White house black house

Thornton Dial, a self-taught artist whose paintings and assemblages fashioned from scavenged materials told the story of black struggle in the South and found their way to the permanent collections of major museums, died on Monday at his home in McCalla, Ala. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by family members.

Mr. Dial, the illiterate son of an unwed teenage mother, spent much of his childhood in rural poverty in western Alabama and, after moving to Bessemer, an industrial suburb of Birmingham, labored at a wide variety of occupations, all the while making works from castoff materials that he came to think of as art only when he was in his 50s.

In 1987, Lonnie Holley, a self-taught artist living in Birmingham, showed William Arnett, an Atlanta collector interested in Southern folk art, one of Mr. Dial’s decorated fish lures. The two men went to see Mr. Dial, who, once he realized what Mr. Arnett was looking for, pulled a painted, welded-steel sculpture topped by a stylized steel turkey out of a turkey coop.

“I knew I was witnessing something great coming out of that turkey coop,” Mr. Arnett said in a statement issued by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation , which he established to preserve and document African-American vernacular art. “I didn’t know at the time that it wasn’t simply the sculpture that was special. The man who had created it was a great man, and he would go on to become recognized as one of America’s greatest artists. I can’t think of any important artist who has started with less or accomplished more.”

Mr. Arnett championed Mr. Dial relentlessly, with remarkable success.

In the early 1990s, as Mr. Dial’s work began appearing in museum shows, he gained recognition as a remarkable artist and storyteller, with a turbulent, expressionist manner that drew comparisons to Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Anselm Kiefer.

“Dial’s paintings are like patches of rough seas in which the faces and figures of living things rise and sink among waves of detritus and color,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 1993.

Intense interest in the previously neglected area of outsider art only enhanced his stature. Over the years, his work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Ten of Mr. Dial’s works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013 as a part of a larger donation from Mr. Arnett’s foundation.

“From the complex, exuberant textures of his assemblages to the deft, fluid lines of his drawings, Dial’s facility as an artist was truly extraordinary,” Sheena Wagstaff, the chairwoman of the department of modern and contemporary art at the Met, said on Monday. “He leaves us with a body of work that is a rich visual manifestation of a life history, one that witnessed a remarkable time of change in the world from the perspective of an African-American man.”

Thornton Dial was born on Sept. 10, 1928, in Emelle, Ala., on a former cotton plantation where members of his extended family worked as sharecroppers. His mother, Mattie Bell, was unable to care for him, and from the age of 3 he was raised by his great-grandmother on the farm of a cousin, Buddy Jake Dial, who liked to make sculptures from bits and pieces lying around the yard.

Thornton picked cotton, drove a mule around a hay baler, herded cows and helped with the milking. Busy and energetic, he raised vegetables on small plots scattered around the area. He rarely attended school.

“I went enough to learn a little bit,” he told Mr. Arnett in a series of interviews in the 1990s for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. “They told me, ‘Learn to figure out your money and write your name. That’s as far as a Negro can go.’”

When he was 12 he was sent to live with relatives in Bessemer, where he worked on road crews, painted houses, loaded bricks and did carpentry. For 30 years, he was a metalworker at the Pullman Standard Plant, which made railroad cars. After the plant closed in 1981, he started making metal patio furniture with his sons in a shed behind his house.

In 1951, he married Clara Mae Murrow, who died in 2005. He is survived by a half brother, Arthur Dial; a daughter, Mattie Dial; three sons, Thornton Jr., Richard and Dan; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mr. Dial made his work from anything at hand, from bits of rope to bones to scrap metal. “I like to use the stuff that I know about, stuff that I know the feel of,” he told Mr. Arnett.

“I’m talking about tin, steel, copper, and aluminum, and also old wood, carpet, rope, old clothes, sand, rocks, wire, screen, toys, tree limbs and roots,” he added. “You could say, ‘If Dial see it, he know what to do with it.’”

A large canvas-on-wood work from 1992, “Graveyard Traveler/Selma Bridge,” incorporates rope rug, tin, wood, wire, plastic bags, paint-can lids and pine cones.

