Terry Adkins: still image taken from the video Synapse (2004)
Part of the Black Beethoven series of works
Chris Tomlinson at Breitbart is getting his knickers in a twist due to the fact that the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels has chosen to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth by posting a portrait of the composer as imagined by the American artist Terry Adkins [1].
Readers are expected to be outraged at this woke attempt to blackwash European cultural history, but, really, this (supposed) controversy about Beethoven's racial origin or ethnicity is old news [2] and even the video by Adkins from which the still is taken was made sixteen years ago. So, unless one subscribes to some kind of sinister anti-white conspiracy theory, it's hard to get too worked up about this ...
What's more, I quite like the image and whilst I don't know how seriously Adkins took the myth of Beethoven's blackness, I can see why it would intrigue and amuse him and suspect he just wanted to have some fun with it - not least of all in order to piss off overly-sensitive white folk, like Chris Tomlinson [3].
Notes
[1] Chris Tomlinson, 'Woke Art Centre Celebrates Beethoven Birthday with Portrait of Composer as a Black Man', Breitbart (18 December, 2020): click here.
[2] As Alexander Carpenter notes: "Beethoven being of African descent is not a new idea: the notion of the
great composer's secret ethnicity has circulated at the fringes of the
media and scholarship for more than a century." See his excellent article 'Was Beethoven Black? A Twitter meme reveals more about race and music than the composer’s origins', on The Conversation website (30 July, 2020): click here.
[3] It's important to also note - as Kanitra Fletcher reminds us - that Adkins often re-examined the lives
of historical figures in his work - not just white German composers - in
order to uncover neglected details and question the processes by which
people are celebrated, remembered negatively, or simply forgotten about. Thus he wasn't just trying to be playful and provocative with his Black Beethoven series. And ultimately, of
far more interest to Adkins than this myth of Beethoven's blackness, was the triumph of the composer in overcoming his
deafness to create some of the world's most powerful music. See Fletcher's article on Adkins on the Landmarks website: click here.
