Killed at age 44 by a gunshot fired by his fiancee’s brother, Arkansas painter Dewitt Jordan left a complicated legacy. There’s something not quite cartoonish but also not quite real about the rounded eyes of the men and women he painted in the middle decades of the 20th century. Whether those doe eyes are an exercise in realism or a message to his audience about the subjects’ personalities is unclear. Perhaps he was suggesting that the roughness of the times in which they lived had failed to blunt their humanity, or perhaps it was a playful riff on the high art tradition of portraiture that inspired Jordan’s output. Either way, the viewer can’t escape the feeling that on some level, Jordan himself wasn’t chuckling.
Then again, Jordan’s paintings range far and wide in tone and format. Starkly less intimate than his portraits, but no less vibrant, were his tableaus of cotton fields and riverboats pulling into port — landscapes inspired by his work as a backdrop painter and sketch artist in the 1950s for Warner Bros. “He just painted what he saw,” said Victor Jordan, the artist’s son, who, as a teenager, lived with his father near Memphis.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on Dec. 14, 1932, to Dewitt Sr. and Frank Ella Jordan, Dewitt Jordan moved as a child to Helena (in Phillips County, and now known as Helena-West Helena), where his mother took over operations of the family’s funeral home. His father worked on a 1,200-acre farm that, along with an additional funeral home and a fleet of automobiles, formed a successful family-owned, African-American business in Helena that lasted into the late 1960s. One of the family’s funeral homes, Jackson Highley Funeral Home of Helena-West Helena, still exists today.
“Dewitt Sr. was kind of a dandy, always dressed to the hilt,” remembered Henry Jordan (no relation, aside from being the family’s business insurer in Helena). “But Frank Ella made all the decisions.”
Henry Jordan recalled the burgeoning artist saying that he learned to paint humans realistically by working with the cadavers at the family’s funeral home. Some of his earliest work was sketches he made of corpses, alongside the images he studied in art books from the public library.
After graduating from the segregated Eliza Miller High School in Helena, Dewitt Jordan studied at Tennessee State University and Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio (now Central State University). He moved to California and studied at the California School of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, San Francisco State University and the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He married Elsbeth Foster and had two sons, Anthony and Eric.
Dewitt Jordan concluded his studies and moved back to Helena, but the time away from home had changed the settings on his artistic lens. “When I finished school and went back home to Arkansas,” he told the Memphis-based Commercial Appeal in 1968, “I saw my people in a different light.”
In a space above the family funeral home, Dewitt Jordan painted many of the musicians he encountered in the local blues joints, where he spent time drinking and listening to music.
He fathered three more children in Helena, Victor, Vince and Cynthia, and made inroads in the art scene. Notably, he met George Hunt, who became an early advocate of his work in the region.
“A dude who frequented my mother-in-law’s place, the Dreamland Cafe, kept telling me, ‘You ought to see Dewitt Jordan’s work,’” Hunt said. “He kept at me to see this guy’s art, so finally I went around the corner from the cafe to Jordan’s Funeral Home, which was run by Dewitt’s family, and as soon as I walked in the foyer I was blown away by a small painting depicting death as a winged angel coming to get a man. There was something Rembrandtish about it. Somebody said, ‘Dewitt did that when he was 15.’”
‘Hell, man, that’s the South’
With Hunt’s encouragement, Dewitt Jordan moved to Memphis and found patrons there. “Sometime in 1963, Jordan read in the Memphis Press-Scimitar that a developer was looking for a large painting of a steamboat scene to hang in the main lobby of a 14-story combination hotel and apartment complex that was nearing completion,” wrote Arkansas historian Bobby Roberts.
“The building, known as the Rivermont, sat atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and for many years dominated the skyline along the river. Jordan got in touch with the developer, Harry Bloomfield, who came by Jordan’s house, liked [his] painting and purchased [a piece] for $3,500. It was a nice commission in the 1960s for a relatively unknown artist — equivalent to about $35,000 in 2024. More importantly, the patronage gave Jordan access to the white elites in Memphis.
“One, and perhaps two, of Jordan’s paintings hung in Memphis’s prestigious Top of the 100 Club, which sat atop the city’s tallest building at 100 N. Main St.,” Roberts wrote. “And, in 1974, two of his Mississippi River paintings were centerpieces of the newly constructed Holly Hills Country Club in Cordova, Tennessee. Both projects were developed by Jordan’s patron, Harry Bloomfield.”
