Harlem Renaissance Art Aaron Douglas Harlem Renaissance Art Aaron Douglas Black and White
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Fine art Movement: Harlem Renaissance
By Shira Wolfe
"I believe that the [African American's] advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the land, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural and the financial center for Negroes of the United States and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples." —James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital," 1925
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance was an influential movement of African-American fine art, literature, music, and theatre. The motility emerged after the First World War, and was agile through the Swell Depression of the 1930s until the outset of the Second World State of war. Most of the artists associated with the movement lived and worked in the predominantly African-American neighbourhood Harlem in New York, which became a great cultural hub flourishing with creativity. The artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance aimed to take control over representations of their own people, instead of accepting the stereotypical depictions past white people. They asserted pride in blackness life and identity, and rebelled confronting inequality and discrimination.
Key period: 1919-1930s
Primal region: Harlem, New York
Key words: identity, pride, bureau, transformation, African American culture, African fine art, modernism, black advanced
Key artists: Augusta Barbarous, Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, James Lesesne Wells, Archibald John Motley, Beauford Delaney, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, James van der Zee, Palmer Hayden, Jacob Lawrence, Allen Lohan Crite
"Besides, they'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed – I, too am America." – Langston Hughes, excerpt from "I, too"
Historical and Social Context of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance started after a summertime of bloody race-related riots in 1919, known as the Red Summer. It was half a century after the abolition of slavery, and lynchings were still mutual in the South, attempts to pass an anti-lynching bill in Congress were repeatedly refused, and white supremacy was widely accepted and reinforced past the prevailing cultural forces of contemporary books and movies.
This was too the menstruation that effectually 200.000 African-American soldiers returned from the state of war in Europe. They had been treated with far more than respect and equality whist away in France than they were used to back habitation. When they returned, their demand for equality had a renewed authority and urgency. In the meantime, during the state of war years in Europe, half a million African-Americans had left the American S for industrialised Northern cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Columbus and Cleveland in search of employment and communities less rife with discrimination. In New York, the Harlem neighbourhood had been planned for eye-course white families only had been overdeveloped, then many black families started moving at that place.
I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100
The Different Disciplines of the Harlem Renaissance
A burgeoning black creativity began to arise in Harlem. Writers, artists, musicians and theatre practitioners inspired each other and often worked beyond disciplines, aiming for fine art that defied stereotypes and that fought against injustice and discrimination.
Providing most of the intellectual grounding for the Harlem Renaissance was the philosopher, sociologist, writer, and patron of the arts Alain LeRoy Locke and his essay "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro." The essay introduced Harlem and its cultural boom to a wider public. He expanded on these ideas in his album of essays The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) which included his influential essay "The New Negro". The initial proper noun of the motion, "The New Negro," derives from this anthology and essay. The essay called for a "new dynamic stage… of renewed self-respect and self-dependence" in the community.
Leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance include Langston Huges, Zora Neale Thurston, Arna Bontemps, Jean Toorner and Claude McKay. Langston Hughes wrote the brilliant poem "I, too" (1926), which demonstrates a yearning and demand for equality:
I, too, sing America / I am the darker brother. / They send me to eat in the kitchen / When visitor comes, / Just I laugh, /And swallow well, /And grow strong. / Tomorrow, / I'll be at the table / When company comes. / Nobody'll cartel / Say to me, / "Eat in the kitchen," / Then. / Besides / They'll meet how beautiful I am / And exist ashamed – / I, too am America.
In terms of music, the popularity of jazz spread more and more, with musicians like Billie Vacation, Louis Armstrong and Knuckles Ellington associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In theatre and operation, swell actors like Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker were making their marking.
In the visual arts, artists portrayed African American life, taking agency over the portrayal of their ain people. Moreover, it was an advanced movement where artists were experimenting and allowing themselves a vast variety of influences, including, for example, the European modernists.
The Visual Arts of the Harlem Renaissance
Sculptors, painters and printmakers were primal contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. Aaron Douglas, who is sometimes referred to as "the father of African American fine art", was an important figure in the motility, who divers a modern visual language representing black Americans in a new low-cal. In his cycle of four murals, "Aspects of Negro Life", commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to decorate the section of the New York Public Library intended for research into black culture, Douglas combined imagery from African-American history with scenes from contemporary life, fusing the influences of African sculpture, jazz music and geometric abstraction. Douglas was influenced by modernist movements such every bit Cubism, and he and other artists besides found a great source of inspiration in Westward Africa, in particular the stylised sculptures and masks from Benin, Congo and Senegal. They viewed this art every bit a link to their African heritage.
Many artists also turned to the art of antiquity, especially Egyptian sculpture. I of these artists is Meta Warrick Fuller, a female sculptor who became a protégé of Auguste Rodin in Paris, before returning to work in the United States. Her sculpture Ethiopia (1921), was inspired by the period of the Pharaohs in aboriginal Egypt, and is widely considered the first Pan-African American work of art. Her sculpture was an allegory for the musical and industrial contributions of African Americans to the development of the United States.
Printmakers James Lesesne Wells and Hale Woodruff explored a streamlined approach, cartoon from African and European artistic influences. They worked with block printing, lithography and etching, creating a distinctive visual language and making a mark with their inventive, modernistic printmaking.
Photography was also an important chemical element in the Harlem Renaissance. The most iconic photographs capturing this fine art move, this very specific time and place, were taken past photographer James Van Der Zee. He recognised the incredible richness of the intellectual and artistic life in Harlem during those years, and realised he had to capture it on motion picture. Van Der Zee produced thousands of photographs of and for Harlem's flourishing centre class. He took both formal, posed photographs in his studio, and photo essays of street scenes, cabarets, restaurants, barbershops and church services. His images immortalise the story of this thriving artistic community.
The Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance left a huge legacy. For one, the stars of the next African American artistic generation, like Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence, were taught by Augusta Barbarous, a key effigy of the Harlem Renaissance. Furthermore, the movement inspired generations of black artists to come up. In the words of Wil Haygood:
"Were it non for this movement, other art movements may not even accept sprung upwards. The Harlem Renaissance gave women, gave impoverished people all over this country a hint of merely what you can do if you desire to put your art on the line, considering all they really wanted was to show America that, if you give u.s. a fair hazard, we will produce greatness. From that motility they have stitched, the blackness American, forevermore, into the creative fabric of this state."
Relevantsources to learn more
Observe more about this period of flourishing creativity centred around Harlem here:
National Gallery of Fine art
The Washington Post
Phaidon
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance was an influential movement of African American art, literature, music, and theatre that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in Harlem, New York.
Who were the key artists of the Harlem Renaissance?
The cardinal artists of the Harlem Renaissance were Augusta Brutal, Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, James Lesesne Wells, Archibald John Motley, Beauford Delaney, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, James van der Zee, Palmer Hayden, Jacob Lawrence and Allen Lohan Crite.
What was the style of the Harlem Renaissance?
Artists worked in many different styles, but a full general tendency was to explore a fusion of realism, modernism, African art, and fifty-fifty elements of antiquity.
Source: https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-harlem-renaissance/
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