Anna Heyward Taylor, Picking Cotton, 1946
Born into a South Carolina family with ties to the cotton industry, Taylor (1879-1956) was well educated and well-traveled. She studied with William Merritt Chase in Holland, in 1903, visited Britain in 1904, France, and Switzerland in 1908, and Germany in 1909. In 1914 she traveled to China and Japan. At that point she entered a graduate program at Radcliffe College, and visited Provincetown, MA, where she studied with BJO Nordfeldt in 1915 and 16. Also in 1916 she went to British Guiana, and then back to France in 1917 and 19, and to Mexico from 1935 to 1936.
During the late teens and twenties Taylor was largely based in New York City; she made the permanent move to Charleston in 1929. There, along with Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Alfred Hutty, and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, she was part of the Charleston Renaissance.
This is a complex mid-twentieth century image. The medium of linocut, with strict black and white patterning, is exploited to show a bleak road and repeating puffs of cotton. The women’s clothes, while patterned, are basic and lacking decoration or charm. The top edge shows the gouges of a carving tool that adds traces of a naïve, home-spun ‘frame.’ At the same time it presents multi-faceted, highly charged social issues.
It is an insightful plunge into American history. Made for the publication of This is Our Land: The Story of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, by Chalmers S. Murray, published by the Carolina Art Association, 1949, this impression has the notation No. 5, possibly referring to its placement in the series of images.
Of special importance is the group of figures working the long rows of plants – often it was women and children who were assigned this task. This references the brutal and rigid nature of the field management system in which the lead picker was among the most productive and the others in the row were pressed to keep up with her. Here they are deliberately un-regimented, shown in a more casual manner. Although they are clustered at the near left, there doesn’t seem to be any exchange between them. They work in isolation – each is alone and their group is apart from others that might be nearby.
In the distance at the right is a building – a simple barn-like structure with a wide door -- probably awaiting the crop. At the far left is the roof of a building that might be a cabin. If this is a home of the field workers it is distant and un-inviting. While not exactly homeless, they seem adrift and aware that ‘home’ it isn’t particularly welcoming when they manage to return there.
Anne Heyward Taylor, working for a relatively objective, even scientific project, used the drama of a block print to examine the fine line between documenting current conditions that were difficult at best, while recalling those historically abhorrent.
An impression of this subject is in the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; it was donated by the artist.