Initially he made art to please himself, or to ornament practical objects. He drew on plywood with an elegant, sinuous line, switching to paper in the early 1990s.

When he began showing his work in galleries and museums, he often played variations on the image of a tiger, a symbol of strength, tenacity and the survival instinct that he used to express the tragedies and triumphs of black life.

In “The Last Day of Martin Luther King” (1992), a somber black and white tiger made of painted mop strings stands in for the murdered civil rights leader, while the four spindly, brightly colored “All the Cats in Town” (1993), interlocked like a puzzle, strut and pose with attitude.

Mr. Dial often commented on current events. He translated wildfires in California into a mixed-media work of wood, tin and soil in “Out of Control” (2003), and around the time of the American invasion of Iraq, he shredded and reassembled the Stars and Stripes in “Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together” (2003).

Other works stayed close to home. When several cows that he bought died, he used their white bones to make a work of sculpture, “Lost Cows” (2000-1). His response to an 1869 painting by William Merritt Chase, “Still Life With Watermelon,” was a celebration of Southern cooking, “Setting the Table” (2003), with a bunch of grapes made from a beaded car seat, and an actual frying pan glued to the canvas, with painted eggs inside.

“I mostly pick up stuff,” Mr. Dial told The Times in 2011. “I start on a picture when I get a whole lot of stuff together. And then I look at the piece and think about life.”

In 1993, his work was the subject of a large exhibition, “Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger,” which was presented simultaneously at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, presented a major exhibition, “Thornton Dial in the 21st Century” in 2005, and in 2011, the Indianapolis Museum of Art mounted a traveling retrospective, “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial.”

“Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world,” Mr. Dial told Mr. Arnett. “It can lead peoples through the darkness and help them from being afraid of the darkness. Art is a guide for every person who is looking for something. That’s how I can describe myself: Mr. Dial is a man looking for something.”

Bill Arnett had spent two decades collecting and dealing antiquities from around the world — African art was his passion — when, in 1986, he had an epiphany in Birmingham, Ala.

There, the artist Lonnie Holley assembled sculptures from salvaged junk, and on his first visit, Mr. Arnett bought one — a statement about racism made from a mannequin and chains. It inspired him more than anything he had seen in Europe, Africa or Asia ever had.

“Nothing has been the same since,” Mr. Arnett told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1993. “I had to go out and tell the world that there’s this forgotten civilization doing this great work.”

To Mr. Arnett, Mr. Holley’s work — and that of other Black painters, sculptors and quilters he would soon encounter, most of them poor — was as distinguished as that of acclaimed white artists like Willem de Kooning , Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

He became their fan, promoter and patron, paid at least 20 of them stipends of $200 to $500 a week and brought their art, invisible to the traditional art world, to the attention of museums.

“He was to these folk artists what Alan Lomax was to folk music,” said Andrew Dietz, author of “The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit” (2006), about Mr. Arnett and some of the artists. Mr. Lomax was a pioneering folk music collector and archivist.

In the process Mr. Arnett found critics, who detected a whiff of paternalism in his relationship as a white art collector and dealer to impoverished Black artists.

Mr. Arnett died on Aug. 12 at his home in Atlanta. He was 81. His son Paul did not specify a cause but said his father had had a history of diabetes and heart attacks.

In addition to Mr. Holley, Mr. Arnett sought to elevate the work of artists like Thornton Dial Sr. , a welder who told the story of Black struggles in paintings and assemblages from scavenged materials; Mose Tolliver , who painted on wood from old tree stumps and roots; and Bessie Harvey , who used branches, roots and found objects for her sculptures.

And there were the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Ala ., Black women whose hand-stitched creations honored traditions that could be traced to the mid-19th century. Over four years, Mr. Arnett paid $1.3 million for more than 500 quilts .

When 70 of the quilts from Mr. Arnett’s collection were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York beginning in 2002, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times described them as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”

He added, “Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I’m wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee’s Bend was a plantation.”

Mr. Arnett was born William Arenowitch on May 10, 1939, in segregated Columbus, Ga., to Hilliard and Minna (Moses) Arenowitch. His father was a dry goods wholesaler, his mother a homemaker.

