Richmond Barthé, Harlem Renaissance sculptor, was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi on January 28, 1901. He grew up enjoying drawing and painting, and his formal schooling did not go beyond grade school. Barthé showed a passion and skill for drawing from an early age. His mother raised her son a devout Roman Catholic and was, in many ways, instrumental in his decision to pursue art as a vocation. Spirituality, race, and sexuality influenced his later art. At age fourteen Barthé took a job as houseboy with a wealthy prominent White family in New Orleans. There, noted figures such as writer and editor Lyle Saxon encouraged the boy’s art and lobbied art schools on his behalf, to no avail. From the age of sixteen until his early twenties, Barthé supported himself with a number of service and unskilled jobs, including house servant, porter, and cannery worker.
His artistic talent was noticed by his parish priest when Barthé contributed two of his paintings to a fundraising event for his church. At age 23 he went to Chicago, where he studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1924 to 1928. He excelled as a painter, taking classes with Charles Schroeder and studying privately with Archibald J. Motley, Jr. Barthé’s painted portraits soon earned him notice from important collectors. His work caught the attention of Charles Maceo Thompson, a patron of the arts and supporter of many talented young Black artists. Barthé was a flattering portrait painter, and Thompson helped him to secure many lucrative commissions from the Chicago's affluent Black citizens. Barthe began as a painter but, at the suggestion of one of his teacher, tried his hand at sculpture, for which had a particular gift.
In 1927, Barthé had his debut as a professional sculptor, when he exhibited two busts of his classmates in the Negro in Art Week Exhibition. He also exhibited the busts in April of 1928 at the Chicago Art League annual exhibition. The critical acclaim allowed Barthé to sculpted commissioned works of Henry Ossawa Tanner and Toussaint L'Ouverture. During his senior year, he took a sculpture class to better understand perspective, and he subsequently pursued that medium. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Barthé's formal artistic instruction in sculpture took place in anatomy class with professor of anatomy and German artist Charles Schroeder. After his graduation in 1928, Barthé decided to leave Chicago and moved to New York City in 1929 and quickly became part of the well-established Harlem Renaissance scene.
Richmond established his first studio in Harlem and entered an established scene of intellectual and creative social circles. During the next four years Barthé followed a curriculum structured for majors in painting and sculpting, living with his Aunt Rose and working different jobs. During this time, he developed his reputation as a Harlem Renaissance sculptor, although he became impatient with racial discrimination and being called a "race" artist. Barthé was one of the earliest modern artists to depict Black Americans in his work. Although he was still in his late 20s, within a short time he won recognition, primarily through his sculptures, for making significant contributions to modern African American art.
In 1930 he won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, at his first solo exhibition at the Women's City Club in Chicago. However, in 1931, he moved his studio in Harlem to Greenwich Village. Barthé mingled with the bohemian circles of downtown Manhattan. Initially unable to afford live models, he sought and found inspiration from on-stage performers. Living downtown provided him the opportunity to socialize not only among collectors but also among artists, dance performers, and actors. His remarkable visual memory permitted him to work without models, producing numerous representations of the human body in movement. Barthé enjoyed consistent recognition for his work following his move to New York City. In 1929, 1930, and 1931 the Harmon Foundation included his sculptures in their prestigious group exhibitions of works by leading Black artists.
While many young artists found it very difficult to earn a living from their art during the Great Depression, the late 1920s and 1930s were Richmond Barthé's most prolific years. During this time, he completed works such as "Black Narcissus" (1929), "The Blackberry Woman" (1930), "Drum Major" (1928), "The Breakaway" (1929), busts of Alain Locke (1928), bust of A’leila Walker (1928), "The Deviled Crab-Man" (1929), busts of Rose McClendon (1932), "Féral Benga" (1935), and "Sir John Gielgud as Hamlet" (1935). In October 1933, a major body of Barthé's work inaugurated the Caz Delbo Galleries at the Rockefeller Center in New York City. The same year, his works were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair and New York’s Whitney Museum. The latter purchased several of his works and helped establish his reputation as the country’s leading African American sculptor.
In 1932, Barthé became the first Black artist to enter the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York when they acquired "The Blackberry Woman" (1932). The Whitney Barthé’s African Dancer (1933) in First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, and Prints the following year and the mounted a solo exhibition of his work in 1934. In summer 1934, Barthé went on a tour to Paris with Reverend Edward F. Murphy. This trip exposed Barthé to classical art, but also to performers such as Féral Benga and African American entertainer Josephine Baker, of whom he made portraits in 1935 and 1951, respectively.
Barthé also received numerous public and private commissions throughout the decade, most notably "Green Pastures: The Walls of Jericho" (1937–38), a frieze for the Harlem River Housing Project commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, and a monument to the journalist Arthur Brisbane commissioned by the city of New York and installed on the wall of Central Park in 1939. Barthé received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1940 and 1941, and in 1946 he was unanimously elected to membership in the National Sculpture Society. During the next two decades, he built his reputation as a sculptor. He was awarded several awards and has experienced success after success and was considered by writers and critics as one of the leading "moderns" of his time.
Barthé’s sculptures frequently focus on the human form in motion, and he applied classical influence to representations of African American life. Barthé broadened the formal art world’s tendency to depict African Americans as agricultural laborers. For example, with "The Negro Mother" he used the classical pietà form to depict an African American mother holding the body of her lynched son. His sculpting of African American male nudes bestowed the classical ideal on bodies that had been excluded from such consideration. His most famous bronze, "The Boxer", is a lean, graceful representation of Cuban boxer Kid Chocolate in mid-swing. The Boxer served as sensual representation of a Black male frozen in a complex, perpetual fight.
In 1945, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received awards for interracial justice and honorary degrees from Xavier University and St. Francis University. In 1949, Barthé purchased a house in Jamaica to escape the violence of the city, but continued to split his time between the small village of Colgate, Jamaica, and New York City. He was the recipient of the Audubon Artists Gold Medal the next year. Also, in 1950, he received a commission from the Haitian government to sculpt Toussaint L'Ouverture, which he completed in 1950 and 1952, respectively, and stands in the front of the palace of Port-au-Prince. He also accepted commissions from the Haitian government to design new coins in 1949 and 1953. Life in Jamaica afforded Barthé the peace he needed to recuperate his health; he continued to create new work which he sold to fellow expatriates.
Barthé received the key to the city of Bay Saint Louis in 1964. He left the West Indies because of increasing violence in 1969 and spent five years traveling between Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, finally settling in Pasadena, California to work on his memoirs and create many of his works. His artistic production slowed during his time in Europe, and he enjoyed frequenting the city’s many cultural attractions. Barthé returned to the United States in 1976, settling into an apartment in Pasadena, California, with the help of artist Charles White. By this time his creative interests had shifted to writing fables and memoirs, but he continued to make a modest amount of money off his sculpture.
In 1978, the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles published an article on Barthé that led to a meeting with the actor James Garner, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. Garner also became an important patron of Barthé in the last decade of his life, providing him with a much-needed stipend for living expenses, funding for the casting of several new editions of his sculptures, and establishing the Richmond Barthé Trust to collect, organize, and document his work. In 1982, the city of Pasadena honored his artistic achievements by renaming the street on which he lived Barthé Drive. Another highlight of his final years came in 1987, when the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles honored him with a gala. Barthé passed away in Pasadena in 1989.
