With the “gems” of black groups, the Harlem Renaissance is making a comeback

How do you measure the United States in the twentieth century without Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington?

You wouldn't dream of it. The writers, poets, singers, and musicians of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which centered around the New York borough from 1919 to the end of the 1930s, loom large in the American cultural imagination. It was a period in which “Harlem became a symbol of the global black city,” as novelist Ishmael Reed described it.

But what about painters? laura wheeler waring, Charles Henry Alston And Malvin Gray Johnson? Or the sculptor Richmond Barthet? Hardly household names. And while other visual artists—Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr., and Augusta Savage—have long been celebrated, their contributions have until recently often been treated as a side road, separate from the rest of European and American modernism.

An ambitious new exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” The exhibition opening on February 25 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hopes to change our view of the time when Harlem, stimulated by the arrival of thousands of African Americans via the Great Migration, flourished as a creative capital.

“When I was a student, none of the 20th-century art survey courses I took included the Harlem Renaissance,” said Denise Morrell, the exhibition’s curator. “This was the first moment in which black artists depicted all aspects of the new, modern city life taking shape in the 1920s through the 1940s. They were very cosmopolitan, spending long periods of time in Europe and engaging in avant-garde aesthetics. They were in the middle of all these trends.” intersecting, not as observers but as participants.

After years of being subjected to racial stereotypes, black artists were able to tell their own stories, Morrell said. “They were trying to define, express themselves, express their own sense of who they saw themselves as and who they were becoming.”

Morrell, who earned his Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University after more than 20 years working in finance, she joined the Met in 2020. She now takes on the challenge set by Alain Locke, the pioneering critic during the Harlem Renaissance whose essay “The New Negro” became “The year 1925 is a touchstone for black aesthetics. Locke encouraged artists to draw on African art, not in the way European artists did, as a form of primitivism, but as an ancestral tradition. At the same time, he insisted on the necessity of working in dialogue with European modernists and showing their works side by side.

The Met exhibition will include about 160 paintings, sculptures and photographs, as well as books, posters, films and ephemera. Among these will be works by a handful of European modernist painters – among them Kees van Dongen, Henri Matisse, and Edvard Munch – who were in dialogue with the artists, writers, and musicians of the Harlem era. This move is intended to confirm Morell's hypothesis that this was indeed a transatlantic movement.

'Stupid and astounding racism'

This is the second time the museum has held an exhibition about Harlem. The first was in 1969. “Harlem on My Mind” was the brainchild of Thomas Hoving, the new director at the Metropolitan Museum, who was keen to bring diverse audiences to the institution, and an independent curator, Alun Schöner, who had a reputation for media presentations New multiplayer on the history of New York City.

Although the museum collected and displayed African art, it never addressed the subject of African American culture. So it was a surprise to black artists, curators, and community leaders to discover that “Harlem on My Mind” did not include a single painting or sculpture by an African American artist. Instead, Schöner relied on documentary photography, text, sound, and other immersive strategies to convey the vitality of Harlem and its people.

The outcry was immediate: several artists, including Penny Andrews, Camille Billups and Cliff Joseph, formed the group Black Emergency Cultural Alliance. They picketed the museum every day, eventually drawing the attention of local news crews.

Morrell let out a sigh of relief when asked about the offer. “I wasn't hired by the Met to do a corrective show to go beyond 'Harlem on My Mind,'” she said firmly. “When you realize what the people behind this show were actually saying — 'Well, there was no fine arts in Harlem, so we don't have to “Include any artists” – you can see the astonishing and ignorant racism in this endeavor, and that is the historical context that I think we absolutely have to address.

One of the bright spots in “Harlem on My Mind,” according to Morrell, is the presence of the work of photographer James van der Zee (1886-1983), who chronicled Harlem life during his long and prolific career. In 2021, the museum partnered with the Studio Museum in Haarlem and van der Zee's widow to create an archive of his work, including 20,000 prints. Morell's exhibition will include some works that have never been shown before. (The Met show comes more than 35 years after the Studio Museum show Special exhibition 1987 On the art of the Harlem Renaissance.)

A legacy built by black institutions

Despite the lessons of “Harlem on My Mind,” the Metropolitan Museum did not prioritize collecting the work of African American artists until relatively recently. Only 21 pieces in the upcoming exhibition are from the Met's collection, along with Van Der Zee's photographic collection.

“We have a spotty group in terms of African-American painting and sculpture, like everyone else involved in political work,” Morrell said, using the acronym for “predominantly white institutions.” To look at the movement in depth, the Metropolitan Museum turned to loans from a handful of collectors and museums who formed a rich repository of works by early twentieth-century black modernists, including Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture In Manhattan and Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans In the savannah. (The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., which also loaned works to the Metropolitan Museum, had received donations from the Harmon Foundation in the 1960s.)

