Historical racism still negatively impacts perception of black art, study finds

There is no doubt that historical racism has influenced the content and composition of some famous figurative paintings, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the exhibition of Rex Whistler’s mural, In Search of Rare Meat (1927), at Tate Britain in March 2024. Critics questioned whether such artworks should be on public display.

Originally commissioned by the Tate as “the decoration of their new rest room”, Rex Whistler’s mural contains a number of shocking elements, including a painting of a black child chained to a speeding horse-drawn carriage. The debate raises the question of whether the continued presence of such artworks in public spaces serves to counter or maintain historical racist views.

In some cases, the racist attitudes behind these paintings are clearly expressed and well documented by the artists and their owners. For example, John Trumbull (1715-1787), a painter who kept several slaves living in his house. Another example is Gilbert Winter Moss (1828-1899), a banker who owned Richard Ansdell’s painting The Hunted Slaves (1861). According to UCL’s Legacy of Slavery database, Moss’s family was deeply involved in the slave trade. In other cases, things are less clear-cut.

But even if not explicitly expressed, implicit racist attitudes may have been held and influenced the creative process. Implicit racial attitudes are mental associations that, when triggered by race, guide people’s judgments and behavior. As a psychology researcher, I wanted to explore whether implicit racial attitudes influence the appreciation of paintings even when the paintings themselves do not suggest racial inequality.

My colleagues and I have been exploring this question in a series of recent studies on portraiture of black and white people. In one study, we used gaze-mapping technology to measure the eye movements of visitors to the Walker Art Museum in Liverpool.

Measuring when and where the eyes move, and how long they focus on particular objects, provides a temporal indication of what is important to the viewer. We measured the eye movements of gallery-goers who agreed to take part in the study while they looked at five portraits of black people (including Augustus John’s Two Jamaican Girls (1937)) and five portraits of white people (including Lucian Freud’s Paddington Interior (1951)).

Participants’ task was to state how much pleasure they felt when viewing each painting. They also rated the implicit racial attitudes of gallery-goers and their actual contact with different racial communities.

Our Results

Our research shows that gallery visitors who have little exposure to black people and who harbor negative implicit racial attitudes report feeling little pleasure from viewing paintings featuring black people.

Perhaps more surprising is that these visitors reported less pleasure and yet paid more attention to the faces of the black models than other visitors. This result suggests that little contact with black people, combined with implicit negative racial attitudes, may lead people to pay disproportionate attention to black faces when viewing these paintings.

“We believe our findings suggest that negative implicit racial attitudes have not only influenced the historical content and composition of some paintings, but also continue to influence painting appreciation in the modern era. Furthermore, the influence of negative implicit racial attitudes on painting appreciation can be influential even when the painting itself is fairly neutral.”

Whether or not racist paintings are removed from public spaces, our findings suggest that implicit racial attitudes will continue to influence some viewers’ perceptions of paintings depicting Black people and Black culture.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.