Denise Murrell, editor: The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - distributed by Yale University Press, 2024)

“The New Negro artistic and literary community … was never either exclusively Black nor American” – Denise Murrell, curator, in her long opening essay, The New Negro Artist and the Modern Black Subject

MET, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from February 25 to July 28, 2024, put on   what they have called a “once-in-a-generation” exhibition: The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, featuring more than 160 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs – the first comprehensive survey of its subject in New York in almost 40 years.

This exhibition catalogue, edited by Denise Murrell, is divided into two parts: essays and plates. Except for photographs, all 133 plates are in color, and the print quality is exceptionally high.

The ten essays, (aside from Murrell’s introductory one), written by American, Caribbean, and European scholars and richly illustrated, are about individual artists (like photographer James Van Der Zee and Black British sculptor Ronald Moody), groups of artists (Harlem and the Dutch Caribbean, Artists from the Antilles in Interwar Paris, and Artists for Victory and the WPA at the Met), or themes (The Boys in the Back Room: Gambling Imagery During the Harlem Renaissance, A Certain Realism: The New in “The New Negro” Portraiture, Queer Harlem, The Harlem Renaissance in Exhibition, and A Political Pageant: The Harlem Renaissance on Parade).  

The New Negro. The Harlem Renaissance’s so-called New Negro was a result of two movements: The return of Black soldiers from the European theater after serving in segregated units during World War I; and The Great Migration from WWI to WWII, when millions of Blacks left the Jim Crow South in search of better opportunities in what Murrell calls “the New Black cities” in especially the North and Midwest, like New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s ‘Bronzeville’.

The concept of a ‘New Negro’ has a long history in African American intellectual life and history. But in terms of the Harlem Renaissance – also known as The New Negro Movement – we associate it with the Rhodes Scholar and professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C.,    Alain Locke (1885-1954). In March 1925 he guest edited Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, a special issue of Survey Graphic that would form the nucleus of The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert and Charles Boni, September, 1925), an anthology of fiction, poetry, essays, drama and art (drawings by Aaron Douglas, a.o.) – a manifesto and a key text of The Harlem Renaissance.   

The anthology included two influential essays by Alain Locke: The New Negro and The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts, the later illustrated by images of African sculptures and masks.

A “spiritual emancipation.” According to Locke, Black migration was not only a move from countryside to (Northern) cities, but from medieval America to modern, with a new vision of opportunity for social and economic freedom and improvement, what he calls a “spiritual emancipation”: “In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is becoming transformed.”

Denise Murrell’s Modern Black Subject is essentially this ‘transformed’ New Negro.  

“Here in Manhattan,” Locke wrote, “is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life.” And New Negro artists, Denise Murrell notes, were as different in terms of visual style, ideology, and choice of subject matter as the diverse and newly race conscious (southern) Black American, Caribbean, and African immigrant population of Harlem, the ‘cultural capital’ of the New Negro movement.  

But despite their differences, these New Negro artists were united in their resistance to prevailing racial stereotypes and in their determination to include the Black artist and the Black subject in the history of art by depicting neglected aspects of modern Black life and culture in a new way.

The “ancestral arts” and Black modernism. Alain Locke had a scholarly and lifelong interest in the “ancestral arts” of Africa, especially African sculptures and masks, that he had first seen as a Rhodes scholar in London. In his travels in Europe, to Berlin and Paris, Locke had observed how painters like Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and others had been inspired by African art. And the ‘New Negro Aesthetic’ promoted by Alain Locke and his Harlem-based followers, would blend elements from African art, Western avant-garde modernism, and Black American folklore.

In May 1919 historian and editor W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) had published a famous editorial in The Crisis, the official organ of NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Returning Soldiers. He wrote: “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” And to DuBois, even the arts should be used in the fight for ‘democracy at home’.

Where Locke had focused on aesthetics, DuBois on social activism, they agreed that the New Negro should ‘speak for himself’ and not let ‘a white jury’ be the judge of the value of New Negro art.

Painting Black history modern. Both The Crisis and its editor, and the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, edited by sociologist Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956), were actively supporting and publishing Harlem Renaissance writers and artists.

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) had begun his career making covers and illustrations for both magazines, and for books like NAACP civil rights leader and poet James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). Between 1935 and 1939 Douglas turned his illustrations into large oil paintings, like The Creation, Noah Built the Ark, Let My People Go and The Judgment Day, in the Black tradition of making stories from the Bible serve Black liberation. 

