Harlem in Bloom

By Gwendolyn Holbrow, 2003

Harlem in the 1920s was the capital of African-American culture, the black Paris, a magnet for artists and intellectuals of color from all over the world. Lured by the cosmopolitan atmosphere, the developing commercial market for their work, and literary and art prizes offered by the Harmon Foundation, the National Urban League and the NAACP, they flocked to Harlem. At the same time, Harlem became a popular destination for whites. They took the A Train to the marvelous land of jazz, and began to recognize and appreciate the African-American contribution to American culture as a whole. Now The Harlem Renaissance and Its Legacy, at the Worcester Art Museum until April 13, celebrates this flowering of African-American culture and its continuing influence on the visual arts.

That’s the myth, anyway, but (surprise!) the truth is more complicated. As African-Americans constructed a racial identity, there was scant agreement on what that identity should be. Many members of Harlem’s highly educated intellectual elite wanted to prove themselves the cultured equals of whites and distanced themselves from the jazz world, leftwing politics, and the working class. Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke, an African-American philosopher educated at Harvard and Oxford, coined the phrase “the New Negro,” and stated that African-American subjects were the only suitable subjects for African-American artists, and that the purpose of the arts was to “advance the race.” Others believed art should first be individual expression, or insisted that any subject matter was fair game. Some embraced folk culture, while others disdained it as representing “the Old Negro.”

The whites coming to Harlem were just as divided. While some promoted civil rights, many were merely taking a vacation from “civilization” to enjoy, in addition to hot jazz and dancing, the illicit pleasures of alcohol and cocaine, gambling, gender-bending and prostitution that they banned from their own turf. Even the primarily white philanthropists funding and promoting the Harlem Renaissance movement were divided between those wanting to “advance the race” and those who saw the African-Americans as unspoiled “primitives” and wanted to keep them that way. The famous nightclubs were almost all segregated.

So a show of 50 pieces drawn from nine decades and vastly disparate regions, styles, media and content, plus a few African artifacts, claiming to represent both the Harlem Renaissance (1924-1934) and its legacy, is inevitably a bit incoherent. The curators have attempted to pull it together by classifying the works into six categories: The City, Spirituality, The Ancestral Legacy, The Arts, Everyday Life and Formal Experimentation, but the groupings are not obvious and the categories feel strained. Documenting connections between the later and geographically distant artists and the Harlem Renaissance might have helped.

That said, there are numerous stunning works on display, both figurative and abstract, and it is inspiring to see African-Americans presenting themselves as subject, rather than in the threatening or amusing object roles which most Euro-centric art assigns them. Archibald Motley’s Cocktails, c. 1926, shows us a group of sophisticated and stylish young women enjoying themselves together in an elegant restaurant, glowing with rosy and golden light. Hanging on the wall behind them is a stiff drab painting within the painting of several dead white European males. Sargent Johnson’s 1930s Mother and Child is a twist on the traditional madonna and child: the abstractly cylindrical wooden woman, with smoothly lacquered apron and brown skin, cradles a white child in her hollow interior. Norman Lewis’s shimmering black and white abstract painting Every Atom Glow: Electrons in Luminous Vibration, 1950, moves beyond racial issues to comment on the Atomic Age.

In the attempt to define a group identity, many African-Americans seized on their shared heritage of traditional African art, particularly the African masks and geometric designs so influential in European art at the time. Several pieces in the show, including Elizabeth Catlett’s El Canto and Lois Mailou Jones’s study for Les Fétiches, refer to masks. Aaron Douglas’s geometric designs are drawn from both Art Deco patterns and African textiles. Jacob Lawrence’s paintings from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s address civil rights and political and economic justice with flat color and perspective adapted from Cubism and Expressionism, which were influenced in turn by African art. Shared bondage is another theme, and chains appear repeatedly, in an Aaron Douglas mural study from the ‘20s, Romare Beardon’s untitled collage,1964, and Melvin Edwards’s welded steel Zhakanaka, 1989.

Unfortunately art often has to compromise with commerce to achieve financial viability, and this exhibit is no exception. Just as the original Harlem Renaissance artists had to avoid offending their patrons, The Harlem Renaissance and Its Legacy has tread carefully around everyone’s sensitivities, engaging in both whitewashing and what might be called blackwashing. While much of the work refers to slavery, lynching, racism, poverty, civil rights and class struggle, such terms are noticeably absent from the themes listed, so Caucasian-Americans need not feel threatened. On the other hand, the label for Richard Yarde’s wistful and moving 1978 watercolor, Garvey’s Ghost, implies that Marcus Garvey was a civil rights hero who promoted “unity and racial pride,” omitting to mention that he was a black nationalist who aligned himself with the Ku Klux Klan because he agreed with them that African-Americans should be repatriated to Africa, and that he was considered an egomaniac and a charlatan by most members of the Harlem Renaissance. Finally, while the show documents the construction of a new African-American identity, it is an overwhelmingly heterosexual male identity, with women marginalized and homosexuals invisible, despite their contributions. Such simplifications deny the rich and complicated texture of race relations in American culture. Fortunately, while texture may be absent from the labels, it is present in the work.

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