Although he was softspoken and reserved in manner, Perkins’s intensity, physical attractiveness, and attentiveness to others lent him a magnetic presence. Perkins was deeply devoted to people and to a number of causes. An intellectual, he became a fervent and outspoken advocate for social reform and racial equality, both in the United States and abroad. Yet, even with all these passions competing for his attention, Perkins labored intensively on his sculpture late at night and on weekends, in makeshift studios in the street, yard (see fig. 17), or kitchen. The powerful and original body of work that he produced reflects his sympathies for those who have experienced inequality and oppression.

Background and Artistic Beginnings

An only child, Marion Perkins was born in 1908 on his grandparents’ farm near Marche, Arkansas, about ten miles from Little Rock. After the death of his parents in 1916, the eight-year-old boy was sent to Chicago to be raised by an aunt, Doris Padrone. 4 His arrival coincided with a period of momentous change in American cities––it was the height of the first Great Migration of southern blacks to the North––and marked the beginning of a new phase of awareness of the social, political, and cultural position of blacks in the United States. Between 1910 and 1920, fifty thousand African Americans came to Chicago from the South. 5 Restrictive covenants on real estate forced the new arrivals to squeeze into a narrow area of the city’s South Side reserved for blacks, which came to be known as Bronzeville. Housing was inadequate, living conditions were poor, and the neighborhood developed as an isolated city within a city. 6

However, Bronzeville in the 1930s saw the emergence of an exceptionally talented group of African American writers and artists, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Catlett (see fig. 5 and Portfolio, no. 18), Eldzier Cortor (see Portfolio, no. 8), Willard Motley, Theodore Ward, Charles White (see Portfolio, no. 17), and Richard Wright. All shared in the struggle for expression and recognition and were close to Perkins.

Perkins attended Wendell Phillips High School, but left to find work before his senior year. Around this time, he married Eva Gillon; very quickly, he was supporting a family: his son Robert was born in 1929, followed by Toussaint and Eugene in 1930 and 1932, respectively. Eva, originally from Louisiana, played a decisive role in Perkins’s life. 7 Strikingly beautiful, she served as his model and muse. Two works in particular demonstrate her importance: a plaster mask and a highly idealized marble head (figs. 2–3). The first, which may date from as early as the mid-1930s, reveals Perkins’s skill in creating naturalistic, three-dimensional form. Executed in the late 1940s, the second portrait, recently acquired by the Art Institute, shows the strong features of the artist’s wife, in the manner of the stylized, intensely powerful symbolic heads he was to produce in the 1950s.