In the galleries of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stood simply ft away from a room crammed with massive and sumptuous work by Aaron Douglas, amongst the most celebrated and studied painters in the historical past of 20th-century African-American artwork. Yet it was a small close by nonetheless life — “Cauliflower and Pumpkin” by Lois Mailou Jones — that stopped me in my tracks. Don’t get me mistaken, the Douglas work made my coronary heart race in their very own method. But there was one thing uniquely forceful about the method this quiet portray commanded house in the similar room as Douglas’s heroic illustrations of Black historical past. This unlikely proximity is a reminder that the Harlem Renaissance was many issues without delay, encompassing Douglas’s portrayals of the trials and tribulations endured throughout and after slavery, but in addition a Black feminine artist’s want and freedom to color greens.
Curated by Denise Murrell, the exhibition catches its guests in the throes of this multiplicity. It brings collectively 160 works of artwork, many by well-known artists like Douglas, James Van Der Zee, and Archibald Motley, however an nearly equal quantity are by artists who haven’t obtained due consideration, like Laura Wheeler Waring and William H. Johnson. As the title suggests, its conceit is partially geographic: works like Palmer Hayden’s “Nous Quatre à Paris” (1930) and Nola Hatterman’s portrait “Louis Richard Drenthe” (1930), depicting a Surinamese musician then dwelling in Amsterdam, underline that the Harlem Renaissance was not unique to Harlem, however was a globally networked motion of sprawling self-determination energized by the new modalities of Black subjectivity that emerged in the early and mid-20th century.
But most compelling to me is the method the exhibition offers with this extensive geographic scope alongside an equally extensive and tangled mental scope. The art work on view ripples with the polyphonic debates and heated questioning that gave the motion its texture. How did Black artists need to signify themselves? What, if something, is the duty of Black artists? Is it — as Mailou Jones’s nonetheless life suggests — to their very own inventive freedom? Or is “all art propaganda” with embedded political motivations, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously argued in his 1926 handle “Criteria of Negro Art”? These tense questions, then nascent, shaped the contours of discussions that proceed to hassle the waters of Black inventive and mental work in the present day, as the visibility of “Black art” has led to renewed questions round what the time period means and what its politics are.
From the begin, the exhibition engages with these questions, by means of an introduction to the motion’s main thinkers and writers. It opens with twinned portraits of Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois — each of whom are sometimes named amongst the most essential Harlem Renaissance thinkers. Notably, the portraits have been rendered by the German-born artist Winold Reiss, whose recurring presence in the galleries attests to the multi-national and multi-racial historical past of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke and Du Bois’s photographs faces a vitrine of books penned by authors together with Locke himself, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. This sensitivity to the textual pervades the exhibition, and nearly each gallery comprises related vitrines that testify to the wealthy literary layers of the interval.
Murrell’s curating demonstrates how these ideologies and debates weren’t simply theoretical, however permeated the realities of Black life. For instance a pensive self-portrait by Samuel Joseph Brown (1941) reifies Du Bois’s time period “double-consciousness,” which refers to the concept that Black folks at all times see themselves concurrently by means of two units of eyes: their very own gaze and the exterior, White gaze. The artist is actually doubled as he seems at his mirror reflection, probing his interiority with inquisitive and barely unsettled eyes.
Also foregrounded are the negotiations of class and respectability politics that surfaced in on a regular basis life and in discussions amongst in writers like Hughes, Du Bois, and George Schuyler. For instance, a James Van Der Zee {photograph} of a sublime tea salon at millionaire Madam C.J. Walker’s condo dangle subsequent to Palmer Hayden’s portray “Nous Quatre à Paris,” which as soon as drew ire for what some thought was an embrace of base anti-Black stereotypes — the males on this portray are pictured consuming and enjoying pool, and have exaggeratedly thick lips and extensive noses. In this juxtaposition, we see a conflict in photographs, a fraught contest over how Black folks would signify themselves after centuries of exterior definition. This conflict stays alive and nicely in in the present day’s post-Obama age, when many are nonetheless connected to the aspiration of “Black faces in high places”: we’re nonetheless (sadly) burdened with the query of illustration, and lots of are nonetheless (sadly) anxious about photographs of Blackness that — like Hayden’s — don’t enchantment to respectability politics.
Considerations like these can go away us with a considerably bitter aftertaste in the present day, when many Black artists have catapulted to ranges of visibility, energy, and wealth that might have been unthinkable to the artists on view in the present. It is an thrilling second. Yet, with Black artists arriving at the supposed apex of success and recognition, open critique of work by Black palms can really feel sparse, if not unwelcome. These conversations exist, however we now have grow to be far too beholden to an ethic of “rooting for everybody Black,” as popularized by actress Issa Rae. We have, based on this concept, an excessive amount of to lose for the public, sharp-toothed debates like the ones we see unfolding on this exhibition. Also suspicious is the modern artwork market’s style for figurative portraiture by legibly Black creators; premium costs on “dignified” representations of our our bodies and faces is, for my part, too straightforward an answer to centuries of racist exclusion from the nice artwork milieu. Harlem Renaissance artists and thinkers labored over concepts in order that we might transfer past the similar questions of illustration and respect.
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) by means of July 28. The exhibition was curated by Denise Murrell.