What Exerted a Great Deal of Influence on Modernism American Art Movements in the 1920s?

James Van Der Zee, Garveyite Family unit, Harlem, 1924, printed 1974, gelatin silvery impress, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Eric R. Pull a fast one on), 2015.19.4388

How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment?

How does visual fine art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-24-hour interval events and issues?

How practise migration and deportation influence cultural production?

"I believe that the [African American's] advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in whatsoever other place in the country, and that Harlem volition become the intellectual, the cultural and the financial heart for Negroes of the United States and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples." —James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital," 1925

The Harlem Renaissance was a menstruum of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the cease of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Neat Depression and lead upwardly to World War Two (the 1930s). Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and involvement in the rapidly changing mod globe—many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the outset time.

While the Harlem Renaissance may be all-time known for its literary and performing arts—pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may exist familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were cardinal contributors to the outset modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.

Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) is known equally the "father of African American art." He divers a modern visual linguistic communication that represented black Americans in a new light. Douglas began his artistic career as a landscape painter but was influenced by modern art movements such as cubism, in which subjects appear fragmented and fractured, and by the graphic arts, which typically use bold colors and stylized forms. He and other artists also looked toward Westward Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed equally a link to their African heritage. They also turned to the fine art of artifact, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of popular involvement due to the 1922 discovery of Male monarch Tutankhamen's tomb. Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902–1993) and Hale Woodruff (1900–1980) as well explored a streamlined arroyo that drew from African and European artistic influences.

Sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) worked in a realistic style, representing his subjects in a nuanced and sympathetic light in which black Americans had seldom been depicted earlier. Painter Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891–1981) began his career during the 1920s as i of the first African American graduates of the Schoolhouse of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the early part of his career, he created intimate and direct portraits, such equally Portrait of My Grandmother of 1922.

James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), a photographer, became the unofficial chronicler of African American life in Harlem. Whether through formal, posed family photographs in his studio or through photo essays of Harlem's cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, diverse, and thriving customs.

The germination of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by the Not bad Migration—the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the continental United States, mainly from rural Southern regions to more than populous urban centers in the North. Pursuit of jobs, amend education, and housing—as well as escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism—drove black Americans to relocate.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Yet the Harlem Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades. Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt'south Works Progress Administration. Further, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Customs Art Center (HCAC) in 1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered hands-on art making led by professional person artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC was critical in providing black artists continued support and grooming that helped sustain the next generation of artists to emerge after the war. In subsequent decades, the Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid critical groundwork for the civil rights movement and the Blackness Arts Motion.

As a final note, women artists were likewise office of the Harlem Renaissance and participated especially as singers, actors, dancers, and writers. Less well-known are the women visual artists of the menstruation. Gaining access to the visual arts scene was more than difficult than entry into the performing arts, as the practice of painting and sculpture in particular were not considered gender-advisable or "feminine." Ii sculptors, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) and Augusta Fell (1892–1962), the latter an activist, artist, and director of the HCAC, made their marker during the menses, but their work has been largely overlooked and is only coming into full assessment past art historians today.

Harlem Renaissance

James Weldon Johnson,God'south Trombones: 7 Negro Sermons in Poesy, 1927

2 artists collaborated on this famous Harlem Renaissance–era book, which combines interpretations of biblical parables written in contemporary verse with bold illustrations that echo the ability and symbolism of the words.

The writer James Weldon Johnson, author, poet, essayist, and chronicler of Black Manhattan (the title of one of his books), commissioned Aaron Douglas to illustrate God'south Trombones. The book is organized into eight chapters: an explanatory preface by Johnson and introductory prayer followed by seven sermon-poems entitled "The Creation," "The Dissipated Son," "Go Down Decease—A Funeral Sermon," "Noah Built the Ark," "The Crucifixion," "Permit My People Go," and "The Judgment Twenty-four hours." Each sermon adopts the vernacular of an African American preacher and is accompanied by dynamic, blackness-and-white illustrations that cast the stories in a contemporary light and feature blackness protagonists. Douglas'south painting manner used assuming coloration, just press processes of the 1920s fabricated color illustrations difficult and plush, which is why the illustrations are monochrome with text offset in a unmarried color.

