FIGURE 1

Marion Perkins posing with his prize-winning sculpture Man of Sorrows (1950) at the Art Institute's "55th Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity," in the spring of 1951. Photo: Mike Shay, courtesy Johnson Publishing Company.

In the 1950s, Marion Perkins (1908–1961) was one of Chicago’s foremost sculptors. He participated in nearly one dozen invitational exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1942 to 1957 and received three awards of distinction. His career was capped by the museum’s 1951 purchase of one of his most extraordinary pieces, Man of Sorrows (figs. 1, 21). In spite of these achievements, Perkins failed to attain national recognition. Today, almost forty years after his death, he is remembered only by family, friends, colleagues, and a handful of collectors and specialists in the field of African American art. Perkins’s work, which is almost totally absent from major public collections of twentieth-century art, has never received scholarly attention. However, the enduring power of his work and the story of his struggle for creative expression provide ample reason to reconsider his career. 1

Why is Perkins so little known today? First, his career was brief. It began when the artist was in his early thirties and ended with his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. His need to work forty-hour weeks to support his family––at jobs ranging from dishwasher to freight handler––further curtailed his output. 2 Moreover, a shortage of mainstream exhibition opportunities for black artists beyond the Art Institute also limited his exposure.

Perkins’s technique is another factor influencing his posthumous neglect. He preferred direct carving in stone or wood; this process, adopted by European modernists such as Constantin Brancusi, André Derain, and Amedeo Modigliani, came to be considered passé by mid-century. Other methods, including assemblage and welded steel, were taking its place. Perkins’s aesthetic conservatism was prompted in part by his uncompromising political convictions. As a committed Marxian activist, 3 he believed that art could convey ideas effectively only through recognizable imagery, an approach that put him at odds with the phenomenally successful New York School of abstraction. Furthermore, he regarded figurative sculpture as participating in the grand tradition of public art, in contrast to abstraction, which he believed was elitist in nature. Stylistically conservative, Perkins’s work nonetheless is remarkably beautiful, emotionally authentic, and politically impassioned.