James Van Der Zee, Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924, printed 1974, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Eric R. Fox), 2015.xix.4388
How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment?
How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to electric current-day events and issues?
How practice migration and displacement influence cultural product?
"I believe that the [African American'due south] advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in whatsoever other place in the land, and that Harlem volition get the intellectual, the cultural and the financial middle for Negroes of the United States and volition exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples." —James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Civilisation Capital," 1925
The Harlem Renaissance was a menstruum of rich cross-disciplinary creative and cultural action amidst African Americans between the stop of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and involvement in the chop-chop changing modern world—many experiencing a liberty of expression through the arts for the showtime time.
While the Harlem Renaissance may exist best known for its literary and performing arts—pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Knuckles Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.
Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) is known as the "father of African American art." He divers a modern visual language that represented black Americans in a new low-cal. Douglas began his artistic career equally a landscape painter but was influenced by modern art movements such as cubism, in which subjects appear fragmented and fractured, and by the graphic arts, which typically use bold colors and stylized forms. He and other artists too looked toward Westward Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Republic of benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as a link to their African heritage. They besides turned to the fine art of antiquity, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of popular interest due to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902–1993) and Unhurt Woodruff (1900–1980) also explored a streamlined arroyo that drew from African and European artistic influences.
Sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) worked in a realistic style, representing his subjects in a nuanced and sympathetic light in which black Americans had seldom been depicted before. Painter Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891–1981) began his career during the 1920s as one of the showtime African American graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the early part of his career, he created intimate and direct portraits, such equally Portrait of My Grandmother of 1922.
James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), a photographer, became the unofficial chronicler of African American life in Harlem. Whether through formal, posed family photographs in his studio or through photo essays of Harlem'southward cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, various, and thriving community.
The germination of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by the Peachy Migration—the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the continental United states, mainly from rural Southern regions to more populous urban centers in the Northward. Pursuit of jobs, meliorate education, and housing—as well every bit escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism—collection black Americans to relocate.
The onset of the Great Low in 1929 deflated the creative free energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Withal the Harlem Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades. Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. Further, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Centre (HCAC) in 1937, office of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered easily-on art making led past professional artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC was critical in providing black artists connected support and training that helped sustain the adjacent generation of artists to emerge subsequently the war. In subsequent decades, the Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid critical groundwork for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement.
Equally a last note, women artists were also part of the Harlem Renaissance and participated particularly as singers, actors, dancers, and writers. Less well-known are the women visual artists of the flow. Gaining access to the visual arts scene was more hard than entry into the performing arts, as the practice of painting and sculpture in particular were non considered gender-appropriate or "feminine." Two sculptors, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) and Augusta Savage (1892–1962), the latter an activist, artist, and director of the HCAC, fabricated their mark during the menses, but their work has been largely disregarded and is only coming into full cess by art historians today.
Harlem Renaissance James Weldon Johnson,God's Trombones: 7 Negro Sermons in Poetry, 1927
Two artists collaborated on this famous Harlem Renaissance–era book, which combines interpretations of biblical parables written in gimmicky poetry with assuming illustrations that repeat the ability and symbolism of the words.
The author James Weldon Johnson, author, poet, essayist, and chronicler of Black Manhattan (the title of one of his books), commissioned Aaron Douglas to illustrate God's Trombones. The book is organized into eight chapters: an explanatory preface past Johnson and introductory prayer followed past seven sermon-poems entitled "The Cosmos," "The Prodigal Son," "Become Downward Death—A Funeral Sermon," "Noah Built the Ark," "The Crucifixion," "Let My People Get," and "The Judgment Solar day." Each sermon adopts the vernacular of an African American preacher and is accompanied by dynamic, blackness-and-white illustrations that cast the stories in a gimmicky calorie-free and feature black protagonists. Douglas's painting style used assuming coloration, merely printing processes of the 1920s made color illustrations difficult and costly, which is why the illustrations are monochrome with text offset in a unmarried color.
