ABSTRACT

African art’s influence on African American art is often accepted a priori, as natural as the commonly used term African American itself. As with many African American artists, Hale Woodruff was deeply engaged in expressing his black experience as well as staking a position in the history of American modernism, often using African art to mediate the tensions that arose. Woodruff’s 1930 painting, Card Players, is the artist’s most significant engagement with African forms and modernist abstraction during his time in France. For Woodruff, many of the abstract forms already found in African art, such as the abstracted glyphs of some Asante gold weights, functioned as signs that were both specifically tied to African art but also invoked universal archetypes. With greater knowledge of African art, audiences were able to more easily identify allusions to Africa in African American art and to make their own connections.