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in his 1943 book, Modem Negro Art, and Cedric Dover alloted the sculptor thirteen reproductions in American Negro Art, published in 1960. Of the three small bronzes?The Harmonica Player, Shoe Shine Boy, and The Boxer (Fig. 133)?James Porter wrote that they ?are so close to perfection of statement that their effect on the spectator is transporting. Never elsewhere had the sculptor better suited means to mood or pose to action.?*' Dover claimed that Barthes sculpture was charged with the ?immensity of life ... all Negro history, potentiality and hope broods in The Negro Looks Ahead [Fig. 173].... It is a quiet piece, quietly executed,? waiting for what Rodin called ?the latent heroism of natural movement.?*7
Born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, of Afro-Ameri-can, French, and American Indian parentage, Barth6,
with only a grade-school education, completed four years of study at the Art Institute of Chicago and a year at the Art Students League in New York. He began his career as a painter and was first introduced as a sculptor at the Chicago Women?s City Club in 1927. In 1933 he was granted his first one-man show? in New York at the D. Caz-Delbo Galleries. Recognition came early: His ?ecstatic and excellent? African Dancer (Fig. 174) was considered one of the attractions of the otherwise drab second Whitney biennial and was purchased by the museum. By 1935 the Whitney collection included two other Barth6 works?The Comedian and Blackberry Woman, the latter a small, elegant bronze that captures the spirit of African sculpture (Fig. 175). Barth6 was, at that time, the only Black artist so represented.1*
173. Richmond Bajvth?.
The Negro Looks Ahead, c. 1944. Plaster, over life-size.
Schomburg Collection,
New York Public Library
(Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations).
130 The Atro-Amerlcan Artist