In the years following the First World War, New York's Harlem became the largest black community in the United States and a magnet for musicians, writers, artists and performers, whose creative activity was celebrated under the banner of the 'New Negro Arts Movement'.
This period in twentieth-century American history, later known as the Harlem Renaissance, is generally regarded as beginning in 1919 and ending in the mid-1930s with the Great Depression. Rhapsodies in Black takes a fresh look at the Harlem Renaissance, viewing it not as an isolated phenomenon confined to artists of colour in a single district of Manhattan, but as a modernist moment of global significance, with links to Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and other parts of the United States. Like jazz, the art of the Harlem Renaissance was cosmopolitan; artists travelled and exchanged ideas, and were inspired by European modernism as well as by the cultural groundswell of black America.
Support and patronage for African-American artists in the 1920s and '30s came from numerous sources. Two important magazines with a national African-American readership were based in Harlem: The Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose founder-editor was the historian, novelist and political activist W.E.B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly journal, edited by Charles S. Johnson. Both magazines published fiction, poetry and critical essays, alongside social analysis and commentary, and campaigning articles in support of the struggle for civil rights. Both used illustrations by black artists on their covers. African-American artists also participated in group exhibitions in New York and other American cities, notably in the exhibitions initiated by the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library and in the Harmon Foundation's annual exhibitions held from 1926 to 1933.
Representing the New Negro
The African-American philosopher Alain Locke's anthology, The New Negro, published in 1925, alerted the world to the cultural renaissance taking place among black Americans, and centred on New York's Harlem. Most of the outstanding writers of the movement were represented in Locke's book, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen, and it contained illustrations by Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas. In his introduction Locke argued that in Harlem, 'Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination'. For the first time, he wrote, 'in art and letters, instead of being wholly caricatured, [the Negro] is being seriously portrayed and painted'.
Rhapsodies in Black opens with a range of images of African-Americans created in the 1920s and '30s. Depictions of representative characters - such as the urban sophisticate, the person of mixed race and country folk from the South - are set alongside portraits and self portraits of some of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Melvin Gray Johnson and Charles Alston painted intimate, searching studies of individuals in reflective moods; photographer Carl Van Vechten often turned his gaze towards celebrities, artists, writers and entertainers, while graphic artist Winold Reiss, in addition to portraying well-known figures such as the poet Langston Hughes, explored the varieties of skin colour, hair texture and body types among ordinary African-Americans. But for many artists, the New Negro was not so much a new entity as an old type re-envisioned - from William H. Johnson's expressionist portraits to Meta Warrick Fuller's allegorical sculpture, Ethiopia Awakening.
The portraits by the South Carolina studio photographer Richard S. Roberts illustrate the extent to which the new ideal of the American Negro in the 1920s and '30s reached black communities across the United States. Film director Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates, which was the first African-American feature film to be distributed nation-wide, foregrounds the New Negro movement in a story of the Great Migration, with characters exemplifying the social changes.
Another Modernism
In contrast to the traditional stereotypes of Southern black culture as essentially folkloric and timeless, the new urban enclaves of the North offered an alternative model: an African-American culture that was dynamic, politically astute, sophisticated and stylish. As in European modernism, big-city life was a major source of inspiration for many artists. The street scenes and interiors of Chicago painter Archibald J. Motley Jr. and James VanDerZee's photographs of Harlem life show how the fads and fashions of the urban scene - sleek Cadillacs, raccoon-coated 'flappers' and 'sheiks', and brilliantly lit, busy street corners - conveyed the mystique and pace of modernity. Aaron Douglas fused African-inspired imagery with geometric abstraction, proclaiming his desire for a provocative black modernism: 'Let's do the impossible. Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic. 'The French film-maker Jean Renoir's experimental science-fiction film of 1927, Sur un air de Charleston, took the rhythmic movements of the African-American dance to symbolise the salvation of humanity.
Performance, Jazz and the 'Blues Aesthetic'
Like avant-garde movements in Europe, the Harlem Renaissance embraced all art-forms, including music, dance, film, theatre and cabaret. Harlem nightlife, with its dance halls and jazz bands, featured prominently in the work of such artists as Archibald J. Motley Jr. and Aaron Douglas, Miguel Covarrubias (the Mexican painter and illustrator) and the Englishman Edward Burra. Often their focus was on the moving body of the black performer, sometimes rendered in an exaggerated, almost caricatural, way. These images are distinguished from caricatures, however, by the artists' sympathetic identification with the aesthetic and cultural values of the performers and their audience. In a similar fashion, Langston Hughes assimilated the formal structures of the Blues in his verse. The 'blues aesthetic' is exemplified in painting by bold, hot colours and improvisatory compositions, with a syncopated rhythm of accentuation and suspension, push and pull.
The Cult of the Primitive
Some Harlem Renaissance artists and writers reacted against the conservative black élite's demands for a propagandistic art of 'racial uplift' by identifying with the poor, uneducated masses. In their representations of the demi-monde, vernacular culture and sexuality were given free rein. Such work could easily fall into stereotypes of black licentiousness and backwardness or, on the other hand, a romantic celebration of the black body and folklife. For the painter Palmer C. Hayden, the 'primitive' viewpoint gave rise to paintings which recall the humorous, mocking 'Hokum Blues' recordings of the 1930s. Sculptor Richmond Barthé's bold figure studies combined an interest in African dance traditions with erotic enthusiasm for the black body. The white pictorialist photographer Doris Ulmann portrayed rural South Carolina as a kind of black arcadia. Performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson played knowingly on the voyeurism of the white entertainment industry, while striving for an individual expression that would transgress the old clichés.
Africa: Inheritance and Seizure
Alain Locke's 1925 manifesto to younger artists, 'The Legacy of Ancestral Arts', challenged them to draw upon the power of African art, as avant-garde artists in Europe had done. However, for the majority of African-American artists, no less than their European counterparts, Africa was largely a place of fantasy. Locke's argument for embracing the African legacy was further complicated by the scientific community's disparagement of African culture as 'primitive', and by Europe's exploitative colonial relationship with Africa. Despite the artists' best intentions, their work often failed to escape the systems of appropriation in which it was rooted. Africa was made to serve as a metaphor for exoticism and sensuality or as a propagandistic symbol of cultural aspiration. It was in this last sense that African motifs function in certain works by Aaron Douglas, Loïs Malou Jones and James Lesesne Wells.
Harlem as Haiti
The Great Depression in the 1930s bought to an end the Harlem Renaissance, as an optimitistic era of patronage and cultural awakening. The work of Jacob Lawrence best embodies the change in mood. As a young man in Harlem in 1937-38, Lawrence produced a narrative series of forty-one tempera paintings chronicling the rise and fall of a legendary eighteenth century Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the founder of the first independent black nation in the Americas. 'I chose Haiti as my theme', stated Lawrence, 'because of the similarity of the Haitian's fight for economic freedom [with that of the Negro in the United States]'.
Lawrence's imagery - stark, episodic, expressionistic and defiantly political - represented a deep-seated desire among artists and activists for black empowerment and nationhood: twin themes that reverberated during the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression and beyond.