How Does the Spirit Move Us in Art?

Light exudes from a dark, rectangular field of vision. Within this light, we see two hands at work. The fingers bend, curl, splay, point, stretch, and, on one occasion, enjoin. There’s something else, too. You can feel it, even see it. Something the light communicates.

The meticulous dodged and keyed-out passages allow the palms to recede, and the thumbs, index fingers, and zones where wrists tuck into pinstriped sleeves move forward. As our eyes adjust to the contrast of tones, we notice that the fingers are nimble with prominent knuckles. The nails are manicured. The hands are alongside each other but they are not making the same shapes in air. They are in time, but they are not in sync. The hands gesture in the service of something we cannot see.

There is a long and beautiful tradition of visual artists attending to the hands of artists they admire. In framing these hands in an instance of emphasis or stress set against a glowing black field in her 1938 photograph Hall Johnson Conducting His Negro Choir, Ruth Bernhard has made a luminist intervention within this tradition. Bernhard employs the avant-garde strategy of defamiliarization, of something ordinary becoming extraordinary, to highlight the delicate perspicacity of a Black man’s hands. Yet, even as we watch fingers flicker before our eyes and exchange their recognizable lines for talons, autumnal leaves, and the tongues of a crackling fire, the shifting ungues of Hall Johnson (1888–1970) are not our subject. The subject is the thing we cannot see, and that no artist sets out to frame. We sense it, however, around and through the tight crop of the field. The subject is being urged, pulled, held, and cajoled in the rustling elasticity of Johnson’s hands in concert. In taking the constraints of a medium to their limit, Bernhard has captured the spirit.

The subject is being urged, pulled, held, and cajoled in the rustling elasticity of Hall Johnson’s hands in concert.

Ruth Bernhard. Hall Johnson Conducting His Negro Choir. 1938