“He and George Hunt were good friends,” Victor Jordan said, “and George was a successful, accomplished artist as well, even though their themes were different … You could see the thought patterns that would coincide with each other’s method of thinking.”
Dewitt Jordan defended his work from criticism he may have taken from the Black community. Arriving in Memphis at the height of the civil rights movement, many African Americans took offense at Dewitt Jordan’s renderings of the field lives they were working so hard to leave behind.
“Whites see my work and accept me as an artist. They value my paintings if not me,” he told the Commercial Appeal in 1968. “But on the other side, my people don’t appreciate my art and tell me, ‘What’s with this art? You ain’t nothing but a n—. You ain’t no good.’ Negroes say I degrade them because I [paint] pictures of the old stereotype.”
But Dewitt Jordan insisted his portrayal of the American South was reality and worthy of depiction. “Hell, man, that’s the South,” he said. “The South is not some cabin on a grassy hill. It’s people, my people and the white bossman and it’s America because the South is in America.”
“He painted what he saw in the South,” Victor Jordan said of his father’s work. “I think people bought his work because of [his] talent, right? Yeah. I don’t necessarily think that they bought his work because they wanted the South to remain. He captured a place in time as far as I’m concerned. That should show us how far we have come.”
Given America’s sustained wrangling over the depiction and meaning of Black laboring bodies, it’s not surprising that Dewitt Jordan’s work drew such radically different responses from these oppositional contingents. But therein lies the enduring relevance of his artistic output, its dual gestures toward nostalgia and lived reality.
‘He’s a little kooky’
On the Memphis scene, Dewitt Jordan was regarded as an eccentric — one who occasionally ran afoul of the law. He drank Scotch, and painted nude while listening to classical music. Caught in such a state by some farmers who called the sheriff to complain about his behavior, the sheriff brushed it off, the artist recalled in the Commercial Appeal in 1977.
“The sheriff told the farmers, ‘That’s Dewitt. He’s an artist. He’s a little kooky.’”
“‘I don’t like your personality but I like your paintings,’ the sheriff said.” And then he bought three of Dewitt’s works.
“He wasn’t part of white society,” Henry Jordan said. “He was on the outside, ’cos Blacks were. But he could do something that they wanted, and he knew it. He was a hustler, I’m telling you.”
“I don’t know all the details, but somewhere [his mother, Frank Ella] called me and knew I was from Memphis,” Henry Jordan said. “And said Dewitt was in jail. I can’t remember whether it was a DUI or what, but it could have been a lot of things, fighting. Anything. So she asked me if I could help. And, believe it or not, one of my dear friends was a judge up there? Now, he wouldn’t appreciate me now telling you that he used his influence to let him out. Anyway, it helped and got him released.
“And for that, she helped me get a painting. I assume she brought it to my office.”
Another friend of Henry Jordan’s, a doctor, had obtained some of Dewitt Jordan’s sketches, he recalled. “Dewitt convinced him to let him take them to [LeMoyne-Owen] College in Memphis for a display and he never saw them again. Dewitt was a scoundrel. Like I told you, he was very full of himself, and he could be overbearing and he took advantage of his art.”
‘This is what I saw’
But Dewitt Jordan is also remembered fondly by Victor Jordan, who recalled his father allowing him to stay up for hours into the night watching him paint. “I was 14 at the time … and I would just stay up with him all night. He’d say he’s going to do a painting. I’d be like, ‘Well, can I stay up and watch?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, you want to watch?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I want to stay up and watch,’ and I would. Stay up with him all night long. On a Friday night or a Saturday night.”
Dewitt Jordan maintained a relationship with his first champion, George Hunt, too, visiting Hunt’s classroom at one of Memphis’s historically Black high schools. Dewitt Jordan relished the role of volunteer teacher. “[The] only thing that kept him from being in the schools as a teacher was that he didn’t have his union card,” Hunt said.
When it comes to his father’s legacy, complex and storied as it may be, Victor Jordan recalled him as a documentarian of the lives of rural Black people, willing to paint the past even when it made some Black viewers uncomfortable. “He left the legacy behind for people to build on. It’s like, this is where we are at this time. But we’re not always going to be here, so look back at this. And remember this and think about the price that your foreparents paid for you to be where you are today. As you’re standing there critiquing my work. As you want to forget your past and where you came from. Think about your relatives and your ancestors. They paid this particular price for you now to be an attorney, for you now to be a doctor, for you now to be a lawyer. For you to be an educator, an inventor or whatever it is you chose or ended up being as you progressed with the talents and abilities you were blessed with. This is my talent. These are my abilities and this is what I saw.”
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