In the 1920s, Harlem taught Americans how to be modern in a thousand different ways. The Harlem Renaissance transcended style or school, spanned art forms and flew far beyond the confines of one New York neighbourhood, to Chicago, Philadelphia and Paris.
More than a movement, it was a sensibility: urban, novel and proudly Black. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” proclaimed poet and activist Langston Hughes in 1926, adopting a prophet-like tone. “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art summons the period’s abundance and creative frenzy in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, a generous, even overwhelming show, that combines exuberant breadth with a focus on the title’s last two words. Artists looked across the ocean to what writer Alain Locke called the “almost limitless wealth of decorative and purely symbolic material” of African art. Usually, though, they absorbed those influences indirectly, through citified Europeans who had a head start.
The show leans heavily on Locke’s manifesto, The New Negro, in which he urged young Black painters to discover themselves by looking to the established avant-garde. A whole generation took his advice, as curator Denise Murell makes irresistibly clear by hanging works by Aaron Douglas, William H Johnson, and Archibald Motley alongside ones by Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse and Chaïm Soutine. The museum presents the period not as a strictly local phenomenon or one of history’s hopeful byways, but as a two-decade, intercontinental conversation on the promise of a metropolitan century.
The Harlem Renaissance gloried in its multifariousness. Pure abstraction wasn’t really an option, since the identity that Black artists were just beginning to celebrate depended on representation. But many other paths were. It was enough, for some, to depict themselves plainly, free from sentimentalism or stereotype. In a smashing 1934 self-portrait, Samuel Joseph Brown confronts viewers with a level gaze. Self-possessed in a suit and bow tie, a lit pipe between his lips, Brown is neither larger nor smaller than life, but a man of the world: serious, aware of his talent and confident of his place in the world.
Other artists strove for a new language that embraced modernity and their ancestral past, expressing a burgeoning sense of who they were without erasing where they came from. Douglas’s mural-sized canvases merge Art Deco linearity, Cubism’s intersecting planes and Egyptian-inspired hieratic figures into quasi-spiritual allegories.
The show includes one panel from his “Aspects of Negro Life”, the four-part epic commissioned for the public library branch that is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A broad-shouldered man, silhouetted against a radiant sun, delivers the Emancipation Proclamation and gestures towards a city on a hill. The crowd before him dances, shouts and blows trumpets, letting cotton flowers blow away in the breeze — but hooded Klansmen wait in the wings. It’s a panoply of jubilation and sobriety, executed in a highly stylised idiom.
Even as they sought a distinctively Black expression, artists steeped themselves in an assortment of contemporary trends. Johnson, one of the exhibition’s superstars, arrived in New York from South Carolina at 17 and trained at the National Academy of Design, before taking off to France. In his 1927 “Vielle Maison at Porte”, a cornucopia of arches, turrets, eaves and corbels all seem poised to take flight. Soutine’s equally explosive “View of Cagnes” hangs next to it, highlighting the shared frenzy of brushstrokes and the sense of a townscape bent by centrifugal motion.
Johnson married the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake and spent the better part of the 1930s in Scandinavia, where he was seduced by the vibrant simplicity of folk art. He imported that rural manner back to New York in a style that mixed large blocks of colour with urbane glamour. In “Street Life, Harlem” (1939-40), a debonair couple — his hat festooned with a feather, hers with a splash of flowers — pause to size each other up before an evening out. Their faces are deadpan, but their costumes speak loudly of joy.
That’s what Locke meant by the “new Negro”: self-assured, self-defining, self-reliant. Ironically, the principal illustrator of his book was the (white) German-born Winold Reiss. The exhibition opens with Reiss’s portrait of Locke, which juxtaposes two distinct but similarly cool styles of the 1920s. The head and hand are modelled in the meticulously realist style of the Neue Sachlichkeit; his torso, in its three-piece suit, could have sprung from one of Picasso’s classical line drawings.
Reiss, a realist at heart, drew freely on whatever references suited his subject. We see Hughes against a jazzy Cubist backdrop. The anonymous figure “The Actress”, her face lined with experience, hair askew, hand cupped to make a rhetorical point, poses before a blank ground that has yet to be conjured into a theatre set. Hughes reported that both Black and white critics considered these paintings “terrible” because they were un-idealised — too true to unsatisfactory life. “Anyone defending them had to answer questions like these: ‘Why does he make his subjects so coloured?’”
Their neutrality appealed to Locke. In a catalogue essay, Emily Braun explains that he saw them as an antidote to racist caricature on one hand and prettified sentimentality on the other. They were clear-eyed and direct — just what the time demanded.
Locke’s exhortations also manifested in unpredictable ways. Palmer Hayden, another southerner by birth, made his way to Greenwich Village via Washington, the circus, the army and the Philippines, before decamping for a five-year stint in Paris. The Harlem spirit travelled with him. In Paris, Locke invited him to see his extensive collection of African art, and Hayden marked his return to New York in 1932 with “Fétiche et Fleurs”, a still-life that gives off heat, with a nod to post-Impressionism. Tiger lilies erupt from a blue vase, partially obscuring the Fang reliquary mask beside it. A swatch of Congolese raffia cloth animates the room with its lively wave pattern.
Back in the US, Hayden’s work grew harder-edged. In one deceptively cosy-looking picture, a man in a button-down shirt, tie and beret sits before an easel with one eye on the canvas and the other on his sitter: a woman with a large, swaddled infant in her lap. A cat luxuriates on the floorboards, but a naked bulb and exposed pipes near the ceiling hint at a cramped life in a basement flat. A huge trash can intrudes into the foreground in the lower-right corner.
The piece and its title, “The Janitor Who Paints”, refers to one of Hayden’s means of supporting himself and, more broadly, to the way Black artists struggled to be taken seriously as professionals. His efforts at messaging backfired: many viewers found the subjects’ features offensively exaggerated, so he eventually knuckled under and painted them over.
As the Depression unfolded and leftwing politics seeped into the art world, Harlem Renaissance artists found that straight observation was powerful enough — no symbolic language, allegories or emblematic figures required. Laura Wheeler Waring kept her political voice quiet in a 1944 portrait of the great contralto Marian Anderson in a floor-length red gown, her back straight and eyes alight.
The style didn’t need to be ostentatiously modern because its subject was contemporary enough: the artist whose talent and patience overcame the hysteria of racism, a triumph scored simply by singing a song. That principle worked for Anderson but not for Waring: her paintings went unseen and unremembered for decades and would have stayed that way but for the advocacy of a persistent grandniece. The Met show includes nine of her works, which is a form of justice reclaimed.
To July 28, metmuseum.org