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Harlem Renaissance Aaron Douglas,The Judgment Twenty-four hour period, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1
Years afterward the 1927 publication of God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Poesy, Aaron Douglas painted new works of art based on his original illustrations for the volume. The artist's use of complementary colors (purple and yellow/dark-green) combined with overlapping arcs, zigzagging shapes, and the silhouetted figures' extended limbs create an energized composition. The central figure, who is outsize to show his importance (a device used in ancient Egyptian fine art, which was an influence on Douglas'south way) represents Gabriel, an archangel appearing in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible who serves equally God'south messenger and whose name means "God is my strength." The other figures respond to Gabriel's telephone call and the pulsating forms suggest the trumpet's echoing sound. The verse that accompanied the illustration published in God'southward Trombones likens Gabriel to a blues trumpeter:
And Gabriel'due south going to ask him: Lord,
How long must I blow it?
And God'south a-going to tell him: Gabriel,
Blow information technology calm and easy.
And then putting i pes on the mountain tiptop,
And the other in the middle of the sea,
Gabriel's going to stand and blow his horn.
To wake the living nations.
Harlem Renaissance Aaron Douglas,Into Chains, 1936, oil on sail, Corcoran Drove (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Collection), 2014.79.17
This painting refers to the Atlantic slave trade, during which 10–12 meg people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas, near during the period from the 1600s to the 1800s. The Us outlawed further slave trade into the country in 1808, although the practice itself was non abolished until 1864. The painting positions us as viewers behind a scrim of foliage, as if we are hiding or witnessing the scene. At that place is a receding line of male figures, heads bowed, advancing toward the ocean and approaching ships that will forcibly transport them to a foreign place and life of enslavement. Aaron Douglas uses nonnaturalistic, complementary colors—teal-blueish figures and a searing, lemon-yellow sky—to add drama. Wrist shackles are painted a contrasting orange, which draws our center to them. One effigy has dropped to his knees in the foreground, arms raised beseechingly heavenward, while a central standing effigy gazes at a single star whose beam of light illuminates him, mayhap a reminder that he is not forsaken.
Harlem Renaissance Fritz Winold Reiss,Untitled (Two Figures in an Incline), woodcut, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 2008.115.4080
Fritz Winold Reiss and his family emigrated from Frg to the United states of america in 1913. He traveled extensively around the U.s.a. and Mexico, and became interested in America'south racial variety, frequently portraying indigenous Americans and African Americans. Reiss illustrated The New Negro, Alain Locke's influential anthology of writing, thought, and verse that became an emblem of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro asserted the unique qualities of blackness American civilization and life and encouraged buying and pride in its fine art and heritage.
Reiss, who was white, was inspired past the same sources as black artists and designers: modern European art and the stylized forms of African fine art, including ancient Egyptian art (see the related Pinterest board for examples). Here, the figures, shown only in profile, are compressed into a geometrical space throbbing with active lines and movement. One effigy appears to tend the hair of another, while the multiply breasted effigy could be a goddess or symbol of fertility. Reiss's active composition of jagged lines and radiating forms influenced Aaron Douglas.
Harlem Renaissance James Lesesne Wells,Looking Upwards, 1928, woodcut in black on laid paper, Ruth and Jacob Kainen Drove, 1994.87.9
James Lesesne Wells found inspiration in the stylized qualities of African sculpture and in High german expressionist art, which revived the centuries-old medium of woodcut printing for the modernistic age. This work shows an outsize, silhouetted figure making his way amid, and dominating, an urban wood of skyscrapers that seem to tumble in his wake. He appears to conduct a small model of other dwellings, perchance a representation of home or the thought of home we retain in retentiveness. The figure looks about him, as if seeking or aspiring to fit in or establish roots. Many African Americans elected to movement from the South to Northern cities during the Bang-up Migration, experiencing both displacement and aligning to new urban environments.
Harlem Renaissance Richmond Barthé,Caput of a Boy, c. 1930, painted plaster, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Drove, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2014.136.295
Richmond Barthé sculpted African American subjects in a sensitive, realist style. Barthé followed a classical style in sculpture, believing that any subject could exist dignified and cute if rendered with skill and thoughtfulness. Upwards until the Harlem Renaissance, African American faces rarely appeared equally the cardinal subject of visual art. Barthé'southward art and involvement in the male figure was informed by his identity every bit a gay man, who co-ordinate to the times was constrained in disclosing this part of his life openly, although he did find fellowship and dear interests amid the flow's artists and intellectuals.
