‘Hell, man, that’s the South’: Remembering the life of Arkansas artist Dewitt Jordan

“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.”