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Black Expression in the Earlier 20th Century—Visual Art1

The Harlem Renaissance was a broad cultural, artistic, and literary movement among

black Americans based in Harlem, New York. During the 1920s, Alain Locke, the

leading critic and spokesman for the Harlem Renaissance, promoted the idea of racial

equality by highlighting distinctively African-American contributions to the arts. In The

New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an anthology of African-American literature,

Locke, as editor, asked black writers and artists to draw inspiration from their African

heritage and racial origins. The Harlem Renaissance encompassed much more than the

visual arts, but the period following World War I marked the emergence of African American

art on the national and international levels. Picasso and other [European] artists in Paris

helped to stimulate interest in African art. Although some black artists in America rejected

identification with African art, others spoke of the need to develop an African American art

idiom based on African forms. [During the] decades of the 1920s and 1930s, racially

conscious African American artists dealt with many of the themes that were articulated in

the “ New Negro” movement [i.e., the Harlem Renaissance]: the celebration of the beauty of

black people, the illumination of the history of the African American experience, and

the search for identity and roots.

Graphic Art: The Negro Renaissance was primarily a literary movement and African-American

authors demanded from their publishers images of African Americans that befitted the new era.

Some of the best examples of African-American graphic arts could be found in New York City,

which was by now the center for America’s proliferating book, popular magazine, and journal

publishing.

Aaron Douglas (1889-1979): One of the most successful artists to

emerge from the Harlem Renaissance was Aaron Douglas.

Douglas, a native of Kansas, regularly read publications such

The Crisis (the journal of the NAACP), Opportunity: A

Journal of Negro Life (the publication of the Harlem-based

National Urban League, an African American organization founded

in 1910 to help black migrants from rural areas adjust to urban life)

and Survey Graphic (a magazine focused on sociological and

political research). When the opportunity arose for him to

travel to Harlem and pursue his art career, he moved without

hesitation. Upon his arrival in 1924 he immediately became

friends with W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke, African

American poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, and whites such as Albert C.

1 Excerpted and adapted from: Bjelajac, David, American Art: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2000); Hughes,

Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); Sayre, Henry M. The

Humanities: Culture, Continuity and Change (Pearson, 2011).

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Barnes and Carl van Vechten, who belonged to the intimate circle of New Negro

leaders. Barnes, one of several wealthy white patrons of black artists during this period,

allowed Douglas to examine his extensive collection of West African sculpture and his

modernist European paintings. Douglas proceeded to combine the stylized2 forms of the two

worlds to create a series of illustrations and murals that spoke to Locke's call for a new

Negro art informed by Africa and celebrating the lives and history of African Americans. On

the strength of his illustrations for Locke’s publication The New Negro, Locke called

Douglas a “pioneering Africanist.” In his bl ack-and-white drawings, human figures

are [often] stylized, and, like the schematic patterns which they complement, they are

flat shapes. Like much of Douglas’s graphic art work, Ma Bad Luck Card (1926) (below),

utilizes flat, sharply outlined silhouettes, geometric forms,

and contrast between light and dark.

Douglas became closely identified with Locke’s notion

of a “New Negro” movement and began receiving

numerous commissions. The powerful profiles of

Douglas’s figures suggest the representations of the human

form found in Egyptian wall paintings. These “Egyptian

form” figures, as Douglas called them, are silhouetted in

profile with the eye rendered from a frontal viewpoint as in

ancient Egyptian tomb reliefs and frescoes. With such

images, D o u g l a s led the way into a new field of African

American art with wall decorations in Nashville (Fisk

University), Harlem, Chicago, and elsewhere.

In 1925 Douglas wrote to Langston Hughes:

our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. . . . Let’s bare our arms

and plunge them deep through the laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through

hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and

drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it,

paint it . . . Let’s create something transcendentally material, mystically objective.

Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.

Douglas conveys this range of emotions in his work, combining hope and determination in

Ma Bad Luck Card, which was used as an illustration for the poem "Hard Luck" by

Langston Hughes in the October 1926 issue of Opportunity. Douglas has given dignity to

his figure, omitting the mundane details of everyday life and conveying, instead, a sense of

monumentality and timelessness. The figure represents the struggles of Africa and of

Africans in America.