Barthé grew up in New Orleans and headed north with the support of his family to pursue an artistic education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he studied painting. At the time, SAIC and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were the two U.s.a. art schools that admitted African American students. Barthé discovered his talent for sculpture in 1927, when he was introduced to the medium during a course assignment to create a portrait bust of a fellow educatee in clay (he completed two). These initial works were noticed by the instructor and included in an exhibition, The Negro in Art Week, launching Barthé's career and lifelong commitment to sculpture.
Harlem Renaissance Werner Drewes,Harlem Beauty, 1930, woodcut in black, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1974.84.i
In 1930, Werner Drewes emigrated to New York City from Germany, where he had been an art educatee. This piece of work is from the aforementioned year he arrived in New York and pays homage to African American womanhood and beauty. The image, created past a white creative person who worked in circles outside of Harlem, attests to the widespread cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance, of interest to people across racial and social lines, including artists, teachers, patrons, and funders who engaged in pluralist, interracial dialogues. Drewes occasionally made images of people and scenes in Harlem and other New York locations. Harlem Beauty has a timeless and sculptural quality, with its stripped-downward focus on the woman's illuminated face in contour, a classical portrait style. Drewes, similar Fritz Winold Reiss, was associated with a modernist European tradition that also was of interest to many African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Can you lot think of other examples of cultural dialogue, wherein seemingly singled-out populations influence each other's creative practices?
Drewes worked in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist employment programs as an art teacher at the Brooklyn Museum and Columbia University. He later headed the graphic arts sectionalization of the Federal Art Projection, part of the WPA, in New York state. He was a prolific printmaker and, later, painter.
Harlem Renaissance Archibald John Motley Jr.,Portrait of My Grandmother, 1922, oil on sheet, Patrons' Permanent Fund, Avalon Fund, and Motley Fund, 2018.two.1
The extended Motley family moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1894. The grouping included the artist'southward paternal grandmother, Emily Motley, pictured hither. Her son, Archibald Motley Sr., worked equally a Pullman porter on the Michigan Central Railroad and his married woman, Mary L. Motley, was a schoolteacher. Their professions were among the highest-status and best-paying jobs blackness Americans could concur at the time and situated the family in the middle class. The family unit's move anticipated the n Great Migration of African Americans that gained momentum during World War I and connected until the ceremonious rights era.
The creative person was among the first African Americans to nourish the Schoolhouse of the Art Institute of Chicago (from 1914 to 1918), where he also worked as a janitor to defray costs. Following graduation, Motley elected to focus his fine art on themes effectually black American life. This portrait of his grandmother, who was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1842, is venerable and dignified, the furnishings of fourth dimension and difficult work visible on her hands and face. She lived until age 87. The work, completed when Motley was still an unknown, may have been painted on a cast-off Cardinal Railroad laundry bag from his begetter's train line.
Harlem Renaissance Hale Woodruff, Robert Blackburn,Sunday Promenade, published 1996, linocut in black with chine-collé on wove paper, Corcoran Drove (Souvenir of East. Thomas Williams, Jr. and Auldlyn Higgins Williams in memory of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.19.3032.8
Hale Woodruff, alongside Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthé, and Archibald John Motley Jr., is among the major visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Robert Blackburn, an African American artist also credited for this piece of work, founded the Printmaking Workshop in New York, where he taught lithography and printed editions for artists, such as this one. All of the same artists were born and lived outside New York, but ultimately relocated to Harlem, drawn by its magnetic art scene. In so doing, they joined many African Americans in the due north exodus that became known as the Bully Migration. Woodruff studied art at Harvard Academy and at the Schoolhouse of the Art Found of Chicago, too as working in Paris, where he embraced modern styles of painting. In improver, he studied with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whom he admired for the social justice themes he pursued in his fine art.
Sunday Promenade, office of a series of work Woodruff made while living in Atlanta during the Low, depicts two couples and a woman wearing their Sunday all-time. A church lies backside them in a point at the top of the composition and underscores the centrality of spiritual life in the African American customs. The turned-out appearance of the promenaders contrasts with the modest wooden structures also pictured. Woodruff also fabricated politically charged piece of work that dealt graphically with lynching, an issue he felt compelled to confront with his fine art. During the first part of the 20th century, the NAACP and other groups worked to advance anti-lynching legislation, which was never passed.