More importantly, it meant diving into the holdings of a group of historically black colleges and universities that had been getting business from the beginning: Fisk University, Howard University, Clark Atlanta University, and Hampton University.

Because many museums at historically black undergraduate colleges did not have the financial resources or staff to display their collections online, Morrell traveled to each campus in person to understand the full scope of their holdings. Katherine Cooney Ali, associate executive director of the Howard University Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., which lent six of the pictures, said she was relieved that well-resourced institutions — including the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mellon and Ford Foundations — “are seeing it.” That there is a need to preserve these collections, these assets, these cultural influences, at historically black colleges and universities because they are gems.”

The family was reunited, and the artist was rediscovered

Some of these gems were hidden in the attics and basements of the artists' families.

Roberta Graves has been on a years-long mission to interest museums and curators in her great-aunt's work. Laura Wheeler Waringwho studied in Philadelphia and Paris and made a name painting elegant portraits of the black bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia beginning in the 1920s.

Graves, who curated about 30 of Waring's paintings, hundreds of watercolors and her archive, had been trying to get attention for years — but to no avail, she said in a phone interview.

In 2014, Graves referred to a representative of Woodmere Art Museum In Philadelphia, she visited the archives and suggested that to avoid the headache of trying to find a home for work, “it might be better for the family to burn” their Waring possessions. (The museum told the New York Times that it decided not to continue talking about the works in question, but that it would never diminish the artist's legacy.) Even the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Waring's alma mater, seemed particularly enthusiastic at the time.

Graves was so determined that she teamed up with Waring's other niece, Madeleine Murphy-Rapp. The two families – the Warings and the Wellers – were involved in a legal battle over the artist's ownership, and relations became strained. This was ancient history, to Greaves. “I said, ‘Together we are a much stronger force.'”

Rapp also found that recognizing Waring's contributions was an uphill battle. “I went after museum curators, I went after museum presidents,” she said in a phone interview. “I consider it a responsibility.”

Just before the pandemic shutdown, they reached out to Morrell, who included Waring's work in “Presentation of modernity”, her highly acclaimed exhibition at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery in 2018.

When the three women finally met in Rapp's living room in Chicago to discuss plans for the Met show, there was celebratory dancing, Rapp recalls. The exhibition will now include nine works by Waring, including five paintings loaned by Graves and Raab.

Morrell and her colleagues realized that while some loans — such as Aaron Douglas's 1934 mural “From Slavery to Reconstruction,” part of his “Aspects of Negro Life” series, which is typically mounted high on the wall at the Schomburg Center — only needed a surface basic. cleaning, others require extensive restoration. To stabilize these works, Metropolitan University relied on its team of seasoned conservators, as well as museums across the country and independent experts.

I met Isabelle Duvernoy and Sean Degny-Bair in the Metropolitan Museum's Conservation Laboratory on the third floor mezzanine. They showed me a circa 1922 portrait by Archibald Motley Jr. of his father, loaned by the artist's family. The picture is very dark, almost depressing – unlike the crowded scenes of the social Jazz Age for which Motley became famous. The older man, elegantly dressed, sits in an armchair, a book in his hand, a painting of a racing scene behind his head, and an Asian porcelain figurine tucked along the edge of the canvas. It reflects the respect in which his father was held in his community more than his actual power – Motley Sr. was a porter in Pullman. Duvernois and Digny Père were surprised to learn that the tone, which they first attributed to old varnish, was entirely intended on the part of the painter. “When it's well lit, it doesn't look dark; it's buzzing,” Digny Bear said.

“It's made like an old painting,” Duvernoy added.

In the conservation lab, Waring's 1930 painting “Girl in a Green Hat,” on loan from Howard University, yielded the biggest surprise: “We saw an unusual passage in the background, so we did some infrared and X-ray photography.” He said. There was a second painting underneath – a picture of two little girls sitting side by side.

Morrell expects this type of restoration work to continue long after the exhibition ends. “We have the new wing,” she said, referring to the planned exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Tang Wing, scheduled to open in 2029, at an estimated cost of $500 million.

“We want to have a very large presence at the Harlem Renaissance when it reopens,” she said. “We will make acquisitions, and it will be an ongoing project.”

It's hard not to share Morrell's enthusiasm for the upcoming show, and its ability to redirect the view of an era that scholars think they know. “It is a celebration of that period, a re-presentation of that period, a new introduction for people of a certain generation and from a certain art-historical point of view,” the curator said.

If she is right, students of future generations will never take survey courses on art history that fail to include the Harlem Renaissance. Morrell said she is also optimistic that showcasing works from HBCU collections “will attract new support that will go directly to those museums, so they can build their infrastructure and show more of what they have.”

“There is no reason why Fisk or Hampton, with their wonderful museums, could not put on a show of this size, if only they had the resources,” she said.