To say that Charles White (1918–1979) is “finally having his moment” probably doesn’t do justice to his stature while alive. White never lacked fans: According to Andrew Hemingway’s authoritative Artists on the Left, he was “the most important Communist artist of the 1950s”; in the late ‘60s, the Washington Post named him as the foremost artist of the Black Arts Movement (though he was really an elder statesman). He taught and influenced important contemporary artists like David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall. He was close with Dalton Trumbo and Harry Belafonte. Sidney Poitier gave a statement at his wake.

What is true is that White is suddenly mainstream in a way that he never was before, with the great painter, draughtsman, and printmaker now the subject of a radiant touring career retrospective. The show is a stunner, ranging from White’s scheme for his earliest mural, the wheeling, tenebrous Depression-era Five Great American Negroes (1939), whose heroes were decided by a vote in a Chicago paper, through the clarion sobriety of his ‘50s charcoal image of a mother and child, Ye Shall Inherit the Earth (1953), to the gorgeously enigmatic, sepia-toned oil Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man) (1973). Everywhere White’s technique is absorbing, always finding new ways to express the modulation of skin tones, new means to balance dynamism and solidity.

And everywhere, White’s black figures radiate dignity without stock sentimentality, which made him radical for his time. The cartoonist Tom Feelings once summed up what he felt to be his friend’s mission: “Charles White deliberately chose to depict the everyday, ordinary, working-class people. The most African-looking, the poorest, and the blackest people in our ranks. The ones who by all accounts were the furthest from the country’s white standards of success and beauty.”