At 73, painter Hughie Lee-Smith has returned to Chicago. A major retrospective–50 paintings from the last 50 years–currently on display at the Cultural Center reveals that in many ways he is still the eager, energetic young man who arrived in Chicago as a Navy recruit in 1943. Fresh out of art school, he was assigned then to paint three WPA murals at the Great Lakes Naval Station.
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Young Lee-Smith took advantage of the city’s openness to go everywhere–to the Art Institute, the theater (where he remembers seeing Paul Robeson in Othello), to concerts, and to the newly formed South Side Community Art Center. Black visual artists, writers, musicians, and poets congregated at the center for a lively exchange of ideas and art. Among them were many leading citizens of today’s black art community–artist and DuSable Museum founder Margaret Goss Burroughs, painter Rex Goreleigh, and poet Gwendolyn Brooks.
The technical discipline by day and the cultural exposure by night set both Lee-Smith’s philosophical direction and his aesthetic course.
Lee-Smith means to provoke questions about the roles of science and the scientist, of the observer–questions about race and the human condition. You do not get his spin on these issues, however, even though you experience them from his point of view.
Lee-Smith’s aesthetic and philosophical paths have been the road less taken by contemporary black artists, who tend to be more militant and separatist, but he has pursued it with remarkable inventiveness and conviction. And it has paid off. At 73, he is doing the best painting of his life.