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Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas,The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1

Years afterward the 1927 publication of God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, Aaron Douglas painted new works of art based on his original illustrations for the volume. The creative person's use of complementary colors (majestic and yellow/light-green) combined with overlapping arcs, zigzagging shapes, and the silhouetted figures' extended limbs create an energized composition. The key figure, who is outsize to show his importance (a device used in ancient Egyptian art, which was an influence on Douglas'southward style) represents Gabriel, an archangel actualization in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible who serves as God's messenger and whose proper name means "God is my strength." The other figures answer to Gabriel'southward call and the pulsating forms suggest the trumpet's echoing sound. The verse that accompanied the illustration published in God's Trombones likens Gabriel to a blues trumpeter:

And Gabriel's going to ask him: Lord,

How long must I accident it?

And God's a-going to tell him: Gabriel,

Accident it at-home and easy.

And then putting one pes on the mountain top,

And the other in the middle of the ocean,

Gabriel'due south going to stand and blow his horn.

To wake the living nations.

Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas,Into Chains, 1936, oil on canvas, Corcoran Drove (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Drove), 2014.79.17

This painting refers to the Atlantic slave trade, during which 10–12 million people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas, virtually during the period from the 1600s to the 1800s. The United States outlawed farther slave trade into the country in 1808, although the practice itself was not abolished until 1864. The painting positions u.s. as viewers behind a scrim of leafage, as if nosotros are hiding or witnessing the scene. At that place is a receding line of male figures, heads bowed, advancing toward the ocean and approaching ships that volition forcibly transport them to a strange identify and life of enslavement. Aaron Douglas uses nonnaturalistic, complementary colors—teal-blueish figures and a searing, lemon-yellowish sky—to add drama. Wrist shackles are painted a contrasting orange, which draws our eye to them. One figure has dropped to his knees in the foreground, arms raised beseechingly heavenward, while a central standing effigy gazes at a single star whose beam of light illuminates him, perhaps a reminder that he is not forsaken.

Harlem Renaissance

Fritz Winold Reiss,Untitled (Two Figures in an Incline), woodcut, Reba and Dave Williams Drove, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 2008.115.4080

Fritz Winold Reiss and his family emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1913. He traveled extensively around the United States and Mexico, and became interested in America's racial diversity, ofttimes portraying indigenous Americans and African Americans. Reiss illustrated The New Negro, Alain Locke'due south influential anthology of writing, idea, and verse that became an keepsake of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1925, The New Negro asserted the unique qualities of black American culture and life and encouraged buying and pride in its art and heritage.

Reiss, who was white, was inspired by the same sources as blackness artists and designers: modernistic European art and the stylized forms of African fine art, including ancient Egyptian fine art (see the related Pinterest board for examples). Here, the figures, shown but in profile, are compressed into a geometrical space throbbing with active lines and movement. One figure appears to tend the pilus of some other, while the multiply breasted figure could be a goddess or symbol of fertility. Reiss's agile limerick of jagged lines and radiating forms influenced Aaron Douglas.

Harlem Renaissance

James Lesesne Wells,Looking Upward, 1928, woodcut in black on laid paper, Ruth and Jacob Kainen Collection, 1994.87.9

James Lesesne Wells plant inspiration in the stylized qualities of African sculpture and in German expressionist art, which revived the centuries-old medium of woodcut printing for the mod age. This piece of work shows an outsize, silhouetted figure making his mode among, and dominating, an urban forest of skyscrapers that seem to tumble in his wake. He appears to carry a small model of other dwellings, perhaps a representation of dwelling or the idea of home we retain in memory. The figure looks almost him, as if seeking or aspiring to fit in or establish roots. Many African Americans elected to move from the South to Northern cities during the Bully Migration, experiencing both deportation and adjustment to new urban environments.

Harlem Renaissance

Richmond Barthé,Head of a Boy, c. 1930, painted plaster, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2014.136.295

Richmond Barthé sculpted African American subjects in a sensitive, realist style. Barthé followed a classical style in sculpture, assertive that any subject area could be dignified and cute if rendered with skill and thoughtfulness. Up until the Harlem Renaissance, African American faces rarely appeared as the central subject of visual art. Barthé's art and interest in the male effigy was informed by his identity as a gay man, who according to the times was constrained in disclosing this function of his life openly, although he did find fellowship and love interests amid the catamenia's artists and intellectuals.

