Harlem Renaissance: Empowering African American Artists

The Harlem Renaissance provided African American artists with an unprecedented moment. Discuss

The Harlem Renaissance began as a movement for young African American creatives to reclaim their lineage and history, taking away from the white paternalistic views that romanticized yet also criticised their culture. They were able to change the exploitative use of primitivism and fetishization of ancient African artworks (that were being displayed in places like Stieglitz’s gallery 291 alongside modern works)[footnoteRef:1] into something that equated for them their own way of education and liberation through the inclusion of the works in their own art. Through the Harlem Renaissance, African Americans were able to promote their own political, social, economic, and cultural agendas through the arts, whilst acknowledging and owning their past. [1: S. F. Patton, African American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 108-109. ]

A key artist who arguably initiated these ideas of owning their cultural past was sculptor Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller. She had studied in Paris and worked with Rodin who encouraged her to pursue sculpture. In turn, her 1914 piece Ethiopia Awakening (fig. 1), anticipated the Harlem Renaissance and ‘introduced America to the power of Black American and African subjects’[footnoteRef:2] as stated by David Driskell. The sculpture is influenced by Egyptian civilization and mythology and gave a sense of nobility for African Americans, who associated (alongside the rest of the world) Egypt as a ‘great civilization’[footnoteRef:3]. Through this sculpture, which represented beauty and the dramatic change of ‘awakening from the sleep of slavery’[footnoteRef:4], Warwick Fuller gave African Americans the strength and encouragement to adopt a sense of nationalism for their home country and rebellion against the colonization and racism that was widely entrenched in America. It also included an underlying religious theme, as Psalm 68:31 states ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.’ Warwick Fuller was supporting the idea that Ethiopia represents Black Africa as a whole, as the Psalm addresses the enslavement of Africans in America and tells that complete liberation is coming, giving hope to a struggling nation. [2: D. Driskell, Hidden Heritage: The Roots of Black American Painting, Channel 4, 1991] [3: Patton, African American Art, p. 107.] [4: Patton, African American Art, p. 107.]

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Through this work, Warwick Fuller offered African Americans the ability to reclaim their history through the ideologies of Pan-Africanism, be it through the links to the experience of the continent of Africa as part of the African American identity or the use of ancient African artworks as an influence. For African Americans, African art was not primitive (as it had been viewed by modern artists in Europe and the US) but a basis for their classical understanding of art – they used it as inspiration and never called it as such – they were diminishing the ideas that had been put in place by Western artists about non-Western art, like artists such as Picasso. As well as this, she introduced a religious theme that was picked up by other artists during the Harlem Renaissance, alongside these ideas of reclamation of primitivism and encouragement of understanding and using Black African culture and lineage in their works throughout this art movement.

Similar to Warwick Fuller in ideologies and artistic themes was Aaron Douglas. Upon arriving in New York in 1924 he met art collector Albert Barnes and saw first-hand the ‘primitive’ African art he owned, as well as the primitivism that was included in works by Picasso, seeing how it had influenced these artists whilst being an influence for him too. For example, there is a clear influence from ancient Egyptian art in his work, he even described his characters as ‘“Egyptian form” figures’[footnoteRef:5] as they resembled what was depicted in Egyptian frescoes and tomb reliefs. It is also clear that from experiencing the art in Barnes’ collection, most notably Picasso, he had developed an understanding and interest in cubism, as well as ideas around soviet art, that also introduced to him the politics of the USSR and ideas of anti-fascism, as racism was identified as a key component of fascism. Although influenced by the modern artists of Europe, he rejected any white paternalistic ideas and stressed the need for African American artists to create art for themselves. [5: Patton, African American Art, p. 119.]

