James Van Der Zee, Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924, printed 1974, gelatin argent print, Corcoran Drove (Souvenir of Eric R. Fox), 2015.19.4388
How practise visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment?
How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues?
How do migration and displacement influence cultural production?
"I believe that the [African American'south] advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other identify in the land, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural and the fiscal center for Negroes of the U.s.a. and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples." —James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Civilization Upper-case letter," 1925
The Harlem Renaissance was a catamenia of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Corking Depression and lead upwards to World War II (the 1930s). Artists associated with the move asserted pride in black life and identity, a ascent consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and involvement in the rapidly irresolute modern world—many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the offset time.
While the Harlem Renaissance may be all-time known for its literary and performing arts—pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were cardinal contributors to the beginning modernistic Afrocentric cultural move and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.
Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) is known every bit the "male parent of African American art." He defined a mod visual linguistic communication that represented blackness Americans in a new calorie-free. Douglas began his artistic career every bit a landscape painter only was influenced by modern art movements such every bit 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 also looked toward West Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as a link to their African heritage. They also turned to the art of antiquity, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of pop involvement due to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen'south tomb. Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902–1993) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980) also explored a streamlined approach 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 blackness Americans had seldom been depicted before. Painter Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891–1981) began his career during the 1920s equally one of the first 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 lensman, 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's cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, diverse, and thriving community.
The formation of new African American creative communities was engendered in part past the Not bad 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 North. Pursuit of jobs, better education, and housing—as well every bit escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism—drove black Americans to relocate.
The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Nevertheless the Harlem Renaissance planted creative seeds that would germinate for decades. Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Projection (1935–1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Assistants. Farther, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Heart (HCAC) in 1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered easily-on fine art making led past professional person artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC was critical in providing black artists continued back up and training that helped sustain the next generation of artists to sally later the war. In subsequent decades, the Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid disquisitional groundwork for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement.
As a final notation, women artists were also part of the Harlem Renaissance and participated peculiarly as singers, actors, dancers, and writers. Less well-known are the women visual artists of the period. Gaining access to the visual arts scene was more difficult than entry into the performing arts, as the practice of painting and sculpture in item were not 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, made their mark during the period, but their work has been largely disregarded and is just coming into full assessment by art historians today.
Harlem Renaissance James Weldon Johnson,God'southward Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, 1927
2 artists collaborated on this famous Harlem Renaissance–era volume, which combines interpretations of biblical parables written in gimmicky verse with assuming illustrations that echo the power and symbolism of the words.
The writer James Weldon Johnson, author, poet, essayist, and chronicler of Blackness Manhattan (the title of one of his books), commissioned Aaron Douglas to illustrate God's Trombones. The volume is organized into 8 chapters: an explanatory preface by Johnson and introductory prayer followed by seven sermon-poems entitled "The Creation," "The Prodigal Son," "Go Downward Death—A Funeral Sermon," "Noah Built the Ark," "The Crucifixion," "Let My People Get," and "The Judgment Day." Each sermon adopts the vernacular of an African American preacher and is accompanied by dynamic, black-and-white illustrations that bandage the stories in a contemporary light and characteristic black protagonists. Douglas'southward painting fashion used bold coloration, simply printing processes of the 1920s fabricated color illustrations difficult and costly, which is why the illustrations are monochrome with text outset in a single color.
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Harlem Renaissance Aaron Douglas,The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1
Years after the 1927 publication of God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Poesy, Aaron Douglas painted new works of fine art based on his original illustrations for the volume. The artist's utilise of complementary colors (royal and yellow/green) combined with overlapping arcs, zigzagging shapes, and the silhouetted figures' extended limbs create an energized composition. The key effigy, who is outsize to show his importance (a device used in aboriginal Egyptian art, which was an influence on Douglas's mode) represents Gabriel, an archangel appearing in the One-time and New Testaments of the Bible who serves equally God's messenger and whose name means "God is my forcefulness." The other figures respond to Gabriel'south telephone call and the pulsating forms suggest the trumpet's echoing sound. The verse that accompanied the illustration published in God's Trombones likens Gabriel to a blues trumpeter:
And Gabriel's going to ask him: Lord,
How long must I accident it?
And God's a-going to tell him: Gabriel,
Accident it calm and easy.
So putting 1 foot on the mountain superlative,
And the other in the middle of the body of water,
Gabriel's going to stand and accident his horn.
To wake the living nations.