Barthé grew upwardly in New Orleans and headed north with the support of his family to pursue an creative educational activity at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he studied painting. At the fourth dimension, SAIC and the Pennsylvania University of the Fine Arts were the two US art schools that admitted African American students. Barthé discovered his talent for sculpture in 1927, when he was introduced to the medium during a class assignment to create a portrait bust of a fellow educatee in clay (he completed two). These initial works were noticed past the teacher and included in an exhibition, The Negro in Art Week, launching Barthé's career and lifelong commitment to sculpture.

Harlem Renaissance

Werner Drewes,Harlem Dazzler, 1930, woodcut in blackness, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1974.84.one

In 1930, Werner Drewes emigrated to New York City from Germany, where he had been an art educatee. This piece of work is from the same twelvemonth he arrived in New York and pays homage to African American womanhood and beauty. The epitome, created by a white artist who worked in circles outside of Harlem, attests to the widespread cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance, of interest to people across racial and social lines, including artists, teachers, patrons, and funders who engaged in pluralist, interracial dialogues. Drewes occasionally made images of people and scenes in Harlem and other New York locations. Harlem Beauty has a timeless and sculptural quality, with its stripped-down focus on the woman's illuminated face in profile, a classical portrait mode. Drewes, like Fritz Winold Reiss, was associated with a modernist European tradition that likewise was of involvement to many African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Can you call up of other examples of cultural dialogue, wherein seemingly distinct populations influence each other's artistic practices?

Drewes worked in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist employment programs equally an art instructor at the Brooklyn Museum and Columbia University. He later headed the graphic arts division of the Federal Art Project, part of the WPA, in New York state. He was a prolific printmaker and, later on, painter.

Harlem Renaissance

Archibald John Motley Jr.,Portrait of My Grandmother, 1922, oil on canvass, Patrons' Permanent Fund, Avalon Fund, and Motley Fund, 2018.2.1

The extended Motley family moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1894. The group included the creative person'south paternal grandmother, Emily Motley, pictured here. Her son, Archibald Motley Sr., worked equally a Pullman porter on the Michigan Central Railroad and his wife, Mary L. Motley, was a schoolteacher. Their professions were among the highest-condition and best-paying jobs black Americans could hold at the time and situated the family in the eye class. The family unit's movement anticipated the northward Great Migration of African Americans that gained momentum during Globe War I and continued until the ceremonious rights era.

The artist was among the get-go African Americans to nourish the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (from 1914 to 1918), where he also worked as a janitor to defray costs. Following graduation, Motley elected to focus his fine art on themes around black American life. This portrait of his grandmother, who was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1842, is venerable and dignified, the effects of fourth dimension and difficult work visible on her hands and face. She lived until age 87. The work, completed when Motley was still an unknown, may take been painted on a cast-off Primal Railroad laundry bag from his male parent'south train line.

Harlem Renaissance

Unhurt Woodruff, Robert Blackburn,Dominicus Promenade, published 1996, linocut in black with chine-collé on wove newspaper, Corcoran Drove (Souvenir of Due east. Thomas Williams, Jr. and Auldlyn Higgins Williams in retentiveness of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.nineteen.3032.8

Hale Woodruff, aslope Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthé, and Archibald John Motley Jr., is among the major visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Robert Blackburn, an African American artist also credited for this work, founded the Printmaking Workshop in New York, where he taught lithography and printed editions for artists, such equally this 1. All of the aforementioned artists were born and lived outside New York, but ultimately relocated to Harlem, drawn by its magnetic fine art scene. In so doing, they joined many African Americans in the northward exodus that became known as the Great Migration. Woodruff studied fine art at Harvard University and at the School of the Fine art Constitute of Chicago, besides as working in Paris, where he embraced modern styles of painting. In addition, he studied with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whom he admired for the social justice themes he pursued in his art.

Sunday Promenade, role of a series of work Woodruff made while living in Atlanta during the Depression, depicts two couples and a adult female wearing their Dominicus best. A church lies behind them in a point at the top of the composition and underscores the centrality of spiritual life in the African American customs. The turned-out appearance of the promenaders contrasts with the modest wooden structures besides pictured. Woodruff also made politically charged work that dealt graphically with lynching, an issue he felt compelled to confront with his art. During the first part of the 20th century, the NAACP and other groups worked to advance anti-lynching legislation, which was never passed.