But it is his monumental murals like Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction (1934), created for the 135^th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) and Building More Stately Mansions (1944), commissioned by Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, that has earned him his reputation as the era’s foremost Black history painter. And it is his signature silhouette style with cut-outs for eyes and mouth, borrowing from Egyptian and West African iconography, that we now associate with Harlem Renaissance art.

A controversy: Luminaries and ‘Harlem Types’. German immigrant Winold Reiss (1886-1953) made original graphic portraits of Harlem Renaissance luminaries like Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, composer and singer Roland Hayes, and poet Langston Hughes.

But the painting Two Public School Teachers (1925) and other portraits of dark-skinned Harlemites, included with other of his sketches of ‘Harlem Types’ in the original edition of The New Negro, got Reiss, and Locke, into trouble with some of the ‘bourgeoisie’ elements of the Harlem community.

One of Reiss’s sitters claimed “a pretty good likeness,” and Locke defended Reiss against the ‘philistines’, but Reiss’s work disappeared from later editions of The New Negro. Even so, in 2018 Jeffrey C. Stewart would use Reiss’s portrait of Locke on the cover of his monumental Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press).

James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), the ‘official chronicler’ of the New Negro’s Harlem, has become one of America’s most celebrated photographers. The MET’s Van Der Zee Archive holds nearly 20.000 photographs, 30.000 negatives, studio equipment, etc., and Murrell has selected more than twenty photographs to illustrate catalogue essays or for inclusion among the catalogue’s plates.

There are street scenes and mortuary photographs, but Van Der Zee is known primarily as a studio photographer with highly composed, explicitly lit portraits of his carefully posed sitters, using props, backdrops, and touch-ups to satisfy the demands of his clientele of Harlem residents, paying customers who had very definite ideas of how they wanted to be portrayed and by whom.

Jazz Age Modernists. On the front and back covers – book and jacket – there are paintings by Laura Wheeler Waring and ‘Jazz Age Modernists’ Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson.

Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891-1981) was uncle to novelist Willard Motley, author of Knock on Any Door, a 1947 bestseller. He grew up in a mixed-race family in a predominantly white neighborhood, but Motley was a frequent visitor to churches, dance halls and gambling dens in Chicago’s Black Belt, and it is genre paintings like Picnic (1934) and Nightlife (1943) – there are similar scenes from his stay in Paris on a 1929 Guggenheim scholarship – that mark him as a Jazz Age Modernist.  

Motley’s “half-Rabelaisian” (Alain Locke) genre paintings of ‘Black joy’ stand in contrast to his equally brilliant but more traditional portraiture, see The Octoroon Girl (1925), Portrait of a Cultured Lady (Edna Powell Gayle), his gallerist, from 1948, and family and self-portraits.

William H. Johnson (1901-1970) is the third painter (after Douglas and Motley) with more than a dozen works shown in the catalogue. His style is as distinctly modern as that of Motley’s.

On this website we have looked briefly at some of the paintings from Denmark and Norway that he painted in the 1930s while living in Kerteminde in Denmark with his Danish wife, textile artist Holcha Krake – see A View Down Akersgate, Oslo (1935) –, influenced by French modernism like that of Chaim Soutine, a painter he admired (see Soutine’s View of Cagnes, ca. 1924-25).

When he returned to the U.S. to paint “his own people” in rural and urban narratives, he changed his style completely. And it is paintings like Street Life, Harlem (ca. 1939-40), Woman in Blue (ca. 1943), Jitterbugs V (ca. 1941-42), Moon Over Harlem (ca. 1943-44, on the race riots in1943), and Mom Alice (1944), influenced in turn by African sculpture, African American folk art, and a comic-strips simplicity, a highly sophisticated ‘primitivism’, that have made his work iconic.  

New Negro portraiture. Paintings of the Modern Black Subject by Black artists are among the highlights of this Harlem Renaissance exhibition. The list is long. Above we have mentioned works by Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and William H. Johnson. Let us take a look at another three:

Charles Henry Alston (1907-1977) has just a single work in the catalogue. It is enough to show his masterclass. By placing his Girl in a Red Dress (1934) as fig. 1 in her introductory essay, Murrell suggests that she is the embodiment of the Modern Black Subject. “Defiantly black, beautiful, and feminine, yet also unsettled, mysterious, and utterly modern,” as art critic Richard J. Powell writes.

