Eldzier Cortor, whose sculptural, Afro-Deco images of elegant, elongated black women were once so quietly enmeshed with the 20th century as to seem almost invisible, returned to Chicago the other day. He hadn’t been back in decades — many, many decades. He had grown up here, on the West and South Sides; his family, which moved from Virginia in 1917, were a part of the Great Migration. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, painted everyday Bronzeville for the Work Progress Administration and became a colleague to Chicago Black Renaissance stars Richard Wright, Archibald Motley and Gwendolyn Brooks; but then, in the 1950s, after also co-founding the South Side Community Art Center, he moved to New York.
He came back Saturday.
First trip home since ’52.
He was surprised to see the city had pancake houses and Kentucky Fried Chickens these days. He only recognized bits and pieces of skyline. He was small and carried a cane, his eyes liquid but lucid and aside from a tidy white mustache and a halo at his scalp, his hair was mostly gone. The last time he was in Chicago, prints of his paintings were treated as benchmarks among an emerging black middle class and his name was well-known enough to be dropped into a Sinclair Lewis novel as shorthand for middlebrow tastes.
He’s 99 now.
With good reason to return.
The Art Institute of Chicago, which began acquiring his art in the 1990s, just opened a small show of Cortor paintings and prints that the artist donated to the museum, one of the handful of influential institutions, including the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, to recently add Cortor’s now often overlooked, marginalized works to its collections. Early Saturday, in his suite at the Palmer House (courtesy of the Art Institute), Cortor leaned in, his memory keen, loose and fluid: “I think this (reassessment) is happening because of longevity, because I’m still here. But my mother was 103 when she died. She was a caterer to wealthy people, and my father owned an electrical shop on Cottage Grove — is there still a Cottage Grove? Plus, I still paint. I’m not a wine-women-and-song type. But I paint. There’s no money in this art thing. But I paint. I never felt overlooked. The Internet has lots of copies of me. And good copies! But I’m still here. Last night (at the opening), I got warm feelings: All of a sudden I’m shaking hands with the children of old friends — who are no longer here. So, today is dessert.”
There was, however, another reason he returned: he wanted to visit the Community Art Center, which he started with Motley and artist Margaret Burroughs and others in late 1940; the following spring, the center’s home on South Michigan Avenue (a former holding of White Sox founder Charles Comiskey, purchased by the artists) was dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt, becoming seminal in the development of black culture in the Midwest.
A phone rang in his suite.
His son, Michael, a 63-year old retired Queens, N.Y. school teacher, who came along to help his frail father, answered. The car had arrived to take them to the Community Art Center, where a homecoming reception would be waiting. Cortor put on his heavy winter and hat and moved through the Palmer House — “this place was beyond me when I lived in Chicago, of course” — as if on a treadmill, neither slow nor fast but steady. “What’s that thing about a prodigal son coming home?” he asked softly and airily, pushing through the polished halls. “Maybe I’m thinking Thomas Wolfe — ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ Some situation like that?”
He smiled, uncertain.
Outside, a black Mercedes pulled to the curb. Cortor took a window seat beside his son. This city had changed, the artist said, then once again, more wistfully. He didn’t recognize the steel curlicues of Pritzker Pavilion or Millennium Park itself. “Is ‘Ebony’ still here?” he asked, watching Grant Park rush past the car. “I remember my teacher taking us here and comparing these wide park streets to the Champs-Elysees.” A moment later he asked: “Is the Tribune Tower still a place?” Then a moment after that: “The Regal Theater?”
Michael watched his father watching.
“Dad,” he said, pointing, “the Field Museum.”
Cortor raised a hand to the window as if to touch the building — it was there, via the fabled SAIC instructor Kathleen Blackshear, where Cortor was introduced to the African art that partly informed his aesthetic.
“Still look the same, dad?”
“Oh yes, it does, definitely. Impressive, isn’t it? Hey, is there still a Soldier Field? They would take school kids there. There it is! Hey, what do you think of that? I had some good times there. It’s round but not really round, you know. Nice that it’s still there. New York, they tear everything down. Hey, who is your mayor?”
“Rahm Emanuel,” the driver said.
“Obama sidekick,” Michael said.
“We had Bill Thompson,” Cortor said. “Remember Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Kicked the lamp, burned the city?”
“Dad, dad … you weren’t there.”
“No, no, I know!”
A couple of days earlier, off the main lobby of the Art Institute in the gallery where Cortor’s show hangs through May, curator Mark Pascale examined a dense tangle of vaguely body-shaped abstractions, a print that Pascale once assumed was referencing Chicago’s meatpacking legacy. Instead, Cortor told him when they met that it was a reminder of the aftermath of the 1960s slaughters in Haiti, which Cortor had witnessed around the time of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s dictatorial reign. Pascale told this story by way of illustrating that Cortor had acted, in his own way, as an “environmental artist,” a man whose wanderlust — living in Haiti, studying with Japanese printmakers, residing in a colony of former slaves off the coast of South Carolina — had taken him far from Chicago (one of the reasons he hadn’t returned), defining his work.
