DEI Goin’ Fishin’

While researching Arthur Dove’s inexplicably titled cow sketch, Public Enemy, I googled my way to the catalogue for Three Centuries of American Art, a labyrinthine exhibition at the Musée du Jeu de Paume organized in 1938 by The Museum of Modern Art.

The proto-blockbuster put every department of the museum to work. It included not only painting & sculpture and prints & drawings, but architecture, photography, and cinema—and Mrs. Rockefeller’s folk art collection.

a black and white still from the 1931 warner brothers film, the public enemy in which two white men in suits and hats are facing each other at the corner of a heavy stone building. the one on the left, in the bright daylight, is beginning to fall from being shot in the back. the one on the right, james cagney, btw, in the shadowy side more protected from the ambush, is holding the edge of the building. the picture is reproduced in a moma catalogue published in france in 1938, and has a caption, "100 l'ennemi public, 1931. warner brothers (public enemy). Mise en scene de william wellman; avec james cagney," like i was saying. via moma.org

Honestly, the installation shots look a bit of a mess, and the use of photography in display, including the architecture section, looks more interesting than a lot of the photography section itself. But there was actually a public screening program [more on this in a minute], and a phalanx of film stills. And let’s be real: the still from The Public Enemy (1931) would make a Renaissance painting jealous.

a 1938 black and white catalogue reproduction of arthur dove's 1925 assemblage portrait of a Black man fishing on a dock near Dove's houseboat. The bamboo sticks of the assemblage form an arm and raised hand, and perhaps a torso, while the man's head is represented by a rectangular piece of dock wood with a button eye. The caption has one of Dove's original racist variations on the title, which included the N-word in both english and french, great work everybody. The work is listed as from the philliips memorial gallery, washington dc, and it is indeed in the collection still. though after funding and collecting dove's work for 16 years, he did manage to get him to change the title to goin' fishin', that had not yet happened in 1938. via moma.org — Arthur Dove’s 1925 collage which had a racist af title for the first twenty years, including when Duncan Phillips loaned it to MoMA for this exhibition in Paris in 1938. image via MoMA

There was one work by Arthur Dove, and it is—oh, wait, ayfkm? It displaces Public Enemy as the instant and permanent winner of the WTF, Arthur Dove? Most Problematic Title award. It’s listed as belonging to Duncan Phillips, Dove’s biggest collector and most important supporter, and it is indeed still in the Phillips Collection, with the deracistified title, Goin’ Fishin’. [n.b. Unless they sold it since, MoMA didn’t own a Dove in 1938.]

color image of arthur dove's 1925 assemblage now titled goin' fishin' is an abstract portrait of a Black man fishing on a pier. The black-painted section of dock wood at the bottom center with the button eye represents his head, while the bamboo fishing pole segments running vertically next to it, and the five pieces spread out atop blackpainted strips of wood, represent the man's raised arm and hand. other pieces of the bamboo pole arc across the top, or are arrayed on either side of the head. underneath them are denim shirt cuffs. somehow after the n-word was removed from the title, people forgot or lost the ability to read this as a portrait rather than an abstract evocation or whatever. anyway, the phillips collection is, as of february 2025, still doing the work of accountability and transparency for their participation in the maintenance of white supremacist structures in our society. so that's something. — Arthur Dove, *[redacted] Goin’ Fishin’*, 1925, assemblage, 21 1/4 x 25 1/2 in., at The Phillips since 1937

The work is an assemblage of real objects—found and painted wood, bamboo, shirt denim, and buttons—one of a series Dove made alongside his paintings. Phillips saw this one early, missed it, and pursued it for twelve years. At Phillips’ prodding, in 1946 Dove made the last of a series of changes to the work’s title by dropping the N-word.

arthur dove's portrait of ralph dusenberry, a houseboat neighbor of his on long island, is an assemblage in which two pieces of wood board, cut at an extreme angle, balance one atop the point of the other. a rivet on the upper piece reads as an eye on a head, but tbh, it also looks like an eel. under the wood at the bottom edge is a fragment of sheet music from one of ralph's favorite songs, and a section of an american-lookin' flag is painted on the background. the whole image is framed by a carpenter's wooden extendable ruler. from the metropolitan museum, via alfred stieglitz, dove's longtime dealer. — Arthur Dove, Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, 1924, assemblage, 22 x 18 in., Stieglitz Collection at The Met

The result, ironically, ended up obscuring the work’s history, and that it was actually a portrait. In 2007, Nancy J. Scott published a close reading of the work, “Submerged: Arthur Dove’s Goin’ Fishin’ and its Hidden History,” that debunks some of the origin stories and interpretations of the piece—including those of Dove’s dealer Alfred Stieglitz. Scott restores the racism of Dove’s title and the contemporary discussion of his treatment of the subject, a Black man he saw fishing on a dock near his houseboat on the North Shore of Long Island. She also restores it to the context of the abstracted portraits was making in the mid-1920s, which included another of his houseboat and fishing neighbors, Ralph Dusenberry. That portrait, made of scrap wood, sheet music, and rulers, belonged to Stieglitz, and is now at the Met.

I’d figured Scott’s essay was the last word, the big reveal, and then I scrolled down on the Phillips’ page for Goin’ Fishin’, which lays out the racist origins, the context, history, and their own founder’s and institution’s involvement in it, up to and including their ignoring scholarship like Scott’s:

Only recently have scholars pulled back the curtain on the suppressed racist history of Goin’ Fishin’. Although the Phillips has been aware of these re-assessments, it has neglected to change its manner of looking at this work on its public platforms, including but not limited to gallery labels and website texts. In that regard, the Phillips has been complicit in the decades-long effort to ignore the racist origins of Goin’ Fishin’. These institutional omissions have effectively erased the fraught nature of this work’s history. The early titles are part of the historical documentation of this work and inform its original context.

The Phillips Collection is committed to shining a light on those parts of its history and collection that raise questions about race and difference, as these questions are not only part of the past but are still very much with us today. We understand that museums have a responsibility to use works like Goin’ Fishin’ to spark a dialogue and inspire critical thinking. We are at the beginning of our DEAI (Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion) journey, which includes, but is not limited to excavating the buried supremacist histories of objects in our collection. We are committed to reckoning with our past and preventing future harm. We do not claim to have the answers, but The Phillips Collection believes we must look with honesty and transparency at the full history of this work and others in our collection in order to begin seeing these works with new perspectives today.

(April 2021)

It’s been a while since I’ve teared up while writing a blog post, but here we are. Now back to the work.

[A few minutes later update: Because this blog is dedicated to me discovering things other people have written whole-ass books about, I am very pleased to learn from Jonathan Lill [@muslibarch.bsky.social] that Catherine M. Riley’s book, MoMA Goes To Paris in 1938: Building and Politicizing American Art (UCPress, 2023) not only exists, it apparently rocks.]