Lynch Family
Framed: 45 1/2 x 43 1/2 inches (115.57 x 110.49 cm)
- 219
Art Américain Contemporain, Galerie Georges Giroux, Brussels, March 20–April 10, 1948 (traveled), no. 44.
The Friends of Art in Retrospect, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Mo., December 1953, no cat.
Paintings Loaned by the Friends of Art Collection, Wichita Art Museum, Kans., William Rockhill Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum, Kansas City, April 22–May 6, 1956, no cat.
Distinguished Americans, Hackley Art Gallery, Muskegon, Mich., September 30–October 28, 1956, no cat.
Retrospective Exhibition, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, May 24–June 24, 1959, unnumbered.
The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Me., May 15–September 6, 1964, no. 76.
The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, Forum Gallery, New York, September 25–October 6, 1967, no. 27.
50 Years of Collecting: The Friends of Art Collection, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., December 15, 1984–January 15, 1985, no cat.
American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920–1950, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, September 26, 2003–May 9, 2004 (Columbus Museum of Art and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Ill., only), unnumbered.
Joseph Hirsch painted Lynch Family as a response to racial disturbances in the South in 1946. That year the number of lynchings rose from an all-time low in January to a fevered pitch by August. Citizens across the country urged President Truman and Congress to end the horrors. To capture the tragedy of Lynch Family, Hirsch presented a mother with her baby, presumably survivors of a lynching victim, in abstracted surroundings. The painting focuses on the mother's intense yet restrained hold on her defiant child while she turns to hide her anguish. The blue background floats around the figures. It both highlights their pain and contrasts with the sheer beauty of Hirsch's painterly technique.
Lynch Family Blues
(After Lynch Family by Joseph Hirsch, 1946)
Went out swingin last night, Baby
hope you didn’t wait up for me.
Said I was swingin all night,
Baby did you stay up late for me?
I wasn’t swingin in no joint, Darlin
I was out on the limb of a tree.
Now I’m walkin on air,
Baby feels almost like I’m free.
My feet steady kickin the wind
Yeah, I’m close to bein free.
For the first time in my life, Baby
white folks is lookin up to me.
Hear me, son, your daddy loves you
keep hangin on to hope.
You the man of the house now
gotta help ya mama cope.
Daddy won’t be home no more
cause I reached the end of my rope.
—Glenn North Poet and spoken word artist
Glenn North is the Executive Director of the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center in Kansas City.
to the Nelson-Atkisn Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1946.
New Masses 60 (September 3, 1946), 25.
Helen Carlson, “Solo Exhibitions in Varied Styles,” New York Sun, November 22, 1946, 30.
Emily Genauer, “New Works of Soloists Add to Stature as Painters,” New York World-Telegram, November 23, 1946, 11.
Carlyle Burrows, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Herald Tribune, November 24, 1946, sec. 5, 8.
Edward Alden Jewell, “Art to Go Abroad: I.B.M. Selection on View—Beckmann and Others,” New York Times, 24 November 1946, sec. 2, 9.
Alonzo Lansford, “Joseph Hirsch Deepens His Aesthetic Power,” Art Digest 21 (December 1, 1946), 9.
“A Nelson Gallery Gift,” December 1946, clipping, Scrapbook, NAMA Archives.
Joseph Hirsch: Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Associated American Artists, 1946), unpaginated.
“Modern Painters Are Aided by the Friends of Art,” Kansas City Star, April 13, 1947, 9D (as The Lynch Family).
Catalogue de l’Exposition d’Art Américain Contemporain, exh. cat. (Brussels: Galerie Georges Giroux, 1948), 16.
Winifred Shields, “A Special Collection of Works Is Growing at Nelson Gallery,” Kansas City Star, May 19, 1950, 28.
Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 256 (as The Lynch Family).
John Canaday, “Negroes in Art: An Exhibition Examines 250 Years of Pictorial Social History,” New York Times, 24 May 1964, X21.
The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, exh. cat. (Brunswick, Me.: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1964), unpaginated.
John Canaday, “Romare Bearden Focuses on the Negro,” New York Times, October 14, 1967, 23.
The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Forum Gallery, 1967), unpaginated.
Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 252.
Simone Schwarz-Bart, with collaboration from André Schwarz-Bart, Hommage à la Femme Noire (Paris: Édition Consulaires, 1989), 5:20.
Bram Dijkstra, American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920–1950 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Columbus Museum of Art, 2003), 136–37, 146.
John Anthony Scott and John Wardlaw Scott, A Ballad of America: A History of the United States through Folk Song, 3rd rev. ed. (Holland, Mass.: Folksong in the Classroom, 2003), 282 (as The Lynch Family).
Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 18, 314-17 (repro.), 2: 133 (repro.).
Sarah Montross, Dana E.
Byrd, and Jack Jen Gieseking, eds., “Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the
Negro in American Painting,” Bowdoin College Museum of Art website, last
modified 2014, http://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/fifty-years/gallery.html#gallery-76
(repro.).