Pascale said he first brought Cortor into the collection as a way of “building up a nucleus of great African-American artists to use as a backdrop for expanding our collection.” Cortor, who initially entered SAIC to be a cartoonist but found he had a talent for figurative painting, had been dedicated as early as his 1930s WPA works to depicting “the daily environment of African-Americans — which itself could be a form of protest.”
Pascale stopped before a print of a dancer, a long streamlined woman who appeared to be gliding amid Art Deco architecture of the ’40s. The work, and a few others like it in the show, had been made in the late ’70s. “One of the things I really like about Eldzier’s works is how so much of it doesn’t always seem of this world or time or country,” Pascale said, “but rather, it has gathered a kind of antiquity to it, this classical quality.”
It’s also, at times, kitschy.
But rather than curdle the works, Pascale agrees, that datedness provides layers. You can see the elaborate density of the great Marvel Comics artist Jack Kirby a nod to venerable WPA murals of Cortor’s youth, the skill of the handmade printing. But also, it’s not impossible to imagine his imagery rendered in black velvet, or employed as a nostalgic reference to black families of a certain era, used in the Afrocentric installations of young artists such as Mickalene Thomas and Chicago’s Rashid Johnson. One series of pieces, marked with the neon color of costume jewelry, would have nicely fit on the walls of the Death Star.
“To be honest,” Pascale said, considering the works, “Cortor drives some people crazy. They think this stuff is tacky. But it is done in a particular voice, and art without voice isn’t art. Eldzier is collected, he’s studied. You look at these pieces and realize he was working at a time when you couldn’t fight the wave of Abstract Expressionism in modern art. But he kept working, he never went away, never quite left. I visited him at his apartment on the Lower East Side, where he’s lived since the early ’60s, and he had this plant growing up the wall and over the ceiling. I asked about it. He said, like it was nothing, ‘Oh, that — housewarming gift.'”
The Mercedes pulled onto 47th Street and moved through Kenwood. Cortor’s face never pulled back from the window. He would stay quiet then erupt with questions. He had grown up not far away, around 50th Street and Forrestville, but as the car passed his street, he said nothing. Almost nothing from those days looked at all the way it had when he left Chicago. “I think we’re coming up to Obama’s neighborhood,” his son said.
“Oh, then we’re near Hyde Park,” Cortor said. “I like the gothic architecture. Is the Midway still there?”
“Do you want to see Obama’s house?” the driver asked.
“How about that!” Cortor said. “Give me a treat! Does he live there now?”
“He lives in the White House,” the driver said.
“Right, but Hyde Park! You went to public school here, you were prepared for university,” Cortor said, himself a graduate of Englewood High School. “I’m looking here for the Victorian homes, like they used to have.” The car moved past the president’s Chicago home, obscured by a wall of trees. “Oh, OK,” Cortor said, not really seeing the house. “Say, is there still a gate at the University of Chicago, to mark the atomic bomb thing?”
“You mentioned the Regal,” the driver said, pulling onto 47th Street. “It was here. But it was demolished.”
“Oh, no!” Cortor said, looking pained. “You’re kidding! But the Savoy Ballroom was there, too! It was really swinging in those days. Honestly? No Regal Theater? Tell me, where then did they put South Park Way?”
“I’m not familiar with that,” the driver said, turning the wheel, “but this is King Drive.”
“In honor of Martin Luther King,” Michael Cortor said.
“Right, right,” Cortor said. “Is there at least a Hull House?”
“Little further north, but closed.”
“Closed? No! Jane Addams?”
The car passed a window that seemed to have a very Cortor-like image of a black woman etched in stained glass. Cortor didn’t appear to notice. Michael’s phone rang and it was the Community Art Center, wondering where they were. Cortor listened to his son talk and then said, “Comiskey owned the building that the Art Center is in, you see. At least we thought he did. No, he did. What is he doing now?” The car turned on South Michigan Avenue and after a minute or so, the building, slightly weathered but welcoming, came into view.
The car stopped.
A small circle of young people and old people, most with cell phones turned around to take a picture, were waiting on the sidewalk, to record this moment, the last of surviving founders of the South Side Community Art Center, back at last. “Here?” Cortor said. “This is it? Well! Isn’t that amazing? You’re right. We are here.”
His door was opened.
“Whadayasay?” he asked the assembled, then stood a moment and looked up at the windows and decided:
“Guess I’m home.”
Twitter @borrelli
