica Kincaid, amongst others. Whereas the compendium considers how Baldwin noticed himself — significantly within the context of artwork, music, and movie — it most successfully elucidates how modern artists see themselves in and thru his work.
God Made My Face additionally succeeds in reminding us that Baldwin was lovely — an identifier he longed for. Baldwin wrestled with deep-rooted, intergenerational insecurities over his lifetime and wrote vividly in regards to the harsh degradation he endured from his stepfather, who lambasted him with insults throughout childhood, calling him “the ugliest boy he had ever seen.” It feels invaluable for the ebook to be centered round extolling Baldwin’s magnificence, which he contended with so devastatingly in his writing.
Our introduction to Baldwin’s visage is rapid: A crisp portrait photographed by Richard Avedon, his highschool classmate and later collaborator, adorns the quilt of the ebook. In an essay reproduced right here on their collaboration Nothing Private, a 1964 ebook pairing Baldwin’s writing with Avedon’s smooth photos, Als culls private recollections about its affect on his psyche as a queer boy and burgeoning critic. The publication launched emotions of lust and introduced him to a formative realization: “Artwork was a distinct and in some ways extra profound evocation of the reality of the occasions.”
The ebook’s meatiest essays entangle its authors with Baldwin’s teachings. Darryl Pinckney’s “On James Baldwin” traces his relationship to Baldwin from his personal childhood to their first, discomfiting assembly, and eventually Baldwin’s funeral. In an easy, amusing essay, “For Baldwin,” Jamaica Kincaid reveals that she discovered to jot down and perceive type by studying Baldwin after their probability assembly when she was 19. If God Made My Face envisions a conceptual portrait of Baldwin, it’s in tutorial Stephen Greatest’s essay, “Baldwin Listens to Himself,” that his options begin to turn into clear. Greatest digs into Baldwin’s self-perception and apprehensions, asking: “For the grownup Baldwin, reflecting on himself as a baby, what dissonant, threatening, perilous sonicity is he listening for?”
Baldwin’s writing was metamorphic, knowledgeable by these anxieties, by race, class, and sexuality — dubbed “sissy poetics” by Greatest (by the use of Marlon Ross’s “sissy sensorium”), and molded by figures like novelist Henry James or blues singer Bessie Smith, who helped Baldwin reconcile his preoccupations about Blackness whereas overseas. His pen was lyrical and theatric, influenced additionally by an upbringing within the church and stint as a baby preacher. Als, Pinckney, and actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste name upon the acquainted language of the pulpit of their essays on interacting with Baldwin’s oeuvre.
Black Christian iconography additionally seems within the ebook by way of an oil-on-canvas church scene titled “Rehearsal” (1952) by modernist painter Beauford Delaney. These conceptual throughlines deliberated on in Baldwin’s writing type the inspiration on which Als curated this assortment of artworks. Different items deal with concepts and locales Baldwin spent a lifetime considering: queerness, in Alvin Baltrop’s silver gelatin prints of the New York Metropolis piers’ homosexual cruising scenes; all-consuming movie star, in a portrait of a younger Michael Jackson by Anthony Barboza; race, in Glenn Ligon’s work subverting coloring books from the Sixties and ’70s that includes Black iconoclasts like Malcolm X and Harriet Tubman. God Made My Face lacks an essay that straight addresses the artwork inside its pages, an unlucky omission that at occasions renders its imagery indifferent. Stills from Kara Walker’s movie “8 Attainable Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America” (2005) would profit from the added context that, in response to Als in a Paris Evaluation article on the 2019 exhibition, her imaginative and prescient aligns intently with Baldwin’s unrealized aspirations as an experimental filmmaker.
As for his precise likeness, we see Baldwin depicted on the unique covers of his beloved Notes of a Native Son (1955), in illustrations by John Bachardy and George McCalman, in sculptures by Larry Wolhander, and in work by Marlene Dumas. Most evocative is “Darkish Rapture (James Baldwin)” (1941), a lush, kaleidoscopic nude of a teenage Baldwin by Delaney, certainly one of his mentors. Als introduces the ebook by musing in regards to the work’s sitting course of and fictionalizing what he imagines of this primary assembly, the christening of a relationship that proved mutually transformative.
In the end, God Made My Face succeeds most as a candy tribute to Baldwin’s magnificence, and in understanding the ways in which he was formed by artists and, in flip, has molded generations in his wake. The ebook’s writings reveal extra in regards to the essayists than the titular topic himself, however it’s in these moments, slightly than these when it makes an attempt to biography the late creator, that it sings. The overall consensus among the many ebook’s contributors, it appears, is that Baldwin was doing one thing much more intricate and intimate than writing along with his work. It’s an invite, it’s musicality, it’s visualization. Baldwin left behind a lot for us to parse, from cultural criticism to fiction and private essays. It’s near-impossible for us to really know the author, regardless of this inheritance of written phrases, however God Made My Face helps deliver him into deeper focus.
God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin (2024) edited by Hilton Als (with texts by Als, Stephen Greatest, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, and Darryl Pinckney) is printed by Dancing Foxes Press and the Brooklyn Museum.