William Christenberry

William Christenberry (1936-2016) was one of the definitive artists of contemporary American art, in content and form. Starting his career in abstract painting, Christenberry later became known as a photographer, and his subsequent works have incorporated printmaking, sculpture, bookmaking and assemblage, all wielded with equal confidence as their discrete forms became necessary to his vision. This is not so unusual anymore in contemporary American art. It is however notable that Christenberry, through embracing multiple mediums, merged his abstract and narrative impulses leading the way for future generations. His legacy continues to astonish with the richness and clarity of his creative voice.

The Belger Collection holds works created across the span of William Christenberry’s life—from early Brownie photographs, later color photographs, drawings, and paintings, to three-dimensional works, including sculptural works depicting structures that are important markers in Christenberry’s rural landscape. Highlights of the Belger Collection include 25 wall-hung assemblages that the artist called “constructions,” along with 14 drawings and lithographs which are studies for, or conversely, two-dimensional evolutions from these dynamic and visually exciting forms. Christenberry’s “constructions” mark a non-narrative, formally conceptual approach to making abstract painting three-dimensional. Christenberry explained that "the Constructions are a very logical bridge between my early paintings, to my three-dimensional work of today." Between 1964 and 1968, Christenberry worked on the “constructions” using found Styrofoam elements, throw-away materials and paint much in the spirit of Kurt Schwitter's merzbau compositions and Marcel Duchamp's "ready mades.''

Many artists have moved from representational works to more abstract forms through their careers. It is less usual for an artist to have emerged from rich and meaningful investigations in the depths of formal abstraction into a realm of narrative autobiography incorporating specific representations and documentations of the observed and changing world. Christenberry navigated this atypical course with a trust in the intelligence and aptitude of his viewers. The Constructions offer a view of Christenberry's experimental creative process at the beginning of his mature working life, free from specific narrative details. This view enriches and expands our understanding of the development of his increasingly narrative and autobiographical current works.

The Belger Collection includes some of William Christenberry’s earliest works completed at the University of Alabama (1956-58), the Tenant House series (1960-64) and the Beale Street and Memphis paintings (1962-64). Included among many significant works on paper are a selection of early drawings and studies for constructions. Additionally, this Collection holds a small number of Brownie-camera photographs. These black-and-white prints depict rural architecture found in the Walker Evans/James Agee book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—homes of families known to the Christenberrys before his discovery of the book in 1960.

From 1954 to 1968 one sees Christenberry's work in his creative evolution. Immersed in Abstract Expressionist philosophies and techniques at the University of Alabama (1954-59), he abandoned painting on canvas (1964), and adopted signs and found objects in the three-dimensional Constructions in Memphis (1964-68). By 1960, following his discovery of the Evans/Agee work, he began including specific references to the places of his family file and history, including Hale County and Perry County, Alabama, reflecting his responses to the ever-changing Southern physical and cultural environment.

William Christenberry had a deep affection for the South. He also had a strong desire to come to grips with the place where he grew up—both the positive and the negative. A significant and disturbing part of the American South in the artist’s memory was the presence of the Ku Klux Klan. These terrible memories are expressed in a number of works in the Collection depicting imagery related to the KKK. The works were meant to express revulsion for that organization and others that promote racism, intolerance, bigotry and violence. A deeply thoughtful man, the artist believed that recognition of evil is crucial to overcoming it. To ignore evil is to allow it to flourish.

The breadth and depth of Christenberry’s work in the Collection allows for an examination of the nuances which enrich our understanding of the broader body of work. It makes it possible to look deeply into his process as he returned to the dominant themes in his work over time. A great storyteller, he used visual language in a variety of mediums to attempt to understand the world and his place in it. The works are highly narrative and packed with emotion, just like the man.