He graduated from the University of Georgia in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English. A course he took in ancient civilizations stoked his desire to explore their art.

He got that chance after college while working for a beverage bottling company in London, a job that left him with time to start collecting art. He began taking trips throughout Europe and to the Middle East, South America and Asia. It was around this time that he and his brother, Robert, who sometimes accompanied him on these trips, changed their Jewish surname to Arnett.

It was only after health problems slowed his international travel that he began his rambles in the Southeast in his van from his base in Atlanta.

For much of the next 30 years he built his collection into a behemoth that needed a warehouse to hold what he boldly told The New Yorker magazine in 2013 was “the most important cultural phenomenon that ever took place in the United States of America.”

Mr. Arnett, loquacious and passionate about what he called the vernacular art of African-Americans, rankled some people in the art world. One issue was his giving stipends to Black artists; these outlays gave him the right of first refusal to buy their works.

“I was trying to give the artists some financial security and confidence; I was buying enormous amounts of work to get the pieces I did want,” he told The Journal-Constitution.

His link to Mr. Dial in particular came under scrutiny. Ned Rifkin, the former director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, for one, questioned Mr. Arnett’s role as Mr. Dial’s exclusive representative.

“He couldn’t help himself from playing God,” Mr. Rifkin said in “The Last Folk Hero.” “He had his own pantheon of hierarchical dimension about this art. He would say, ‘Dial is Picasso, this one is Matisse, that one is Chagall.’”

In 1993, Mr. Arnett was a subject of a “60 Minutes” segment with Morley Safer in which one artist said on camera that Mr. Arnett had underpaid him for some works; another, Ms. Harvey, said he had not returned three works he had borrowed (an accusation she later dropped). The segment suggested that Mr. Arnett controlled Mr. Dial by owning the house the artist lived in.

Mr. Arnett defended himself by saying Mr. Dial had needed to move from a dangerous neighborhood but had been subjected to racism when he tried to get a mortgage. So Mr. Arnett bought the house, he said, and put it in his name.

“His good intentions led to this cul-de-sac where my father had to figure out how to get the house given over to Dial without Dial owing taxes,” Paul Arnett said in a phone interview.

Mr. Arnett said that the notoriety the “60 Minutes” broadcast had brought him had hurt his business, but he recovered somewhat in 1996 when “Souls Grown Deep,” his exhibition of 500 works by 30 Black artists, was shown in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics.

Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times wrote that the show demonstrated “the potential power in a highly personal art commonly made from castoff materials, by artists who have themselves been castoffs from American society.”

Over the years, Mr. Arnett said, he sold off parts of his collection of antiquities and his two houses to support the artists and pay off his debts from helping them. In 2010, he donated 1,300 pieces of the artists’ works to the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which he founded. The foundation, in turn, has made gifts to museums, including one, in 2014, of 57 paintings, drawings, sculptures, quilts and mixed media works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

When the Met exhibited some of the works in 2018, Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote, “The show seems nearly perfect in art installation and irrefutability of greatness.” In addition to his son Paul, Mr. Arnett is survived by his brother, Robert; three other sons, Matt, Harry and Tom; and eight grandchildren. His wife, Judy (Mitchell) Arnett, died in 2011.

Two of Mr. Arnett’s grandchildren, including Viva Vadim, are the children of Matt Arnett and Vanessa Vadim, a daughter of Jane Fonda and the director Roger Vadim. Ms. Fonda was a partner with Bill Arnett in a publishing firm that produced books about the Black artists and is on the foundation’s board . Ms. Vadim and Matt Arnett produced a short film about the Gee’s Bend quilters in 2002.

Mr. Arnett was working with his son Matt in the late 1990s on a book about African-American quilters when a photo of a woman with a quilt from Alabama riveted them. They set out to find her — which they did, in Gee’s Bend — and were welcomed by her fellow quilters.

“We went to meet one quilter and after a few days, we’d met 15,” Matt Arnett said by phone. “Word got around that there were two crazy white men buying ‘ugly, raggly’ quilts. They weren’t ugly, but they were not the prevailing aesthetic. And once it was clear there was something extraordinary there, we went as often as we could.”