His four-panelled mural from 1934 called Aspects of Negro Life was an inherently political work that supported the notions of creating African American art for African American people. It tells the story of Africans and African Americans fighting for freedom, whilst incorporating the ideas of socialism through the inclusion of a figure presumably modelled after Lenin in the piece From Slavery to Reconstruction (fig. 2). As well as this, the depictions of workers struggling against ‘the icons of American secular society modernism – industrialization and urbanism’[footnoteRef:6] in Song of the Towers (fig. 3) – as they are trying to reach the Statue of Liberty (the beacon of hope), just as the main figure playing the saxophone seemingly has. He was introducing the idea of the ‘New Negro’[footnoteRef:7] through the representation of the main figure, who is the epitome of ‘black creativity and self-expression’[footnoteRef:8] – these ideas gave African Americans a chance to celebrate, that hope was inevitable and that liberation and change had already begun (his piece from 1936, Aspiration (fig. 4), showed that they could achieve upward mobility and integration), as well as allowing artists in all cultural fields of the Harlem Renaissance to have an unprecedented moment, as this New Negro held cultural and political power. [6: Patton, African American Art, p. 141.] [7: R. J. Powell and D. A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (London: Hayward Gallery, 1997), pp. 23-24.] [8: Powell and Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, p. 24.]

The panelled mural also showed the influences of cubism and African art in its stylistic choices (along with the rest of Douglas’ work). His work was fascinated with primitivism and used these Euro-centric ideas around it to tell the story of slavery and the struggles of African Americans through the links to their African identity with the influences of ancient African art.

Another artist that similarly used the ideas of primitivism was Palmer Hayden. He would incorporate African art in his work as a sign of ancestral legacy and having also experienced cubism whilst studying in Paris, his work Fetiche et Fleurs (fig. 5) from 1926 is a modern interpretation of a still life in the home of an African American. The inclusion of the Fang reliquary and Kuba cloth had been popular representations of African art for artists in the US and Europe and so Hayden was representing the ideas of Alain Locke (the African American writer) and what he believed was the New Negro artist, as well as addressing the fact that white artists seemingly fetishized African art[footnoteRef:9], as they would see it as an aesthetic rather than part of African American lineage and culture. His later work, Nous Quatre a Paris (fig. 6) from 1935 is influenced by the work of Cezanne (his piece The Card Players (fig. 7) from the late 19th Century)[footnoteRef:10] but is painted to resemble the works of cubists, as well as referencing the Fang reliquary in how the male card players are depicted – he is representing African Americans as if they were ancient African sculptures. [9: Patton, African American Art, p. 121.] [10: Patton, African American Art, pp. 136-138. ]

His work began to be heavily criticized by many different critics for this provocative way of depicting characters, as they somewhat resembled racist imagery, as argued by David Driskell ‘Hayden’s deliberately self-effacing interpretation of his efforts as an artist, his insistence on portraying Blacks with the masks of minstrels … and his ingratiating reference to the benevolence of his liberators, are probably honest … portrayals of Hayden’s very real feelings about his efforts at making art.’[footnoteRef:11] He seemingly played into the white paternalistic trope, accepting the racist ideas of white America but instead argued that his work was a ‘symbolic reference to comedy, tragedy, and pleasures of a Black lifestyle.’[footnoteRef:12] He was therefore not allowing the white paternalistic trope to win, he was playing into the ironies of depicting African American subjects in the same way that white artists would, whilst also citing his influences in Black folklore. [11: D. Driskell, Hidden Heritage: The Roots of Black American Painting, Channel 4, 1991] [12: Edited by C. Miers, Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1994), p. 133. ]

Similarly, female African American artist, Lois Mailou Jones’ 1938 piece Les Fetiches (fig. 8) engages with a comparable Fang reliquary in a cubist style, as she had also experienced this first-hand when working in Paris. Through this piece, she addressed the fetishization and exoticism that was associated with African culture, which had been seen by white people as a commodity and fashion, adding a new and different aesthetic to the artworks of white Americans and Europeans, who did not understand or acknowledge what appropriating and depicting primitive objects would entail. Jones and Hayden, as well as many other artists in the Harlem Renaissance, including Douglas and Warwick Fuller, reclaimed this use of primitive art. Creating for them and many other African Americans a key link to their cultural past, acknowledging and using the works as a basis for their classical understanding of art and art history, just as Warwick Fuller was doing in the early 20th Century.

