Sooty Palette

Nothing brings out the artist in able Painter Julien Binford like a chocolaty skin. His Negroes are something that Negroes admire. Sixteen new Binfords made his one-man show last week at Manhattan's Midtown Galleries look like a black-belt village on Saturday afternoon. The canvases showed Negroes playing harmonicas, shooting craps, teaching Sunday school, and a vigorous study of two bucks locked together in a razor fight (one of Painter Binford's childhood memories). In most of these pictures, somber tones of the sooty bodies and faces stood out in contrast to the brilliant light of a lamp, the yellow interior of a church at night, the flame of a match. All reveal Artist Binford's understanding of Negroes.

Born in Powhatan County, Va. of an old Southern family, tall, good-looking Julien Binford was awarded the Ryerson Traveling Fellowship ($2,500) in 1932, spent three years studying in Paris. Returning to the U.S. with a charming French wife, Painter Binford bought himself "a more than primitive" house in Virginia, started farming, painting the local Negroes. He also succeeded in arousing the local white population. Commissioned last spring to paint a mural of the burning of Richmond (1865) for the Saunders Station Post Office, Binford submitted a preliminary sketch nicely calculated to lose him the job. His rough drawing showed a street scene jammed with looters, a mother trying to escape with her baby over prone bodies, a half-naked woman who has torn off her blouse to prevent herself from being scorched, a horseman riding roughshod over all.

Said a past president-general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy: "It is one of the most horrible things I've ever seen." Said Bishop James Cannon Jr. in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "The woman's back and hips are poorly portrayed." Said Artist Binford: "When and how did this bishop become an authority on the 'backs and hips' of nude women? Scat, Bishop! Get off my scaffold. I am not trying to swarm your pulpit." Result: his mural is still in the sketch stage.

But he had just completed another assignment--a 12 1/2-ft.-sq. mural for a Negro church at Shiloh, Va. This is one of the rare occasions that a Negro congregation has commissioned a white artist to decorate its church. The mural, unveiled with impressive ceremonies, forms the background to the church's baptismal pool. For this job Painter Binford was paid in produce. "The local Negroes," he explains, "who have spent months posing for and watching me paint this mural, inaugurated for my benefit and unknown to me a 'Harvest Home' in their church." Now the Binfords have enough preserves, potatoes, beets, corn, chickens to tide them over the winter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.