Symbol, 1953 (oil on canvas)

Painting by Charles Alston. He was an influential mentor to other artists and a critical part of the African American cultural community in the New York neighborhood of Harlem. He favored straightforward, bold genre scenes early in his career and was a successful muralist. By 1950 he had started making abstractions, often with suggestions of figures in the compositions. This painting is among his most direct of the period. It depicts a scene of ritual sacrifice. Many artists in the years following World War II sought analogies in mythology, folktales, and ancient art for the modern traumas of the 1930s and 1940s. Symbol emerged out of that impulse among American and European artists coming to terms with the war.