Harlem Renaissance James Van Der Zee,Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924, gelatin silver print, printed 1974, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Eric R. Fox), 2015.19.4388
James Van Der Zee opened the Guarantee Portrait Studio in Harlem in 1917. He captured the faces and lives of people who lived in Harlem: its famous entertainers, artists, leaders, and a growing black middle class. He besides took his photographic camera to the places they chosen their own: homes, billiard halls, barbershops, churches, and clubs. Van Der Zee's piece of work forms an important chronicle of black life of the period. This well-dressed family was associated with Marcus Garvey's motion, the Universal Negro Comeback Association (UNIA). UNIA advocated for black Americans (and others from the African diaspora) to immigrate to Africa to populate and further develop Liberia, the simply non-colonial state on the continent. Van Der Zee was hired by the UNIA to record and document its marches, parades, and members, who adopted a quasi-militaristic appearance. The UNIA became a mass motion of over 200,000 members during the 1920s, a fourth dimension when the Ku Klux Klan had reemerged as a white nationalist group. Garvey was bedevilled of mail fraud in 1927 and deported to his native Jamaica. Absent his leadership, the movement faded.
Harlem Renaissance James Van Der Zee,Alpha Phi Blastoff Basketball Team, 1926, gelatin silverish print, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.19.4507
This portrait of a higher basketball team shows a serious group of young men united by their affiliation with their fraternity and its basketball team. Alpha Phi Blastoff was the get-go intercollegiate African American fraternity in the U.s.a., its outset chapter founded in 1906 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The fraternity provided support, study groups, and, later, opportunities to participate in intercollegiate sports at a time when black players were non permitted on higher teams. Notation how each thespian is carefully posed and forms a symmetrical organization on the steps of the fraternity, showing their integrity every bit a group while radiating their determination to succeed in a racially divided state.
Harlem Renaissance Norman Lewis,Jazz, c. 1938, lithograph in blackness on wove paper, Reba and Dave Williams Drove, Florian Carr Fund and Souvenir of the Print Enquiry Foundation, 2008.115.193
Similar Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis was attuned to the importance of jazz and blues music, specially growing upwards in Harlem during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. Only 19 when he created this print, the work shows a modernistic, abstract quality while capturing visually the sense of music produced past this quartet of musicians, who seem to bob in the space of the film, emulating the rhythm of the music.
Lewis was influenced by the writings of Alain Locke, an intellectual, impresario, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance who advocated for blackness visual artists to explore the distinctive grapheme of their experience and civilisation. Jazz is a hybrid art grade with many influences, including West African music. In 1935, Lewis viewed African Negro Art, an early American exhibition (at the Museum of Modern Art, New York) of African sculpture, textiles, and objects shown as aesthetic works of art rather than ethnographic artifacts. Lewis then began a phase of drawing imagined African masks (see the associated Pinterest lath for an example). The masklike advent of the figures in this work may also accept been influenced by the exhibition.
Lewis'southward printmaking activity over the form of his career was limited; he made prints for the Works Progress Assistants's Federal Art Project (FAP) during the Depression years and several editions independently in the 1940s, subsequently which he returned to printmaking simply sporadically. After the 1940s, Lewis embraced brainchild in his fine art and became well-known in the 1950s and beyond for his large-scale paintings, one of which is also in the National Gallery of Art collection (meet the related Pinterest lath). He is also notable amidst the artists who took part in the FAP—as printmakers, muralists, and teachers—who later became prominent abstruse artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jacob Lawrence.
Harlem Renaissance Isac Friedlander,Rhapsody in Black, 1931, wood engraving, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 2008.115.1943
Isac Friedlander, a white printmaker who emigrated to the United states in 1929, reminds us that the Harlem Renaissance and its exuberant nightlife was also an allure for progressive-minded whites who traveled to Harlem to partake of the entertainment, which was generally entirely produced, written, and performed by black artists and impresarios. Hither a tiptop-hatted bandleader leads a group of robed singers, a jazz orchestra, and a pianist in a vibrant musical effect. The technique of woods engraving that Friedlander used is a process in which the artist uses negative, or white, lines to describe the image (remember of drawing on a black scratchboard). The technique can produce nuanced detail due to the very fine-grained wood that is used for the procedure. The nature of the medium allowed Friedlander to capture the feeling of a night nightclub with the performers' faces illuminated by stage lights. This dynamic scene may have been captured by Friedlander prior to the onset of the Depression.
