Arthur Rothstein - Minstrel Showbill

Print: Gelatin silver print on Baryta (2015), 30x24cm, from original negative (scan) – Galerie Bilderwelt, exhibition-print archive, #2 from edition of 5 – Very good condition.
Walker Evans (1903 – 1975)
Minstrel Showbill (– also catalogued as Movie and Minstrel Show Posters on Brick Wall, Demopolis, Alabama; Minstrel Poster, Alabama; and other variants)
Date: December 1935 – January 1936
Place: Alabama; Demopolis, Marengo County (Metropolitan Museum’s record) – “Alabama” in most others
Print: Gelatin silver print on baryta (2015), 30x24cm, from scan of original negative – Galerie Bilderwelt, exhibition-print archive, #1 from edition of 5

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The collection card below can be followed section by section for information surrounding the image itself. These are entries from my collection archive — compiled when the material was catalogued for private context, slightly updated for current offer. They were not written or copy-edited as catalogue or exhibition text; that context belongs to the photographic print and its history as part of Galerie Bilderwelt exhibition history and archive alone. Offered here as private background information, and given to the best of my knowledge.

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Image context.

The bill advertises a “Colored” tent show — a Black-cast company working the Southern circuit under white management, whose own advertising promised “sweet singers, fast dancers, funny comedians” and the “Famous New Orleans Brown Skin Models.” The photograph therefore records something more layered than a white minstrel show: Black performers inside a racist entertainment genre. Minstrel shows were a dominant American popular form from the 1830s; they began with white performers in blackface, and Black companies appeared from the 1840s, the form in both cases presenting Black people as objects of ridicule. As MoMA’s catalogue entry states, minstrel shows were “an exploitative form of popular entertainment throughout the US from the 19th century into the 1950s that reinforced white supremacy.”

Image legend (central motifs, keys & references).

Vernacular signage — the brick wall functions as the public visual field of Depression-era Alabama towns, where commercial posters constituted the shared image environment. The ground litter and rough texture tie the spectacle imagery back to lived conditions in the segregated South. Two entertainment economies — Hollywood Westerns and traveling minstrel shows, both shaping national self-understanding. The material deterioration of the minstrel bill (peeling paper, exposed brick) performs a slow erasure that sits uneasily with the continued legibility of its racist imagery.

Initial reading.

Evans photographs the apparatus of entertainment as a surface — paper, paste, brick — caught at the moment it is failing. He takes a mass-market spectacle built on racial caricature and reframes it under the cool, analytical gaze of photographic modernism. The ideological lines of the culture are shown written directly onto a wall in a small Alabama town. What he does with that material is neither neutral description nor editorial commentary: the picture records a racial hierarchy at the exact moment its advertising is weathering off the wall.

Place in Evans‘s work.

By the mid-1930s his subject was settled. As the Metropolitan Museum’s account puts it, “his principal subject was the vernacular — the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés, advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets.” A wall of pasted bills is that subject in something close to pure form: not the event advertised but the paper announcing it, the surface on which a town’s public life is posted up and wears away. Evans himself resisted the word “documentary,” preferring “documentary style”: “A document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.” This picture adopts the style and withholds the use.

Characterization/appraisal.

John Szarkowski, introducing the 1971 MoMA retrospective, wrote that Evans’s photographs “have enlarged our sense of the usable visual tradition and have affected the way that we now see not only other photographs, but billboards, junkyards, postcards, gas stations, colloquial architecture, Main Streets, and the walls of rooms.” That sentence describes this photograph’s subject almost exactly. Clément Chéroux has called Evans‘s vernacular manner “the art of the oxymoron,” finding formal elegance in utilitarian signage; here that elegance does documentary work on a racial hierarchy, and the two are not separable in the finished picture.

Attribution and dating.

The image is generally catalogued to 1935 or 1936, and on the present evidence that is as far as it can honestly be taken. The Metropolitan Museum’s Walker Evans Archive dates its negative to 20 or 30 December 1935, placing it in Demopolis, Marengo County. The Library of Congress caption line — drawn from the photographer’s field notes, a contemporaneous record — dates a companion frame to January 1936. The one hard datum printed inside the image is the minstrel bill’s one-night stand for Friday, 25 October, a date that fits 1935. The fair statement: the picture was made in Alabama in the winter of 1935 – 36, most probably December 1935 or January 1936.

The picture exists in two framings — the fuller composition showing both bills (the present lot), and a tighter crop catalogued as Minstrel Showbill Detail, reproduced in American Photographs (1938). This structural duality — two distinct crops circulating under related titles — accounts for much of the variation in institutional dating and location attribution.

Publication, exhibition, collection history.

Minstrel Showbill Detail (the tighter crop) was included in Walker Evans: American Photographs, MoMA, New York (September – November 1938), reproduced under the caption “Minstrel showbill detail, 1936.” The full composition was included in later MoMA gallery installations (2013 – 14; 2019 – 22). Prints held by MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, among others.

Selected literature.

Walker Evans: American Photographs (MoMA, 1938) — the motif reproduced as “Minstrel showbill detail, 1936.”
Svetlana Alpers, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (Princeton University Press), pp. 124, 135 — analyzes Evans’s engagement with vernacular signage and surface.
Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection (1995) — documents FSA period and Southern sequences.

* “Publication, exhibition, collection history” here is for information purposes and not linked to provenance for an offered sheet, which is stated in the header.