Harlem Renaissance

James Van Der Zee,Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924, gelatin silver print, printed 1974, Corcoran Drove (Gift of Eric R. Fox), 2015.xix.4388

James Van Der Zee opened the Guarantee Portrait Studio in Harlem in 1917. He captured the faces and lives of people who lived in Harlem: its famous entertainers, artists, leaders, and a growing black center class. He besides took his photographic camera to the places they called their own: homes, billiard halls, barbershops, churches, and clubs. Van Der Zee'southward work forms an important chronicle of blackness life of the flow. This well-dressed family was associated with Marcus Garvey's movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Clan (UNIA). UNIA advocated for black Americans (and others from the African diaspora) to emigrate to Africa to populate and further develop Republic of liberia, the simply non-colonial state on the continent. Van Der Zee was hired by the UNIA to record and document its marches, parades, and members, who adopted a quasi-militaristic advent. The UNIA became a mass movement of over 200,000 members during the 1920s, a time when the Ku Klux Klan had reemerged as a white nationalist group. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1927 and deported to his native Jamaica. Absent his leadership, the movement faded.

Harlem Renaissance

James Van Der Zee,Alpha Phi Alpha Basketball Team, 1926, gelatin silver impress, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.19.4507

This portrait of a college basketball team shows a serious group of young men united by their affiliation with their fraternity and its basketball team. Alpha Phi Blastoff was the first intercollegiate African American fraternity in the United states, its commencement affiliate founded in 1906 at Cornell Academy in Ithaca, New York. The fraternity provided support, study groups, and, later on, opportunities to participate in intercollegiate sports at a time when black players were not permitted on college teams. Note how each player is carefully posed and forms a symmetrical arrangement on the steps of the fraternity, showing their integrity as a group while radiating their decision to succeed in a racially divided country.

Harlem Renaissance

Norman Lewis,Jazz, c. 1938, lithograph in black on wove newspaper, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Souvenir of the Print Inquiry Foundation, 2008.115.193

Similar Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis was attuned to the importance of jazz and blues music, peculiarly growing upwards in Harlem during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. Only xix when he created this print, the work shows a modern, abstruse quality while capturing visually the sense of music produced by this quartet of musicians, who seem to bob in the space of the picture, emulating the rhythm of the music.

Lewis was influenced by the writings of Alain Locke, an intellectual, impresario, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance who advocated for black visual artists to explore the distinctive graphic symbol of their experience and civilization. Jazz is a hybrid fine art form with many influences, including W African music. In 1935, Lewis viewed African Negro Art, an early on American exhibition (at the Museum of Mod Art, New York) of African sculpture, textiles, and objects shown as artful works of fine art rather than ethnographic artifacts. Lewis then began a phase of drawing imagined African masks (see the associated Pinterest board for an example). The masklike appearance of the figures in this work may as well have been influenced by the exhibition.

Lewis's printmaking activity over the course of his career was limited; he fabricated prints for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (FAP) during the Depression years and several editions independently in the 1940s, after which he returned to printmaking simply sporadically. Later on the 1940s, Lewis embraced abstraction in his art and became well-known in the 1950s and beyond for his large-scale paintings, 1 of which is also in the National Gallery of Fine art collection (see the related Pinterest lath). He is also notable amidst the artists who took part in the FAP—every bit printmakers, muralists, and teachers—who later became prominent abstract artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jacob Lawrence.

Harlem Renaissance

Isac Friedlander,Rhapsody in Black, 1931, woods engraving, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Souvenir of Reba and Dave Williams, 2008.115.1943

Isac Friedlander, a white printmaker who emigrated to the United states in 1929, reminds us that the Harlem Renaissance and its exuberant nightlife was too an attraction for progressive-minded whites who traveled to Harlem to partake of the entertainment, which was generally entirely produced, written, and performed past black artists and impresarios. Here a top-hatted bandleader leads a grouping of robed singers, a jazz orchestra, and a pianist in a vibrant musical result. The technique of woods engraving that Friedlander used is a procedure in which the creative person uses negative, or white, lines to describe the image (think of drawing on a black scratchboard). The technique can produce nuanced detail due to the very fine-grained woods that is used for the process. The nature of the medium allowed Friedlander to capture the feeling of a dark nightclub with the performers' faces illuminated by phase lights. This dynamic scene may take been captured by Friedlander prior to the onset of the Depression.