Harlem Renaissance Aaron Douglas,Into Bondage, 1936, oil on sail, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Drove), 2014.79.17
This painting refers to the Atlantic slave trade, during which x–12 million people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas, most during the period from the 1600s to the 1800s. The United States outlawed further slave trade into the country in 1808, although the practice itself was not abolished until 1864. The painting positions us every bit viewers behind a scrim of foliage, as if we are hiding or witnessing the scene. There is a receding line of male figures, heads bowed, advancing toward the ocean and approaching ships that will forcibly send them to a foreign identify and life of enslavement. Aaron Douglas uses nonnaturalistic, complementary colors—teal-bluish figures and a searing, lemon-yellow sky—to add drama. Wrist shackles are painted a contrasting orange, which draws our heart to them. One figure has dropped to his knees in the foreground, arms raised beseechingly heavenward, while a central standing figure gazes at a single star whose axle of light illuminates him, perhaps 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 Federal republic of germany to the Usa in 1913. He traveled extensively around the U.s. and Mexico, and became interested in America's racial diverseness, frequently portraying indigenous Americans and African Americans. Reiss illustrated The New Negro, Alain Locke'due south influential album of writing, thought, and poesy that became an emblem of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro asserted the unique qualities of black American culture and life and encouraged ownership and pride in its art and heritage.
Reiss, who was white, was inspired by the same sources as blackness artists and designers: modern European art and the stylized forms of African art, including ancient Egyptian fine art (see the related Pinterest board for examples). Here, the figures, shown only in contour, are compressed into a geometrical space throbbing with active lines and motion. One figure 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 Upward, 1928, woodcut in blackness on laid newspaper, Ruth and Jacob Kainen Collection, 1994.87.9
James Lesesne Wells found inspiration in the stylized qualities of African sculpture and in German language expressionist art, which revived the centuries-quondam medium of woodcut press for the modern age. This work shows an outsize, silhouetted effigy making his way among, and dominating, an urban wood of skyscrapers that seem to tumble in his wake. He appears to carry a modest model of other dwellings, perhaps a representation of home or the idea of abode we retain in memory. The figure looks about him, as if seeking or aspiring to fit in or constitute roots. Many African Americans elected to motion from the Due south to Northern cities during the Dandy Migration, experiencing both deportation 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 way in sculpture, believing that any subject area could exist dignified and cute if rendered with skill and thoughtfulness. Up until the Harlem Renaissance, African American faces rarely appeared as the fundamental discipline of visual art. Barthé'due south art and interest in the male figure was informed by his identity as a gay human, who co-ordinate to the times was constrained in disclosing this function of his life openly, although he did find fellowship and dear interests among the period's artists and intellectuals.
Barthé grew upwards in New Orleans and headed north with the back up of his family to pursue an artistic didactics 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 United states art schools that admitted African American students. Barthé discovered his talent for sculpture in 1927, when he was introduced to the medium during a class assignment to create a portrait bust of a fellow educatee in dirt (he completed ii). These initial works were noticed by the teacher and included in an exhibition, The Negro in Art Calendar week, launching Barthé's career and lifelong commitment to sculpture.
Harlem Renaissance Werner Drewes,Harlem Beauty, 1930, woodcut in black, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1974.84.1
In 1930, Werner Drewes emigrated to New York City from Deutschland, where he had been an art pupil. This piece of work is from the same yr he arrived in New York and pays homage to African American womanhood and beauty. The paradigm, created by a white artist who worked in circles exterior of Harlem, attests to the widespread cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance, of involvement 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 Dazzler has a timeless and sculptural quality, with its stripped-downwards focus on the adult female's illuminated confront in contour, a classical portrait style. Drewes, like Fritz Winold Reiss, was associated with a modernist European tradition that likewise was of involvement to many African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Can you think of other examples of cultural dialogue, wherein seemingly singled-out populations influence each other's artistic practices?
Drewes worked in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt'due south Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist employment programs as an art teacher at the Brooklyn Museum and Columbia Academy. He afterward headed the graphic arts partitioning of the Federal Art Projection, office of the WPA, in New York state. He was a prolific printmaker and, later on, painter.
Harlem Renaissance Archibald John Motley Jr.,Portrait of My Grandmother, 1922, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, Avalon Fund, and Motley Fund, 2018.2.1
The extended Motley family moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1894. The group included the artist's paternal grandmother, Emily Motley, pictured hither. Her son, Archibald Motley Sr., worked every bit a Pullman porter on the Michigan Key Railroad and his wife, Mary 50. Motley, was a schoolteacher. Their professions were among the highest-status and best-paying jobs black Americans could hold at the time and situated the family in the middle class. The family's movement anticipated the n Great Migration of African Americans that gained momentum during World War I and continued until the civil rights era.