Jones also looked at Ethiopia just as Warwick Fuller had, in her 1932 painting The Ascent of Ethiopia (fig. 9). It uses similar tropes as Warwick Fuller’s sculpture Ethiopia Awakening (fig. 1) as it is accepting Ethiopia as the ascent of the African American legacy, as the imagery of the pyramids and ancient Egyptian figures move up towards the skyscrapers – the symbol used by many artists of modernity and presumably the city of New York, where Harlem was located. She is giving African Americans their moment, showing them where they are moving from and what they are moving towards – a modern life, free from the shackles of slavery and a link to their ancestral past, just as Warwick Fuller was representing.

The Harlem Renaissance did provide African American artists with an unprecedented moment. It provided them the ability to reclaim the use of primitivism and redefine how it was used within their artworks, enabling them with the opportunity to get rid of the white gaze and the ideas put on them and their art by white viewers. It also introduced the ideas of the New Negro – the modern African American who was no longer associated with slavery but was free to explore their history and in turn helped the outpouring of new art, of untapped creativity that reappropriated their culture, ideas, lineage - creating art for themselves. It was truly a renaissance, a rebirth of a nation in the new modern society of the northern states of America.

Bibliography

1. Sarah A. Anderson, ‘“The Place to Go”: The 135th Street Branch Library and the Harlem Renaissance’, The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, Vol. 73, No. 4, (Oct., 2003), pp. 383-421.
2. Amy Dempsey, Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), pp. 72-73.
3. David Driskell, Hidden Heritage: The Roots of Black American Painting, Channel 4, 1991.
4. · ‘Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998)’, American Art, Vol. 12, No. 3, (Autumn, 1998), pp. 86-88.
5. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986).
6. Patricia Hills, ‘Cultural Legacies and the Transformation of the Cubist Collage Aesthetic by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and other African-American Artists’, Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 71, (2011), pp. 221-247.
7. Milton Morris James, ‘A Note on American Negro Art’, Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 8, (May 1956), pp. 179-180.
8. Edited by Charles Miers, Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1994).
9. John Ott, ‘Labored Stereotypes’, American Art, Vol. 22, No. 1, (Spring, 2008), pp. 102-115.
10. Sharon F. Patton, African American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
11. Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (London: Hayward Gallery, 1997).
12. George C. Wright, ‘Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America’, The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 1, (Jun. 1990), pp. 253-261.

List of Illustrations

1. Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller Ethiopia Awakening 1914 Bronze, 170.18 x 40.64 x 25.4 cm
2. Aaron Douglas Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction 1934 Goache, with touches of graphite, on illustration board, 152.4 x 353 cm
3. Aaron Douglas Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers 1934 Goache, with touches of graphite, on illustration board, 274.3 x 274.3 cm
4. Aaron Douglas Aspiration 1936 Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
5. Palmer Hayden Fetiche et Fleurs 1926 Oil on canvas
6. Palmer Hayden Nous Quatre a Paris (We Four in Paris) 1935 Watercolour and graphite on paper, 55.2 x 46 cm
7. Paul Cezanne The Card Players 1890-92 Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.9 cm New York, The Metropolitan Museum
8. Lois Mailou Jones Les Fetiches 1938 Oil on linen, 64.7 x 54.0 cm Washington, D.C., Smithsonian American Art Museum
9. Lois Mailou Jones The Ascent of Ethiopia 1932 Oil on canvas, 59.69 x 43.82 cm Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum

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Illustrations

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• Fig 1. Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller, Ethiopia Awakening, 1914.

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• Fig 2. Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934.
• Fig 3. Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers, 1934.

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• Fig 4. Aaron Douglas, Aspiration, 1936.

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• Fig 5. Palmer Hayden, Fetiches et Fleurs, 1926.
• Fig 6. Palmer Hayden, Nous Quatre a Paris, 1935.

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• Fig 7. Paul Cezanne, The Card Players, 1890-92.

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• Fig 8. Lois Mailou Jones, Les Fetiches, 1938.

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• Fig 9. Lois Mailou Jones, The Ascent of Ethiopia, 1932.