Harlem Renaissance

Alfred Stieglitz,Brancusi Exhibition at 291, 1914, printed 1924/1937, gelatin silver print, Alfred Stieglitz Drove, 1949.3.353

This is an epitome that documents a 1914 gallery exhibition of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian modernist who worked in Paris and was profoundly influenced past the forms of African art. At this fourth dimension, Westward African art was beingness imported to the The states by French and Belgian fine art dealers. This fine art had come up to the attention and involvement of artists working in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Amedeo Modigliani, Brancusi, and others, who were searching for new forms to express the modern era and a new century. They institute inspiration in the often abstruse and stylized forms of African fine art, also as the art of other non-Western cultures and of antiquity. The relationship of Europeans to the art of Africa entails a circuitous dynamic that raises questions about who has the right to advisable and translate another culture'south patrimony. A generation after the Parisian modernists, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance also borrowed from the forms of African fine art every bit a means of reconnecting with and expressing pride in their African heritage.

Harlem Renaissance

Pablo Picasso,Head of a Woman (Fernande), model 1909, cast before 1932, bronze, Patrons' Permanent Fund and Gift of Mitchell P. Rales, 2002.one.1

Many Europeans assimilated influences from African art, including Spanish creative person Pablo Picasso, who often worked in Paris

At left, the modeled and cast head of Picasso's companion, Fernande Olivier, is in a cubist mode. Cubism shattered ideas of how infinite and objects could be depicted in art. For the first time, fine art was not trying to reproduce the appearance of a person or object. Instead, objects and the subjects of portraits, like this one, were fractured into smaller planes and surfaces. Cubism was meant to portray the creative person's style of seeing and perceiving the subject area. Modern creative person David Hockney has noted, "Cubism was an assail on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. Information technology was the kickoff large, large change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'" Some of Picasso's inspiration for cubism derived from his interest in African fine art, and particularly masks, which he collected and kept in his studio in Paris.

Harlem Renaissance

Amedeo Modigliani,Head of a Adult female, 1910/1911, limestone, Chester Dale Drove, 1963.10.241

Amedeo Modigliani, an artist from Italy, also worked in Paris, a vibrant cultural capital that attracted immature artists from all over Europe. His piece of work does not embrace cubism, but he bathetic the features of his Head of a Adult female by elongating them, maybe in emulation of African masks or archaic sculpture. In turn, artists of afterwards generations, such as those of the Harlem Renaissance, became interested in both the values of modern fine art, which rejected the art styles and traditions of the by, and in African fine art, which developed along a distinct trajectory contained of Europe.

Harlem Renaissance

Walker Evans,Figure of a Woman, Laongo, 1935, gelatin silver print, Souvenir of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.17

This work of art was amongst some 600 presented in a 1935 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Fine art, New York, entitled African Negro Fine art. The exhibition marked the commencement time that non-Western cultural objects were shown in a mod fine art gallery as aesthetic fine art objects rather than ethnographic artifacts. In and then doing, the museum acknowledged the significant influence of African fine art, traded from colonized African countries, on Western modern art.

Harlem Renaissance

Walker Evans,Polychrome Mask, 1935, gelatin silverish impress, Gift of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.vi

In 1935, the Museum of Modernistic Art in New York presented the exhibition African Negro Fine art. The exhibition's emphasis on the objects' aesthetic qualities led the museum to omit data near their cultural context and ceremonial use or significance, which prevented visitors from accessing a deeper agreement of the objects' origins. For instance, the title of this mask does not offering cultural information, such as the fact that it is from Gabonese republic or the Republic of the congo, Kwele people. What tin y'all discover well-nigh art from West Africa and its characteristics?

Harlem Renaissance

Walker Evans,Figure of a Young Adult female, Pahouin, Edge of Spanish Republic of guinea, 1935, gelatin silverish print, Gift of Samuel and Marilyn Stern, 1991.119.10

Today, the Pahouin culture referred to in this object's title is more ordinarily known equally Fang or Fãn, a Fundamental African ethnic group.

The Museum of Modernistic Art's 1935 exhibition, African Negro Art, was photographed past Walker Evans, who may be best known for his photography documenting the furnishings of the Depression in rural America. Evans produced a portfolio containing 477 prints of African Negro Art; most of these sets were given to African American colleges and universities in the United States.