The artist was among the outset African Americans to attend the School of the Art Establish of Chicago (from 1914 to 1918), where he too worked as a janitor to defray costs. Following graduation, Motley elected to focus his art on themes around black American life. This portrait of his grandmother, who was built-in into slavery in Kentucky in 1842, is venerable and dignified, the furnishings of time and hard work visible on her easily and confront. She lived until age 87. The work, completed when Motley was nonetheless an unknown, may have been painted on a cast-off Fundamental Railroad laundry handbag from his begetter'southward train line.
Harlem Renaissance Hale Woodruff, Robert Blackburn,Sunday Promenade, published 1996, linocut in black with chine-collé on wove newspaper, Corcoran Collection (Gift of E. Thomas Williams, Jr. and Auldlyn Higgins Williams in memory of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.xix.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 work, founded the Printmaking Workshop in New York, where he taught lithography and printed editions for artists, such as this i. All of the aforementioned artists were born and lived outside New York, only ultimately relocated to Harlem, drawn by its magnetic art scene. In and so doing, they joined many African Americans in the northward exodus that became known every bit the Great Migration. Woodruff studied art at Harvard University and at the School of the Art Establish of Chicago, as well as working in Paris, where he embraced modern styles of painting. In addition, he studied with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whom he admired for the social justice themes he pursued in his art.
Sunday Promenade, part of a serial of work Woodruff made while living in Atlanta during the Depression, depicts two couples and a adult female wearing their Sunday best. A church building lies behind them in a point at the summit 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 minor wooden structures too pictured. Woodruff as well fabricated politically charged work that dealt graphically with lynching, an outcome he felt compelled to confront with his fine art. During the first role 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 argent print, printed 1974, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Eric R. Play a joke on), 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 blackness middle class. He too took his camera to the places they chosen their ain: homes, billiard halls, barbershops, churches, and clubs. Van Der Zee's work forms an important chronicle of blackness life of the menses. This well-dressed family was associated with Marcus Garvey'south movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). UNIA advocated for black Americans (and others from the African diaspora) to emigrate to Africa to populate and further develop Liberia, the only non-colonial land on the continent. Van Der Zee was hired by the UNIA to tape and document its marches, parades, and members, who adopted a quasi-militaristic appearance. The UNIA became a mass movement of over 200,000 members during the 1920s, a fourth dimension when the Ku Klux Klan had reemerged as a white nationalist grouping. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1927 and deported to his native Jamaica. Absent his leadership, the move faded.
Harlem Renaissance James Van Der Zee,Alpha Phi Alpha Basketball game Squad, 1926, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.19.4507
This portrait of a college basketball team shows a serious group of young men united by their amalgamation with their fraternity and its basketball squad. Alpha Phi Blastoff was the outset intercollegiate African American fraternity in the U.s.a., its commencement chapter founded in 1906 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The fraternity provided support, study groups, and, afterward, opportunities to participate in intercollegiate sports at a time when black players were not permitted on college teams. Note how each player is advisedly posed and forms a symmetrical system on the steps of the fraternity, showing their integrity as a grouping while radiating their determination to succeed in a racially divided country.
Harlem Renaissance Norman Lewis,Jazz, c. 1938, lithograph in black on wove paper, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Impress Research Foundation, 2008.115.193
Like Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis was attuned to the importance of jazz and blues music, specially growing upward in Harlem during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. Only nineteen when he created this print, the work shows a modern, abstract quality while capturing visually the sense of music produced by this quartet of musicians, who seem to bob in the space of the picture, 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 character of their feel and civilisation. Jazz is a hybrid art form 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 fine art rather than ethnographic artifacts. Lewis then began a stage of cartoon imagined African masks (run across the associated Pinterest board for an instance). The masklike appearance of the figures in this work may also have been influenced by the exhibition.
Lewis's printmaking activity over the course of his career was limited; he made prints for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (FAP) during the Low years and several editions independently in the 1940s, later which he returned to printmaking but sporadically. Later the 1940s, Lewis embraced abstraction in his art and became well-known in the 1950s and across for his large-scale paintings, one of which is likewise in the National Gallery of Art drove (see the related Pinterest board). He is also notable among the artists who took part in the FAP—as printmakers, muralists, and teachers—who later became prominent abstract artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jacob Lawrence.
