John Wilson at the Met

Why did the Metropolitan Museum of Art remove the John Wilson banner that graced its façade last fall? This arresting image was created from a tiny portrait of the artist's brother, enlarged to monumental public proportions, which previewed the Met's “Testimony of Humanity,” a Wilson retrospective that runs through February 8. In the photograph, the brother’s eyebrows are unwavering, his gaze is serious and wary, his mouth and chin are determinedly restrained; perhaps no black face has ever stared so spectacularly at the egos of Manhattan's Museum Mile. Wilson, who died in 2015, took the portrait in 1942 as a 20-year-old art student; “In my youth,” he once said, “the black man was the invisible American.” For several weeks, this was not the case in the trendiest part of Fifth Avenue.

To see Wilson's energetic brother now, you'll have to stop by the Met galleries (691–693), where this little painting is installed alongside more than a hundred other Wilson paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. Wilson believed that drawing was the source of energy for all fine art, a belief that grew out of his lifelong exploration of the masterpieces of Asia, Africa and the Americas, as well as Europe. Time and time again, in two dimensions or three, and in a variety of media, the draftsman Wilson demonstrated the ability of line to support weight like a beam, or to allow emotion, like a tightrope, to dance gracefully, almost weightlessly.

Wilson's marks can make the viewer's fingertips itch to touch, whether the mark is made with charcoal, lithographic ink, a clay cutter, or a bristle brush filled with paint. From sculptures framing his father's shoulders Father and child readingto an ink and chalk depiction of an activist's fists thrown into the sky. OracleWilson's line also creates texture.

“His drawings,” notes art critic Elizabeth Hodermarski, “often appear to be clay or metal that has been scratched or aggressively rubbed.” IN Black soldierIn a World War II painting of a father and husband about to be shipped across an ocean, each line feels like a live wire. In the foreground of the picture are a soldier’s wife and little son; the woman's agitated contours—her mouth clenched and her hands clenched protectively around the child's face—convey the tense silence barely containing the volcano of outrage: her husband is forced to fight for the freedoms of people in another country, while his own country denies him those freedoms.

Wilson was born into a working-class Boston family of Guyanese immigrants who raised their seven children to become investigators around the world. He grew up reading black newspapers such as New York Amsterdam News and also Marcus Garvey Negro worldthe only publication that regularly covers issues such as wage theft from black farmworkers, racial discrimination in the military, and domestic terrorism crimes typically committed by lynch mobs. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Wilson received a scholarship to Paris, where he studied with Fernand Léger, an artist who sought to liberate art from the salons of the rich and allow it to express large, general ideas among working people. The air in Léger's studio hummed with the accents of students from all over the world, whom the teacher urged to create public art and imagine their human heroes as living amiably in the world on equal terms with trees, cars, clouds and architecture. Years later, Wilson's mighty arms and neck Steelmakerexecuted with deliberate touches of pastel and gouache, recalls Léger's call to imagine people, at work or at play, as authoritative participants in their modern environment.

After three years in France, Wilson and his new wife, Julie, the daughter of Eastern European immigrants, went to Mexico City for five years. But since Jim Crow was still ruling the United States, they had to travel in separate cars. Wilson was inspired by his new city's great desire to create high-quality public murals in schools, hospitals, markets and government buildings, the boldest of which were created by Los Tres Grandes: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. While there, Wilson created his own public mural, which could have gotten him killed in his own country. Incident shows a black mother clutching her child while her husband stands vigil at the window with a shotgun as, on the street outside, a mob of hooded Klansmen has just lynched a black man and is holding up his body, with a noose around his neck, like a trophy. Although the mural itself no longer exists, the Met exhibition features numerous studies of the work that viscerally convey its horrific impact.

Describing the most ordinary private or public gestures—a baby sleeping peacefully in his father's large arms, a work crew swinging a trowel to cement a wall—Wilson declared that he was “trying to make black people truly visible in a world that would see us (when it bothered to look) only as undeveloped.” This assertion of appearance is nowhere so striking in its expression as in the massive Eternal Presencea seven-foot sculptural head rising from a grassy lawn in his home neighborhood of Roxbury (a bronze model of which is on display at the Met).

The head represents the goal that Wilson relentlessly pursued throughout his long career: to create art that proclaims the presence of black people while striving to embrace all humanity, to ratify the existence of all ethnicities and genders. The intentionally neither male nor female sculpture reads as Black, but not only as Black: Eternal Presence immediately recognizes the sculpture of many cultures, including the Benin cultures of West Africa, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, and Buddhist Asia. Every September Eternal PresenceRoxbury's neighbors gather for the ceremonial cleansing of the sculptures, rags and brushes in hand, some kneeling at ground level, others rushing up the stairs, participating in a ritual of veneration and ownership.

The Wilson work with which most people are familiar stands in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol—a bust of Martin Luther King Jr., conspicuous by its lack of great man heroism or hagiographic otherworldliness. Instead, he leans slightly, in undemonstrative humility, off-center: the gesture of a head occupied with thought. For many years after the bust was installed in the late 1980s, Wilson persistently created two-dimensional versions of the king's portrait, using drawings as well as various printing techniques. As the Met exhibition demonstrated, these drawings, prints and lithographs are perhaps the most complex and arresting images of King ever produced; in them he never looks traditionally heroic, decisive or domineering. Instead, they reflect the weight and intensity of the commitments King made on behalf of millions of people disempowered. Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, contemplating his death at the hands of his ideological enemies, the King in these images is paying the price of the burden he has taken upon himself – a burden within which, no doubt, rages contradictions, doubts and hesitations, as well as firm commitments. Only out of such mental and emotional turmoil can any gesture of stunning courage arise; Wilson's portraits are a fascinating testament to the human cost of King's incredible bravery, and therefore to the enormity of his achievements.

For decades, John Wilson taught at the Boston University School of Art. He did not teach among colleagues, none of whom possessed either his level of skill in painting, drawing, sculpture and engraving, or his deep first-hand knowledge of other cultures and languages. However, while the men who hired him taught prestigious advanced studio courses, Wilson was relegated to the most humble rung of the course ladder: teaching the basics of drawing to freshmen. How fortunate were those 18-year-olds who, at such a young age, greatly expanded their understanding of artistic work through the example of one exceptionally brilliant teacher who devoted his entire life to the urgent work of what he called “the business of seeking.”