2 stylized: in the visual arts, artworks that are “stylized” reflect an emphasis on the manner in which thing is

represented rather than the way it appears to the eye; to “stylize” an image means to make the image conform to

the rules of a particular style

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Even when dealing with a historical figure, as Douglas

does in his 1931 mural (right) devoted to the escaped

slave Harriet Tubman, who repeatedly returned to the

South to help others escape, he generalizes her form to

represent all black women who broke the shackles of

slavery to flee north. The mural also utilizes a limited

palette [of colors] and shafts of light that function as veils

across the surface of the works, creating an otherworldly

atmosphere. The gradually enlarged circular shapes of

color create a visual rhythm, evocative of music and

spirituality. In Harriet Tubman, Douglas celebrates and memorializes a history that too often had

been misinterpreted or forgotten altogether.

In 1934, Douglas completed a well-known mural (consisting of four separate panels) for the 135th

Street branch of the New York Public Library (known today as the Schomberg Center for Research

in Black Culture, located in Harlem) The four-part mural, titled Aspects of Negro Life (1934),

depicts the cultural and historical background of African Americans. Taken as a whole, Aspects

of Negro Life was Douglas’s most impressive response to Locke’s directive to use African art and

African-American folk culture as an inspiration. It also reflected the conviction of W.E.B. DuBois

that any art of value must be morally responsible and instructive. The historical narrative, on

Africa and African descendants in the United States, is shown in two horizontal and two vertical

compositional formats. In these murals, Douglas restricted his palette [of colors], ranging from light

mauve-browns to dark blue-purples, interweaving his silhouetted figures of abstract geometrical

design.

In the first painting of the mural series, The Negro in an

African Setting (left), Douglas employs the popular tropes3 of

“primitivism”—dancing figures, standing figures holding

spears, drummers, and a highlighted fetish4 statue (located in

the middle of the top third of the painting). The figures are

painted in Douglas’s elongated “Egyptian style.” The only

ethnographically accurate image is of the dancing woman,

whose profiled hairstyle is that of the Mangbetu Woman

whom Douglas had portrayed for the

cover of Opportunity

magazine (May 1927); the

original photograph that

inspired Douglas’s artwork

is shown to the left, with

the related magazine cover

shown on the right:

3 tropes: in visual art, a trope is a commonly recurring visual motif that functions as the visual equivalent to a literary figure of speech (in which the words or expressions are used not in their literal sense but to call to mind another meaning) 4 fetish: in traditional African art, a fetish is a statue or other object believed to embody supernatural power

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The second panel of the series is entitled From Slavery Through Reconstruction5 (below):

From Slavery through Reconstruction displays a subtle divergence from the African scene in subject

matter and aesthetic style. From right to left, the panel depicts, in Douglas’s words,

the slaves’ doubt and uncertainty, transformed into exultation at the reading

of the Emancipation Proclamation; in the second section, the figure standing on

the box symbolizes the careers of outstanding Negro leaders during this time; the

third section shows the departure of the Union soldiers from the South and the

onslaught of the Klan that followed.

Cotton, the cash crop on which the slave system was driven, is foregrounded, as it grows even from the

bottom border of the mural while men stand in various poses of work, resistance and exultation around it.

Union troops are depicted, but both their comings and goings fade deep into the background of the

painting, demonstrating both the promise of emancipation and the ultimate failure of Reconstruction.

Even the threatening image of the Ku Klux Klan on the far left of the piece is faded and somewhat

ghostly, more a haunting presence than a direct threat. The piece is clearly most interested in the black

toilers who work the fields and stand in resistance: one, near center, forcefully breaking the chains around

his wrists and raising a fist above his head in triumph or revolt.

The third panel, An Idyll6 of the Deep South7, is shown on the next page. In An Idyll of

the Deep South, Douglas subverts the myth of the "happy southern plantation Negro" by

5 the commentary on From Slavery Through Reconstruction is taken from: Gardullo, Paul. "'Just Keeps

Rollin' Along': Rebellions, Revolts And Radical Black Memories Of Slavery In The 1930S." Patterns Of

Prejudice 41.3/4 (2007): 271-301. Academic Search Premier. Web.] 6 idyll: 1) a short literary work describing a picturesque episode or pleasant scene of country life 2) an event or scene of rural simplicity 3) a carefree experience

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flanking the central theme of the painting—cheerful and contented African Americans

singing, dancing, and playing music—with the images of black southern reality, the

aftermath of a brutal lynching and black workers toiling in the fields:

This reality of racism and economic hardship is underscored through Douglas's

incorporation of a star and its emanating ray of light in the left-hand corner of the

composition. Although this star has generally been perceived as a representation of the

North Star, in April of 1971, during a conversation with David Driskell, Douglas revealed

that in fact the star was his version of the red star of Communism. Douglas added that he

had included this star in An Idyll of the Deep South to illustrate the hope held by some

black Harlem intellectuals that true equality might be attained through the alternative

policies of communism and socialism.

