Art galleries are traditionally quiet places filled with whispered words of criticism or praise or bewilderment. But Tuesday afternoon it seemed particularly noisy in the Sidney R. Yates Gallery on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, where a handful of people wandered through a spectacular exhibition titled “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist.”
The noise was not unpleasant; rather, it enhanced the viewing experience. People talked louder than usual: “This one is really amazing.” “So colorful and vibrant.” On the east side of the gallery, where large windows displayed a fighting-toward-spring Grant Park, was a video monitor looping a 5-minute, 55-second film by Charles Stone III of images by the artist and words from experts and critics. In the hallway leading to the gallery there was music: “Hot Stuff” from 1928 by Fess Williams and his Joy Boys, and “J’ai Deux Amours,” a 1930 recording by Josephine Baker.
The music, all 10 tunes of it, was jazz, and as my colleague Howard Reich rightly observed in print a couple of weeks ago, “Though not all of Motley’s paintings concern music … it’s the jazz life that animates his world and this exhibition.”
He’s right. Motley’s jazz club paintings — Reich writes that they allow you to “experience something that no photograph can convey with comparable intensity: the energy, movement, music and noise of Chicago jazz as it came of age” — are the stars of this show. But there is much more. There are portraits of Motley’s mother, Mary, and grandmother, Emma, and a 1933 self-portrait with a nude model. There are paintings from the time Motley spent in Paris.
He also went to Mexico to visit his nephew Willard, and near four paintings from those journeys in the 1950s is an enlarged typed page detailing the pair’s adventures that includes this about a trip to San Miguel Allende: “We came in late, about 1 o’clock, no bars open, no whorehouses in that town where we could have a drink. Stay at a very interesting hotel.”
Reading that and seeing these paintings of Mexico, I was startled by another noise.
It was a sound some 50 years old: the buzz of the doorbell in the second floor of an apartment in Old Town, followed by the sight of Willard Motley at the apartment door, wearing on his face a bright smile and carrying in his hands two rolls of bright silver pesos.
He had come to see my parents, who were his friends. The pesos were a gift for my young brother and me, and he brought them to us the two or three times he visited.
As terrific and enlightening as it is to have Archibald Motley evoked in such a vivid exhibition (running through August), it must be remembered that his nephew is no less important.
Willard Motley was famous and successful for a time but is now mostly forgotten. If he is remembered at all, it is for a few words out of the millions he wrote: “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”
Those words came from Nick Romano, the protagonist of Motley’s 1947 novel, “Knock on Any Door,” and were further immortalized a couple of years later by John Derek in the film of the same name. Romano is a former altar boy sent to reform school for some petty crimes. He comes out hardened and spirals downward, eventually winding up on trial for killing a cop.
Horace Clayton reviewed the book for the Tribune, writing, “Chicago has produced many great writers …. But of all of them, (Theodore) Dreiser not excepted … only Motley has dealt in such detail with the nuances of feeling — the delicate balance between love and hate, cruelty and kindness — which exists in the human personality.”
In 1947, Motley was on top of the world. But it had not been an easy climb. He was born out of wedlock and grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents, his mother having moved to New York after his birth. The family lived in what was then the virtually all-white Englewood neighborhood. His “older brother,” Archibald, was actually his uncle. Nearly 20 years older than Willard, Archibald convinced him of the power of creativity, and when Willard was 13 he sent a short story to the Chicago Defender newspaper. The editors were so impressed that they offered him a weekly column, and thus did he become the first of many to write under the byline of Bud Billiken, a mythical figure created by the paper to tell children’s stories and a character celebrated for decades in the eponymous South Side parade that takes place every August and is the oldest and largest African-American parade in the country.
Willard couldn’t find a job after graduating from Englewood High School and so wandered the Depression-ravaged country before returning here in 1939.
He lived in down-and-out conditions in the Maxwell Street area, published some short fiction in the Hull House Magazine and wrote for the Works Project Administration’s Federal Writers Project.
Then he wrote “Knock on Any Door” and followed that hit with 1951’s “We Fished All Night,” about the impact of World War II on three young Chicago men. It was panned by the critics and ignored by the public. But in 1958 came “Let No Man Write My Epitaph,” a best-seller that picked up the lives of some minor characters in “Knock on Any Door” and became a 1960 movie starring Burl Ives, James Darren and Ella Fitzgerald.
He wound up being hounded by the IRS and spent his last years in near-poverty, some of those living in Mexico, where he adopted a son and wrote his final novel, “Let Noon Be Fair.” It was published a year after his death in 1965.
His uncle Archibald outlived him by more than 15 years, painted more paintings and now has this fine and exciting show. There is a lengthy and detailed biography of the painter in the entrance to the gallery. And while those old jazz songs play, you can learn about him and see photos of him and read some of the things he said over the decades in interviews, such as, “Give the artist of the Race a chance to express himself in his own individual way … and we shall have a great variety of art, a great art.”
There is also on the walls a photo of Willard Motley, seen in profile with Archibald at a 1947 book party for “Knock on Any Door.” There are no quotes from the author on the walls, but you might hear the echo of something he once said, in response to critics who grumbled about this black man writing about white characters: “My race is the human race.”
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
