Pope X

The Chicago-born artist Charles White demonstrated an unwavering commitment to realism over his life’s work. In the words of his student, Kerry James Marshall: “He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority.” He sought to make art that would be available to a wide, non-elite audience and printmaking became a primary medium. As the artist wrote in 1955: “My major concern is to get my work before common, ordinary people; for me to be accepted as a spokesman for my people; for my work to portray them better, and to be rich and meaningful to them.”

Meticulously rendered, “Pope X” is one of Charles Wilbert White’s most powerful images. A tour-de-force of etching, an eerie atmosphere of stillness and quiet envelops the space in and around the papal figure, his head, adorned with the traditional papal miter, raised skyward. This artist’s proof differs from the final edition of the large-scale etching in the starker contrast between the profile head and the emptiness of the background which is more richly textured and toned in the published print.

White depicted figures engaged in religious practice through much of his career, and the figure of a black pope was the subject of a number of works in the early 1970s, precursors to what is oftentimes considered White’s late masterwork, “Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man),” 1973, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. White’s focus on the image of a black pope came at a moment of speculation that that Pope Paul VI would retire and be replaced by a black cardinal. In 1972, for example, Time magazine ran an article titled “Black ‘Pope’” focused on the recent election of Philip Alford Potter, a Methodist from the Caribbean island of Dominica, to the position of general secretary of the World Council of Churches. In the following year, Encore magazine ran an article titled “An African Pope?” a copy of which is among White’s papers in the Archives of American Art. The enigmatic figure of “Pope X,” made in the aftermath of the widespread political and social upheavals of the 1960s and at the end of the Vietnam War, has been described as “a preacher for his time” and manifests White’s lifelong dedication to fighting racial injustice.