MS01.01.03.B01.F25.052

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26

during the later quarter of the nineteenth century. In each
case the artist paid less attention to the racial features of
the subject in an attempt to blend human figures into the setting
without particular note.

Finally, it is of equal importance to note that the image
of the Black in American art had not been undertaken as a subject
around which an exhibition was worthy of presentation prior to
the summer of 1964. It was Marvin Sadik, until recent, Director
of the National Portrait Gallery, who assembled the first such
exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. It was called
The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting. The exhibition
ran through July 15, 1964. And perhaps for the very first time,
students of American art, other than Blacks themselves, took
special note of the Black theme as it appeared from colonial
time to the mid twentieth century. Saliently displayed were
canvasses showing blatent [blatant] feelings of racial inferiority previously cited. And perhaps for the first time art historians
realized the deliberate biases of some of America's visual
artists and recognized the contributions they made to the development
and perpetuation of images without honor to [deleted: any] the race.

This brief overview of the subect is by no means a comprehensive
study of the subject of race in American art nor is it
meant to be a sociological analysis, instead, it brings to our
attention a view of how American artists saw Blacks, first as
exotica, in the manner that some European artists saw them
though seldom as personalities. Secondly, they were depicted

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