Few places in the world were as fabled as Harlem was in the early 1920s.
To black artists, writers, actors and musicians, Manhattan above 125th Street was the American Paris.
As the center of the New Negro Movement that encouraged migration as an act of spiritual emancipation, Harlem proved a magnet for blacks from all over the country. They relocated to elect options for self-definition not available anywhere else.
This was not easy, given that, by the end of the 19th Century, a great many black Americans strongly identified with the regions in which they lived. Still, however great their feeling, Harlem promised more. As writer Arna Bontemps said, the atmosphere there was ”like a foretaste of paradise.”
America long has known such representatives as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. Yet working beside them were a number of other pioneers now almost forgotten. They are the painters and sculptors of what has been called the Harlem Renaissance.
Four such figures-Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden and William H. Johnson-make up the nucleus of an exhibition organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, which presently is at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery in Evanston. Shown with photographs by Carl Van Vechten and James Van Der Zee, the works of these artists represent a crucial stage in the development of an Afro-American sensibility.
Viewers familiar with ”Sharing Traditions,” the 1985 show of black American artists of the 19th Century, may recall that each of the exhibitors developed their themes within a vocabulary provided by European examples. This was not unusual, given that most white American artists did so, as well.
But in Harlem during the 1920s, black artists received different counsel. Alain Locke, a leader of the New Negro Movement, proposed African art as the chief source for esthetics and iconography, cautioning against any involvement with either the European or American avant-garde.
At this time, Fuller`s art already was mature. She graduated in 1899 from the Pennsylvania Museum and School for Industrial Arts, going on to study in Paris, where she worked with Auguste Rodin and exhibited at Samuel Bing`s gallery, L`Art Nouveau. Her esthetics thus owed little to Harlem and, indeed, she never lived there.
In the present context, Fuller`s romantic realism looks strange, which is to say, in the earlier European mold. The catalogue essays gloss over this en route to discussing her imagery, which occasionally does relate to Afro-American concerns. It is better, however, to think of Fuller as a 19th Century artist, sometimes lively but certainly not modern, not even in Harlem`s restricted, sociological sense of the term.
Johnson, on the other hand, spent time in Paris and was influenced by European modernism, yet turned his back on all of it to paint scenes from black life in a folklike style of his own. Here the development is startling, as one watches him change from an academic to a primitive by way of Soutine and Van Gogh.
The change was not always met with approval, given that many blacks felt Johnson and other Harlem artists not only were provincial but also were painting in the very styles white society expected. Even so, in the works on view, Johnson displays a keen sense of color both before and after his shift. It actually keeps some of the pieces from becoming ”jazz age” caricatures of the sort done by John Held Jr.
The element of caricature is stronger in Hayden`s paintings, which here indicate little awareness of European currents, though the artist worked in Paris, Brittany and Normandy for five years. Perhaps one sees something of his early style in a group of marine watercolors, as it was in this category that he won his first prize.
Hayden`s mature work is represented by paintings with sometimes outrageous caricature and a sequence that becomes a folkloric narrative. The artist incurred heavy criticism for his vignettes from everyday life, and such are the stereotypes that, if they were done by anyone other than a black, they would not have been tolerated. Hayden`s 1944 series on John Henry is, however, a purer kind of fancy in an idealized, almost mural-like style.
Murals are central to Douglas` work, which is at once the most individual and the most modern. He, too, worked in Paris, later and for a shorter time than any of the others. His main influence was Cubism, though it was the watered-down, design-oriented Cubism of Art Deco and commercial illustration. Douglas` best-known paintings are wonderfully stylish, with flat overlapping planes, strong silhouettes and pale colors. Still, apart from their symbolic black subject matter, they are not substantially different from plates in the books illustrated by American graphic artist John Vassos.
The smaller ”urban” paintings, done in a loose, atmospheric realist style, have a freshness that never presses upon idealization. They can be compared, perhaps, with some ”American Scene” pictures, though they may very well be better because of their refusal to glorify. In any event, these little canvases are alone in getting the viewer to want to see more.
The odd thing about all the artists is that, despite repeated exhortations from Locke, none really translated the power and directness of African art. This failure is inexplicable unless one considers the possibility of their being too close to the social context that European modernists ignored. It is quite a paradox that the work with the greatest formal strength should have been done by artists who felt or understood less rather than more, yet that is what happened. Certainly nothing here can compare with the force of, say, a 1906 Picasso.
This is a show, then, about the aspirations of a period and a place that now are part of American mythology. Van Der Zee`s photographs, as corny and artless as often they are, support the myth no less than do Van Vechten`s, which view it more sophisticatedly but still admiringly, from the outside. But the rest of what we see does not approach the exalted level of Harlem Renaissance music or even its literature.
Romare Bearden and others said as much during the 1930s, only later to recant, thinking the verdict too harsh. And, back then, it was too harsh because it also was dismissive. Today, we can see the difference more easily between pieces that give inspiration or courage and those meant to function more purely, only as art. This is the difference felt here, though most viewers also will feel a full measure of respect for what this art continues to engender on its own rich ideological level.
”Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America” will continue at the Block Gallery, 1967 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, through June 5.
