Robert L. Neal
1916
–1987
BirthplaceAtlanta, Georgia
Death placeDayton, Ohio
BiographyRobert Lee Neal benefited greatly from his relationship with Hale Woodruff, the revered artist-educator who oversaw the art department at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). A native of Atlanta, Neal began studying under Woodruff as a teenager, presumably while enrolled at Atlanta University’s Laboratory School, an experimental preparatory school that Martin Luther King Jr. also attended.
Neal became Woodruff's chief assistant on a major mural project, The Amistad Series, at Talladega College in Alabama. Three of these large-scale, colorful canvases, painted in 1938, commemorate the uprising aboard the Spanish slave ship referred to in the title. The other panels depict the founding of Talladega College, the construction of Savery Library on its campus, and the efforts of the Underground Railroad. Neal recounted that “Mr. Woodruff did all the figures. I did all of the background.” Woodruff would later praise Neal’s integral role in the project: “He kept my sketches and equipment in order. He transferred the cartoons to the actual canvas. He posed for all the hand and figure gestures in the mural. (His hands were expressive, by nature, artistically structural, and adaptive to what I was trying to do.) I don't know what I would have done without him.” When Woodruff became ill shortly before the murals’ unveiling at Talladega, he deputized Neal to oversee the installation of the panels in his stead.
Neal’s painting style reflects the hard-edge realism and deep chiaroscuro of his mentor’s work at the time of these murals. Several of his works were included in landmark exhibitions celebrating the achievements of African American artists, including Contemporary Negro Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939 and the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro in Chicago in 1940.
Neal became Woodruff's chief assistant on a major mural project, The Amistad Series, at Talladega College in Alabama. Three of these large-scale, colorful canvases, painted in 1938, commemorate the uprising aboard the Spanish slave ship referred to in the title. The other panels depict the founding of Talladega College, the construction of Savery Library on its campus, and the efforts of the Underground Railroad. Neal recounted that “Mr. Woodruff did all the figures. I did all of the background.” Woodruff would later praise Neal’s integral role in the project: “He kept my sketches and equipment in order. He transferred the cartoons to the actual canvas. He posed for all the hand and figure gestures in the mural. (His hands were expressive, by nature, artistically structural, and adaptive to what I was trying to do.) I don't know what I would have done without him.” When Woodruff became ill shortly before the murals’ unveiling at Talladega, he deputized Neal to oversee the installation of the panels in his stead.
Neal’s painting style reflects the hard-edge realism and deep chiaroscuro of his mentor’s work at the time of these murals. Several of his works were included in landmark exhibitions celebrating the achievements of African American artists, including Contemporary Negro Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939 and the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro in Chicago in 1940.