In the last of the four murals, Song of the Towers (below), the Statue of Liberty has

replaced the African fetish statue included in the first painting (The Negro in an African

Setting, shown earlier), and the saxophone player

has replaced the dancer. Considered together, the

first and last paintings represent the quintessential

symbols of African and African-American culture.

However, Song of the Towers also carries a “social

realist” message, a critical comment on the forward

march of science and technology, which has had

little effect in improving the economic and social lot

of African Americans.

7 the commentary on An Idyll of the Deep South is taken from: Fleming, Tuliza. “Narratives of African American Art and Identity.” The David D. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans

and the African Diaspora. Web. http://www.driskellcenter.umd.edu/narratives/exhibition/sec2/doug_a_02.htm

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The icons of American secular society

modernism—industrialization and urbanism—are

represented by skyscraper buildings, smokestacks

belching smoke and mechanical wheel cogs. At

the center of this nightmarish urban-industrial

landscape stands a jazz saxophonist, juxtaposed

with New York harbor's Statue of Liberty in the

far background. However, the distant promise of

African-American freedom appears overwhelmed

by an inhuman socio-economic environment.

In the lower left corner, an exhausted, muscular

figure holds his head in despair as serpentine

and claw-like clouds of smoke threaten to

imprison him, sapping his strength. The plumes of smoke and towering urban-

industrial forms create the demonic characteristics of a hellish underworld.

Douglas’s critical interpretation of American urbanism and industrialization

expressed his socialist political views and strong support for labor unions. Socialist

organizations attracted many African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s because of their

credo of social and economic equality, and anti-racism. Artist’s organizations, such as the

left-wing Artists’ Union (est. 1934), functioned like any other labor union, fighting for

occupational solidarity, better working conditions and economic benefits. . . . Douglas also

belonged to the Harlem Artist Guild, an African-American alternative to the Artists’

Union, whose members desired the visibility and economic opportunities which were

denied to most of them.

In his essay “The Negro in American Culture” (1936), Douglas wrote:

Our chief concern has been to establish and maintain recognition of our essential

humanity, in other words, complete social and political equality. This has been a

difficult fight as we have been the constant object of attack by all manner of

propaganda from nursery rhymes to false scientific racial theories. In this struggle

the rest of the proletariat8 almost invariably has been arrayed against us. Some of

us understand why this is so. But the Negro artist, unlike the white artist, has never

known the big house. He is essentially a producer of the masses and can never take

a position above or beyond their level. This simple fact is often overlooked by the

Negro artist and almost always by those who in the past have offered what they

sincerely considered to be help and friendship.

8 the proletariat: the working classes; term particularly associated with Marxist economic theory, used to refer to

the collective class of industrial wage-earners who do not control any capital or means of production and so who

can only earn a living by means of selling their labor

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The potential victimization and continued precarious

survival Douglas refers to in his essay is suggested in the

image of a man on the verge of falling into grasping skeletal

hands, seen in the lower left corner of the painting Song of

the Towers described earlier, and also seen in an 1928

illustration entitled Charleston (right) which Douglas

designed for Paul Morand’s book Black Magic (1929).

Jacob Lawrence (left, 1917-2000) Another important

African American painter whose work has been associated

with raising consciousness of black history and experience is

Jacob Lawrence, who was among the many young artists

supported by the WPA Artists Relief Program [“WPA” refers

to the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal government

program operating during the Great Depression].

Lawrence (shown in a photo from 1941 above) dealt with American themes, particularly

work and the urban experience. Like some other black artists who were deeply influenced

by European modernism, Lawrence experienced

hostility not only toward his race but also toward his

manner of painting. However, this did not deter him

from creating a remarkable body of work, which can

be associated not only with the African American

past but also with the shared and universal themes

of freedom and repression, human life, and work.

