The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through 28 July 2024
William Henry Johnson, Jitterbugs V, ca. 1941-42. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Who determines which artists take a central place in history, and which artists are marginalised or erased from our cultural memory?
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently showing a groundbreaking exhibition that seeks to reposition the Harlem Renaissance, the first African American-led movement of modern art, as a central moment in American art and international modernism. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance aimed to create a new Black identity. They wanted to change the way society viewed people of colour by creating a new set of images that were supposed to help define the modern African American experience. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s-30s was a golden age for African American artists and jazz musicians, who inspired pride and the courage to fight for equality. It set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that fought to abolish legalised racial segregation and discrimination.
The Harlem Renaissance was a result of the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the racially segregated Southern United States to the cities of the north. Before the end of the American Civil War in 1865, most African Americans were living as slaves in the American South. After the war, slavery was abolished, but equality proved elusive. Many Southern Whites resisted the reforms and violent racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan brutally murdered freed slaves. Racist laws set down racial segregation in all public facilities such as school, public transport in the Southern United States.
By the 1910s, African Americans increasingly started to aspire to a better life in cities outside the South. During the “Great Migration,” millions of African Americans headed to the Harlem neighbourhood of New York, Chicago’s Southside, and other America cities up north. They were dreaming of building a new life based on new social and economic opportunities.
The creative explosion in the African American communities in the new Black cities during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s–40s was the beginning of the representation of modern Black life and culture. As Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote in 1926: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . “
The movement was later marginalised and erased from the “official” canon of American art. The Met’s exhibition aims to reposition the Harlem Renaissance as central to American art in the pre-war period while positioning it within the history of international modernism. It is the first survey of this movement in a New York art museum in almost forty years. Here are some paintings to whet your appetite.
Everyday Life in the New Black Cities
The artists of the Harlem Renaissance wanted to show everyday African American life from every angle. Their paintings showed both the affluence and elegance of the rising Black middle classes and the everyday life of workers in the big cities.
Installation image. On the left: William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Street Life, Harlem (ca. 1939-40). On the right: Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Pool Parlor, 1942. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen.
William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Street Life, Harlem (ca. 1939-40)
Johnson’s painting shows a stylish couple on a Harlem Street. They are confident and colourfully flamboyant, ready for a night on the town. Maybe they are planning to go to the local Savoy Ballroom to enjoy swing jazz and to dance the jitterbug. Johnson’s painting combines the flattened, stylised features of African masks with the bold but flat colours of the international avant-garde. Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston liked to dress flamboyantly as well: “While whites try to achieve restraint, we strive to pile beauty on beauty, and magnificence on glory. . . the common run of us love beauty, colour and poetry so much that there can never be enough of it.”
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Pool Parlor, 1942
Pool halls were a popular form of relaxation for Black men during the Harlem Renaissance. The intense figures of the pool players are almost like caricatures, but the strong geometric elements in the painting’s composition and contrasting colours give it a distinctly modern, almost abstract edge.
William H. Johnson (1901-1970), Street Life, Harlem (ca. 1939-40). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Portraiture of the Modern Black Subject
“Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have obscured and overlaid. . . All vital art discovers beauty, and opens our eyes to beauty that previously we could not see.” Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925)
The Harlem Renaissance was based on a set of ideas formulated by writers who were often friends with the artists. In 1925, Alain Locke published the book “The New Negro,” which gave the Harlem Renaissance its original title the New Negro Movement. Locke urged the New Negro artist to engage with both the aesthetics of the European, Western avant-garde and the aesthetics of African sculpture.
There was also a competing set of aesthetic ideas within the movements. Artists painting portraits of Black subjects were breaking with a prejudice that had considered African Americans unworthy subjects for portraits. While some painters approached their portraits with a distinctly modern aesthetic, other painters sought to convey their subject’s dignity in the elegant naturalism of traditional academic painting.
Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Portrait of a Cultured Lady (Edna Powell Gayle), 1948. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Portrait of a Cultured Lady (Edna Powell Gayle)
Edna Powell Gayle was Motley’s gallerist in Chicago. Motley portrays Powell Gayle in the tradition of academic painting. Her dignified exterior makes her a personification of Black success. Her naturalistic (close to life) representation shows her as an elegant, poised figure sitting in a sophisticated interior.
William Henry Johnson, Woman in Blue, ca. 1943. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Johnson’s portrait Woman in Blue Dress could not be more different from Motley’s Portrait of a Cultured Lady. We don’t know whether the painting shows an actual person or an emblematic woman: the model is unnamed. Her proportions are exaggerated, her face is flat like an African mask. The broad expanses of bold colours speak the language of the international avant-garde and reflect aesthetic ideas of German expressionism, fauvism, but also of African mask aesthetics, all combined to depict the modern African American subject.
Unable to visit the Met? Check out the museum’s online video tour of the exhibition.