Museum Aims to Get Harlem Right
it did have its architects, notably two sparring Black public intellectuals, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Nor was it confined to Harlem, or even New York City. Many of the artists closely associated with it lived and worked elsewhere — Chicago; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Paris. Finally, it was not strictly, or even chiefly, a visual art phenomenon. It was initially defined in terms of new directions in Black literature — Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were emergent stars — and music, particularly jazz.
What it was, was a transcontinental vibe, an ideal of racial pride embodied in the term “New Negro,” a concept given instant currency through essays written by Mr. Locke and published in the progressive political journal “Survey Graphic.”
Mr. Locke’s ideal of a new cosmopolitan Black aesthetic blending Western classicism, European modernist innovation, African art and Black folk culture, dominates the show, organized by Denise Murrell, a Met curator. And a painted portrait of Mr. Locke by the German American artist Winold Reiss is the first thing we see before being plunged into Harlem itself.
Three displays at the end of the show touch on specific political themes of the New Negro era. One section addresses the pervasiveness of colorism — social exclusion based on skin tone — within the Black community. The underknown Philadelphia artist Laura Wheeler Waring’s 1920s painting “Mother and Daughter,” of two women, one light-skinned, one darker, seen in overlapping profiles, coolly alludes to this. Sexual politics could also be a minefield. The Harlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was Black,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once wrote. Mr. Locke was gay, as were the sculptor Richmond Barthé and the painter Richard Bruce Nugent. An installation with a sampling of their work, along with Beauford Delaney’s rainbow-hued nude portrait of the teenage James Baldwin, confirms this reality.
A concluding small display, “Artist as Activist,” asserts the risks inherent simply in being Black in America, risks that no effort at social uplift — even the current one — can mitigate. In the center is a small sculpture of a female figure who seems to be rising from flames. Created in 1919 by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and titled “In Memory of Mary Turner As a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence,” it was made in response to the death of a young pregnant Black woman who was lynched and torched in Georgia the previous year. Ms. Fuller’s figure radiates like an emergency flare that will not go out.
This exhibition underscores the functional value of what is now often referred to — with increasing disdain in the mainstream art world — as an art of “identity politics” — an art that asserts, actively or incidentally, some measure of anti-assimilationist cultural solidarity.
What Mr. Locke wanted for a new Black art was the same visibility that white art has always had in the public consciousness, in the market, in the history books. But he also insisted that, in this new art, a Black identity be foregrounded, maintained and nurtured, to create a fresh, distinctive cosmopolitanism. That is a dynamic evident in the Met show.