Lawrence painted several important series that narrate

major events in African American history, including his

thirty-two panel Frederick Douglass series (1938-39) and

his series of thirty-one paintings devoted to Harriet

Tubman. The seventh panel in the Tubman cycle (right)

shows the power of Lawrence’s imagery. Tubman is

represented, one knee on the log she is sawing, as a

massive physical form that nearly fills the picture area.

This suggests that in her strength lies her ability to survive,

to fight, and to gain her freedom.

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Perhaps the best known is Lawrence’s series on the “Great Migration” (completed in 1940-

41) The migration of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North of America in the

first decades of the twentieth century was the biggest internal migration in American

history and, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "the largest movement of black bodies

since slavery." It involved at least a million people—due to defects in the records, the number

will never be known. It went largely uncommemorated, except by historians and sociologists.

No novel, in or out of the African-American tradition, has handled it on the scale it

deserved—it provoked no black equivalent, for instance, of [John Steinbeck’s novel] The

Grapes of Wrath, and although Richard Wright's Native Son dealt with a part of its aftermath in

Chicago, there was no fictional work to match the drama of the migration itself. No

monuments commemorate it, no documentary films were made about it. Lawrence simply

picked up the subject and made it his own. The subject had personal relevance to Lawrence;

members of his own family had migrated from South Carolina to northern industrial

cities.

As Lawrence explained:

I was part of the migration, as was my family, my mother, my sister, and

my brother . . . I grew up hearing tales about people ‘coming up,’ another

family arriving . . . I didn’t realize what was happening until about the

middle of the 1930s [when Lawrence was about 18 years old], and that’s

when the Migration series began to take form in my mind.

The Great Migration had an epic character. It was forced by the merciless Southern white

reaction that came in the wake of Reconstruction, plunging the black population of the

Southern states—all poor, and nearly all rural workers—into a purgatory of abrogated9

rights. In the South, the years 1900-25 brought the high tide of Jim Crow laws, of lynchings,

and the unrestrained terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Moreover, most of the work available to

"free" blacks depended on the cotton industry; and the invention of cotton-picking machines

knocked the bottom out of their labor market. Deprived of work, unable to vote, and

powerless to change their political status, Southern blacks voted with their feet and started

flocking to the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Midwestern cities, repeating en masse the

old perilous journey on the abolitionists' Underground Railroad, north out of bondage in the nineteenth century. They were looking for a better America than they had known—

not a hard one to find, one might have thought; except that racism and unemployment were

also endemic in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Those who imagined they were heading

for the Promised Land were sharply disappointed, especially after 1929, when they arrived

in a North economically devastated by the Depression, with little work and less chance of

finding any.

In "Po' Boy Blues," 1932, the black poet Langston Hughes put words in the mouth of the

migrants caught between two worlds:

9 abrogated: nullified; abolished by authority

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When I was home de

Sunshine seemed like gold.

When I was home de

Sunshine seemed like gold.

Since I come up North de

Whole damn world's turned cold.

But there was no way back. Thus the South was drained of its black proletariat, while the

North acquired a new one, out of which grew a radically altered conception of black

culture in America: distinctively urban, but still Southern in its origins and collective

memory. This was the culture whose synthesis, in New York, produced the Harlem

Renaissance; and through it, American blacks reinvented themselves.

Lawrence was one of them. Born in Atlantic City, he spent part of his childhood in

Pennsylvania and then, after his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and

siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. When years later he told an interviewer that "I am

the black community," he was neither boasting nor kidding. . . . .He trained as a painter at

the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch (known

today as the Schomberg Center for Black Culture). Younger than the artists and writers who

took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Lawrence was also [different from]

them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks—the

“Noble Negroes”—that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes

with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction.

Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu—in particular, from

the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete10 (and America's first black Rhodes

scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks which could speak

explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of

modernism. Or, in Locke's own words, "There is in truly great art no essential conflict

between racial or national traits and universal human values." This belief was vital to Lawrence's own growth as an artist. Locke perceived the importance of the Great Migration, not just

as an economic event but as a cultural one, in which countless blacks took over the control of their

own lives, which had been denied them in the South:

With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro migrant becomes more

and more like that of the European waves at their crests, a mass movement towards the

larger and more democratic chance—in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only

from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

To narrate this event, then, would require a modern language, a deep immersion in the

experience, and an awareness of the harsh toll that contact with American modernity

exacted on the blacks. From childhood, Lawrence had been steeped in family and community

stories of the Migration, and when—encouraged by Locke—he decided to paint it, he

worked hard to get the historical background right. Months of painstaking research in the

10 esthete: one who cultivates a superior appreciation of the beautiful

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Schomburg Collection of the Public Library, New York's chief archive on African-

American life and history, followed—even though the finished paintings rarely allude to

specific historical events. He took on the task with a youthful earnestness that remains one of

the most touching aspects of the final work, and goes beyond mere self-expression. As a

result, you sense that something is speaking through Lawrence—a collectivity.