Harlem Renaissance Isac Friedlander,Rhapsody in Black, 1931, wood engraving, Reba and Dave Williams Drove, 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 attraction 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. Here a top-hatted bandleader leads a grouping of robed singers, a jazz orchestra, and a pianist in a vibrant musical effect. The technique of forest engraving that Friedlander used is a process in which the creative person uses negative, or white, lines to draw the image (think of drawing on a black scratchboard). The technique can produce nuanced detail due to the very fine-grained wood that is used for the process. The nature of the medium allowed Friedlander to capture the feeling of a night nightclub with the performers' faces illuminated past 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 silver print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.3.353
This is an image that documents a 1914 gallery exhibition of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian modernist who worked in Paris and was greatly influenced by the forms of African art. At this time, West African art was beingness imported to the United States by French and Belgian art dealers. This art had come to the attending and interest of artists working in Paris at the first of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Amedeo Modigliani, Brancusi, and others, who were searching for new forms to express the modern era and a new century. They found inspiration in the often abstract and stylized forms of African fine art, likewise equally the art of other non-Western cultures and of antiquity. The relationship of Europeans to the fine art of Africa entails a circuitous dynamic that raises questions about who has the right to advisable and interpret another civilization's patrimony. A generation after the Parisian modernists, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance as well borrowed from the forms of African art every bit a means of reconnecting with and expressing pride in their African heritage.
Harlem Renaissance Pablo Picasso,Head of a Woman (Fernande), model 1909, cast before 1932, bronze, Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of Mitchell P. Rales, 2002.one.1
Many Europeans assimilated influences from African art, including Spanish creative person Pablo Picasso, who often worked in Paris
At left, the modeled and cast head of Picasso'due south companion, Fernande Olivier, is in a cubist mode. Cubism shattered ideas of how space and objects could be depicted in art. For the beginning time, art was not trying to reproduce the advent of a person or object. Instead, objects and the subjects of portraits, like this one, were fractured into smaller planes and surfaces. Cubism was meant to portray the artist's mode of seeing and perceiving the subject. Mod artist David Hockney has noted, "Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first large, big alter. Information technology dislocated people: they said, 'Things don't look similar that!'" Some of Picasso'southward inspiration for cubism derived from his interest in African art, and particularly masks, which he collected and kept in his studio in Paris.
Harlem Renaissance Amedeo Modigliani,Head of a Woman, 1910/1911, limestone, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.241
Amedeo Modigliani, an artist from Italy, also worked in Paris, a vibrant cultural capital that attracted young artists from all over Europe. His work does not embrace cubism, merely he abstracted the features of his Head of a Woman by elongating them, perhaps in emulation of African masks or archaic sculpture. In plow, artists of later generations, such as those of the Harlem Renaissance, became interested in both the values of mod art, which rejected the art styles and traditions of the past, and in African fine art, which developed forth a distinct trajectory independent of Europe.
Harlem Renaissance Walker Evans,Figure of a Adult female, Laongo, 1935, gelatin silvery print, Gift of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.17
This work of art was among some 600 presented in a 1935 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, entitled African Negro Fine art. The exhibition marked the first time that non-Western cultural objects were shown in a modern art gallery as artful art objects rather than ethnographic artifacts. In then doing, the museum best-selling the meaning influence of African fine art, traded from colonized African countries, on Western modern art.
Harlem Renaissance Walker Evans,Polychrome Mask, 1935, gelatin silver print, Souvenir of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.6
In 1935, the Museum of Modernistic Art in New York presented the exhibition African Negro Art. The exhibition's accent on the objects' aesthetic qualities led the museum to omit data nigh their cultural context and ceremonial utilise or significance, which prevented visitors from accessing a deeper understanding of the objects' origins. For case, the title of this mask does not offer cultural information, such as the fact that it is from Gabon or the Republic of the congo, Kwele people. What can y'all discover near art from Due west Africa and its characteristics?
Harlem Renaissance Walker Evans,Figure of a Young Woman, Pahouin, Edge of Spanish Republic of guinea, 1935, gelatin argent print, Souvenir of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.ten
Today, the Pahouin culture referred to in this object'due south title is more unremarkably known as Fang or Fãn, a Central African indigenous group.
The Museum of Mod Fine art's 1935 exhibition, African Negro Art, was photographed past Walker Evans, who may be all-time known for his photography documenting the effects of the Depression in rural America. Evans produced a portfolio containing 477 prints of African Negro Art; well-nigh of these sets were given to African American colleges and universities in the Usa.
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