Murrell has placed Girl with Pomegranate (ca. 1940) by Philadelphia-based Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948) on the front of the jacket to the exhibition catalogue, thereby reintroducing Waring, “regrettably little known today,” to a new audience. With Girl in Pink Dress (ca. 1927), Girl in Green Cap (1930), and Mother and Daughter (ca. 1927, an engagement with the then controversial topic of mixed-race families), Murrell places Waring as the era’s principal Black female portraitist.

The paintings of the even less well-known Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr. (1907-1994), like Girl in Blue Dress (1936), Mrs. Simmons (ca. 1936), Smoking My Pipe (1934) and the unconventional Self-Portrait (ca. 1941), show him to be a highly accomplished and original watercolorist.

Movement(s): Migration, processions, and marching. Malvin Gray Johnson (1896-1934) is the fourth artist featured on the covers of the exhibition catalogue, with Self-Portrait (1934). His Elks Marching (1934), and the ‘photojournalism’ of James Van Der Zee documenting Marcus Garvey’s UNIA/Universal Negro Improvement Association’s marching in 1924 in support of his Back to Africa-movement, remind us how important parades and marching was to everyday life in Harlem.

The Great Migration – depicted by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) in his famous The Migration series (1940-41): “They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers” – is the first instance of mass movement(s) of Black people. With the ‘Abstract Impressionism’ of Norman Lewis (1909-1979) and his brilliant March on Washington (for Jobs and Freedom, 1965), we move beyond the Harlem Renaissance to the 1950s and the momentous civil rights movement.

“Harlem is Everywhere.” We borrow our subtitle from an essay by literary critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The essays mentioned at the beginning of this article bring us to Holland and the Dutch Caribbean; to the London of Jamaica-born British sculptor Ronald Moody (1900-1984) and his remarkable wooden sculptures like Johanaan (1936) and Dr. Harold A. Moody (1946), his father; to Germaine Casse (1881-1967) and the French Antilles; and to the Paris of Palmer Hayden (1890-1973), a longtime expatriate, and his rarely exhibited Fétiche et Fleurs (1932) situating an African sculpture within a traditional academic still life, another icon of the Harlem Renaissance.

The French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) has a painting in the catalogue from 1917 showing an influence of African masks, and there is even one by Norwegian Edward Munch (1863-1944).

Harlem was everywhere, where American, Caribbean and European artists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lived, sharing an interest in Africa and the Modern Black Subject, exchanging images and ideas to build the first African American-led movement, of a Transatlantic Modernism. 

CODA: Exhibiting Blackness. Bridget R. Cooks, author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), in her essay Harlem Renaissance in Exhibition notes that there have only been three museum surveys of  Harlem Renaissance art since the 1930s, the fist held by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1987.

Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America focused on five artists: the sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence, 1919), painters Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden and William H. Johnson, and photographer James Van Der Zee. 

While critics in 1987 might have been familiar with Harlem Renaissance literature (James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond and Zora Neale Hurston – to mention some of the poets and fiction writers included in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology), a New York Times reviewer wrote: “Of Black art, we knew nothing at all.”

In 1997 and 2018 there were two more museum exhibits of this key moment of African American creativity in literature, the arts, and intellectual life. And recently there have been several catalogues and monographs making the names of major Harlem Renaissance artists more familiar to us today. We can now add The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism to the list.

LOOKING AT THE MET WEBSITE and The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, you will find a link to a YouTube video where curator Denise Murrell guides you on a half-hour tour of all of the exhibition’s 12 galleries, ‘connecting the dots’, so to speak – highly recommended.

On the podcast Harlem Is Everywhere artists and scholars talk about The New Negro, Portraiture & Fashion, Art & Literature, Music & Nightlife, and Art as Activism, discussing key works exhibited.

You can access the booklet with all the large-print exhibition text, reproducing the texts that accompanied each painting, sculpture, drawing, photograph, etc. on the museum walls – many works on loan from the collections of HBCUs/Historically Black Colleges and Universities –, ending with Romare Bearden (1911-1988) and his big six-panel collage The Block (1971), owned by the MET, that he painted in remembrance of the Harlem that he had known back-in-the-day.