The series is notable for the language it does not use. Lawrence was not a propagandist. Considering

the violence and pathos of so much of his subject matter—prisons, deserted villages, city slums,

race riots, labor camps—his images are restrained, and all the more piercing for their lack of

bombast. When he painted a lynching, for instance (panel 15 of the Migration series, below), he

left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose,

and the huddled lump of a grieving woman.

Lawrence wasn't painting murals, but images closer in size to

single pages, no more than eighteen inches by twelve.

Nevertheless, he imagined the paintings as integrally

connected—a single work of art, no less unified than a

mural, but portable. Migration is a visual ballad, each image

a stanza—compressed, like the blues, to the minimum

needs of narration.

Panel Number 10

of the series "They were very poor" (right), pares the

elements of a black-sharecropper's life down to the least

common denominator: a man and a woman staring at

empty bowls on a bare brown plane, an empty basket

hung on the wall by an enormous nail—the sort of nail you

imagine in a crucifixion. There isn't a trace of

sentimentality.

The debts to [European modernist painting] i n L a w r e n c e ’ s w o r k are obvious [to those familiar with

early 20th century Western art], but some aspects of his visual style, such as his approach to the use of

color, came, as Lawrence acknowledged, more from his experience in Harlem

than from other art. Recalling the visual influence of the Harlem

neighborhoods that influenced him, Lawrence later recalled:

In order to add something to their lives, [black families] decorated their

tenements and their homes in all of these colors. I've been asked, is anyone in

my family artistically inclined? I've always felt ashamed of my response—I

always said no, not realizing that my artistic sensibility came from this

ambiance... It's only in retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by art.

You'd walk Seventh Avenue and look in the windows and you'd see all these

colors in the depths of the depression. All these colors.

Lawrence’s memory of those colors is plain in panel Number 57, "The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South" (above), with its single

figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring a vat of fabrics—blue, black, yellow, pink—

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with her pole: a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence and resistance

which is one of the underlying themes of Lawrence’s series as a whole.

Lawrence had met the older artist Aaron Douglas soon after arriving in Harlem in the mid-

1930s. The angularity and rhythmic repetition of

forms that Douglas introduced is evident in many of

Lawrence's paintings for the Migration series.

Angularity and rhythmic repetition of forms is also

reflected in his illustration of three girls writing on a

chalkboard at school. Lawrence gave this panel from

the series the caption In the North, the Negro had

better educational facilities (right).

Here the intellectual growth of the girls, as each

reaches higher on the board, is presented as a

musical crescendo in a syncopated11, 4-beat, rhythmic form where the first beat, as it were, is

silent and unplayed. Lawrence dresses the girls in the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue,

thus emphasizing the fundamental nature of primary education.

Above all, what the art of both Douglas and Lawrence makes clear is

the connectedness of literature, music, and visual image in African-

American experience. Such connections would continue to inform

African-American culture for the rest of the century. In the panel

They also found discrimination in the North although it was

much different from that which they had known in the South

(panel 49, left), Lawrence depicted a blatantly segregated dining

room with a barrier running down the room’s center separating

the whites on the left from the African Americans on the right.

In panel 50 of the series, Race Riots

were very Numerous all over the

North, right), Lawrence depicted

several club and knife-wielding

rioters in flattened, distorted

patterns of violence directed

against unseen victims beyond the

picture frame. Although his abstract, simplified style recalls

American folk art, Lawrence h a d assimilated Cubist painting

techniques and admired Aaron Douglas's fusion of realism and

Modernist abstraction. Images like these reflect the fact that the

conditions African Americans found in the North were often as

difficult and discriminatory as those they had left behind in the

South. Lawrence believed that the story of the Great Migration,

like every subject he painted during his long career, had important lessons to teach viewers.

11 syncopated: in music, the term “syncopation” refers to the accenting of a note at an unexpected time, as

between two beats or on a weak beat