Harlem Renaissance Alfred Stieglitz,Brancusi Exhibition at 291, 1914, printed 1924/1937, gelatin silvery impress, Alfred Stieglitz Drove, 1949.3.353
This is an paradigm that documents a 1914 gallery exhibition of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian modernist who worked in Paris and was greatly influenced past the forms of African art. At this time, West African fine art was being imported to the U.s. by French and Belgian art dealers. This art had come to the attention and interest of artists working in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Amedeo Modigliani, Brancusi, and others, who were searching for new forms to limited the modern era and a new century. They institute inspiration in the oft abstruse and stylized forms of African art, as well as the art of other non-Western cultures and of antiquity. The relationship of Europeans to the fine art of Africa entails a complex dynamic that raises questions about who has the right to appropriate and interpret another culture's patrimony. A generation after the Parisian modernists, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance as well borrowed from the forms of African fine art every bit a means of reconnecting with and expressing pride in their African heritage.
Harlem Renaissance Pablo Picasso,Caput of a Woman (Fernande), model 1909, cast before 1932, bronze, Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of Mitchell P. Rales, 2002.1.1
Many Europeans assimilated influences from African art, including Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who often worked in Paris
At left, the modeled and bandage head of Picasso's companion, Fernande Olivier, is in a cubist style. Cubism shattered ideas of how space and objects could be depicted in art. For the first time, art was non trying to reproduce the appearance of a person or object. Instead, objects and the subjects of portraits, similar this one, were fractured into smaller planes and surfaces. Cubism was meant to portray the creative person'due south way of seeing and perceiving the subject area. Modern artist David Hockney has noted, "Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the start big, big change. Information technology confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'" Some of Picasso'southward inspiration for cubism derived from his involvement in African art, and particularly masks, which he collected and kept in his studio in Paris.
Harlem Renaissance Amedeo Modigliani,Head of a Adult female, 1910/1911, limestone, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.241
Amedeo Modigliani, an artist from Italy, also worked in Paris, a vibrant cultural capital letter that attracted immature artists from all over Europe. His piece of work does not embrace cubism, only he abstracted the features of his Head of a Woman by elongating them, perhaps in emulation of African masks or archaic sculpture. In turn, artists of later generations, such every bit those of the Harlem Renaissance, became interested in both the values of modernistic fine art, which rejected the fine art styles and traditions of the by, and in African art, which developed forth a distinct trajectory contained of Europe.
Harlem Renaissance Walker Evans,Figure of a Woman, Laongo, 1935, gelatin argent impress, Souvenir of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.17
This piece of work of art was amid some 600 presented in a 1935 exhibition at the Museum of Mod Art, New York, entitled African Negro Art. The exhibition marked the get-go time that non-Western cultural objects were shown in a modern art gallery as aesthetic art objects rather than ethnographic artifacts. In so doing, the museum acknowledged the significant influence of African art, traded from colonized African countries, on Western modern art.
Harlem Renaissance Walker Evans,Polychrome Mask, 1935, gelatin argent print, Gift of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.6
In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the exhibition African Negro Art. The exhibition'south emphasis on the objects' artful qualities led the museum to omit information virtually their cultural context and ceremonial use or significance, which prevented visitors from accessing a deeper understanding of the objects' origins. For example, the title of this mask does non offer cultural information, such as the fact that it is from Gabon or the Republic of the Congo, Kwele people. What can y'all observe most art from West Africa and its characteristics?
Harlem Renaissance Walker Evans,Figure of a Immature Woman, Pahouin, Edge of Spanish Republic of guinea, 1935, gelatin argent print, Souvenir of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.10
Today, the Pahouin culture referred to in this object'due south title is more than commonly known as Fang or Fãn, a Primal African ethnic group.
The Museum of Modernistic Art'due south 1935 exhibition, African Negro Fine art, was photographed by Walker Evans, who may exist best known for his photography documenting the effects of the Depression in rural America. Evans produced a portfolio containing 477 prints of African Negro Fine art; most of these sets were given to African American colleges and universities in the United States.
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