Works by Harlem Renaissance black art movement on show at Met
The first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged an exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance, it was a disaster.
“Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900 – 1968”, which opened at the New York institution in 1969, did not feature any art by black artists, and was more of an ethnographic study about the community.
The show was roundly criticised and a group of black artists called The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition picketed the Met.
Fifty-five years later, the Met is again having a show on the Harlem Renaissance, an important modern artistic movement that marked a watershed moment for race identity and black pride.
Is the new show a form of atonement? As The New York Times pointed out, “The museum isn’t framing the show as an institutional correction, though how can it be viewed otherwise”?
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” show certainly has a lot of art by black artists: 160 items of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera illustrate daily life in Harlem, one of America’s “new black cities”, in the 1920s to 1940s.
New York’s Harlem is today well-known as a centre of African-American culture, and because of the presence of the landmark Apollo Theatre, the neighbourhood has made it on to many tourists’ must-see lists.
In the 1920s, Harlem was an up-and-coming black neighbourhood benefiting from an influx of residents during what was known as the “Great Migration”.
This large-scale movement of African-Americans from the South to the North took place because of the institutionalised racial segregation of the American South during the notorious “Jim Crow” era.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the former Confederate states, which had fought to keep slavery in the civil war, passed laws that mandated racial segregation in public places.
African-Americans sought freedom and equality by migrating to the Northern states, and “New Black cities” like Harlem and Chicago’s South Side were the result. Such neighbourhoods were cosmopolitan and economically stable, paving the way for new movements in literature, music and art to develop.
In the mid-1920s, a new art movement, which later became known as the Harlem Renaissance, was born.
The movement was consciously created by African-American painters, sculptors and photographers, and the black writers, essayists and columnists they had befriended.
The Harlem Renaissance is considered to be the first modern art movement led by African-Americans. The artists used modern artistic styles to depict the black figure and the realities of contemporary black life – neither of which had previously been considered a “fitting” subject matter for American artists.
“It was the first African-American-led movement of modern art where we had black artists making modern portrayals of the modern black subject, shaping new images they thought should define the African-American experience,” says exhibition curator Denise Murrell
The artists of the Harlem Renaissance tried to represent African-American experience in ways that were both authentic and forward thinking.
The artists wanted to challenge stereotypes and depict the complexity and diversity of the black experience in America – the same desire that can be seen in a lot of contemporary art today, especially since the Black Lives Matter movement drew international attention after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
They sought to celebrate African-American heritage while emphasising black culture’s modernity. Although the movement was primarily aesthetic, they also engaged with social and political issues through their work.
Among the important writers at the time was Alain LeRoy Locke, who encouraged artists to look to the new avant-garde European art movements for inspiration, and to reflect on past times and take note of Egyptian art and African art.
The movement’s other great thinker, W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist and a writer, held a contrary position. Du Bois felt the artists should work in an academic, naturalistic style, which would imbue their black subjects with dignity.
The push-pull of the two writers is evident in the exhibition. William H. Johnson’s Woman in Blue (1943) expresses both African art and German Expressionism, while Archibald J. Motley Jnr’s 1948 Portrait of a Cultured Lady (Edna Powell Gayle) is classical and refined in style.
The leader of the movement was Aaron Douglas. His murals, which depicted black history, won him acclaim as the movement’s premier history painter.
His works are historical documents imbued with a transcendentalism which embodies the hopes of a people seeking a more equal, more just society.
Photography was an important part of the Harlem Renaissance, and photographs on show smash stereotypes and show a diversity of social classes.
James Van Der Zee’s photograph Couple, Harlem (1932) captures a stylishly dressed couple on a posh street getting out of an expensive state-of-the-art Cadillac V16 car.
“He is capturing the emergence of an urbane, economically affluent middle class in the new black cities,” says Murrell, noting that such depictions of wealthy black people were very new. “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Until July 28.