Review: "Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism," Building Political Context
By: Sid C.
Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series, 1940-41
After over fifty years, the visual art of the Harlem Renaissance has returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, brought to us by curator Denise Murrell, provides an in-depth survey of the aesthetic movement built by Black artists, poets, and political theorists in the United States from 1920 through the mid 1940s.
The show itself is an epic undertaking, occupying the second-largest exhibit space at the Met. Its primary goal is quite simple: Present the visual art of the time period in the context of the intellectual movements that created it. Archibald Motley’s flowing partygoers are presented alongside the words of contemporaneous thinkers, while less-recognized artists like William Henry Johnson are deftly woven into the story of modernism as a global, multiracial movement. To Murrell, the visual artists of the movement are not treated as “forgotten geniuses” but indeed the individuals who helped shape global culture alongside the poets and the musicians of the Jazz Age.
For Marxists, this exhibit presents an incredible opportunity to understand how one generation of thinkers transmitted the changing class structure of their society into cultural production. Indeed, political and social thought are key to Murrell’s storytelling, though as we will see, not as wholly as they need to be to make sure the complete story of the Harlem Renaissance is told. When viewers enter the exhibit, we are greeted not by a survey of the period’s visual art, or a cursory history lesson about the time period covered. Instead, we are presented with an introduction to the major intellectual leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. This, in and of itself, is a refreshing intervention. As the viewer moves through the show, they are given an “intellectual toolkit,” so to speak, or an ideological window into the world these artists sought to describe.
Anchoring this discussion are W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who are thrillingly rendered in pastel by Winold Reiss, a German expatriate who gained renown for his portraits of Harlem in the 1920s. They are presented as thinkers and writers, but with little emphasis on their actual work and their beliefs about art and aesthetics. While faulting the exhibition in this way may appear on the surface to be psuedointellecual quibbling (why should an art exhibit provide more than a cursory overview of these theorists?), understanding the debate between these two men is key to interpreting the art of the movement.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1926, had not yet embraced Marxism as wholly as he would in the next decade. Even so, he was very keen to emphasize the political immediacy that Black artists sought to portray in their work. In an address published in the Crisis late that year, Du Bois stressed that all art was propaganda, and that Black artists must seek to use their abilities for uplift of the entire race. Locke, writing two years later, disagreed: Art that was too overtly propagandistic, he argued, would permanently subsume Black America to an inferior position, or at the very least, stifle individuality.
Almost a hundred years after, this debate seems almost quaint: I am deeply skeptical of the possibility of an “apolitical” Black aesthetic, and even most liberal commentators have come around to believing the same. Similarly, the intervening years between Du Bois’ era and ours have demonstrated that the propagandistic qualities of centuries of Black artworks have not diminished the aesthetic power of their creators. Du Bois, it seems, has won the debate. Nonetheless, thinking deeply about this debate and the Harlem in which it unfolded are key to understanding what world these artists were trying to describe, and how they were trying to transform it.
Both Du Bois and Locke are making an appeal to universality: The former believes in art as a gateway for all people to understand, and then hopefully support, the political and social struggles of Black America, while the latter is appealing to a universal aesthetic sensibility that Black artists deserve the chance to explore. The theme of universality, remarkably enough, is key to understanding the “Transatlantic Modernism” in the exhibition’s title. Denise Murrell presents her subjects in conversation with European Modernist artists, such as Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch, suggesting that the visual artists of Harlem were participating in a global cultural exchange, over which they had some degree of intellectual control. As the Jazz Age birthed new forms of Black American artistic expression, Harlemites found themselves at the center of a rapidly changing cultural world—one in which the talents and contributions of Black artists themselves were rapidly being recognized by the European world.
This increased exposure garnered by a subset of artists may have convinced Locke that true racial equality (or as close to equality as the 1920s liberal mind could conceive) was close at hand. Even more tempting, most assuredly, was the changing economic landscape in which these thinkers and artists were working. A remarkably large section of the exhibition is devoted to portraits produced in the time period. While many were created as humanistic portraits of a newly-urbanized Black working class, others, such as this portrait of socialite Edna Powell Gayle, were commissioned by members of a growing Black bourgeoisie whose economic position allowed for the consumption of European-style finery.
Indeed, much has been written about the Harlem Renaissance itself as a bourgeois intellectual movement: It’s thinkers emerged in a time period in which economic mobility (fostered in part by the geographic mobility of the Great Migration) became a much greater possibility for a certain portion of Black America—if Locke saw Black people around him becoming more and more integrated into the political and economic system of the United States, should it not follow that he could believe the same about Black integration into western aesthetic sensibilities? Locke’s hopes, of course, did not come to pass—Black people continue to constitute a herrenvolk underclass in the American economy, and Black art continues to remain either marginalized or fetishized depending on the political climate. This reality was predicted and described by many Harlem Renaissance movers and shakers, including Du Bois himself, who eventually turned to Marxism and the recognition that capitalism had to be defeated precisely because it survives on the continued superexploitation of Black workers.
This takes me to my final point: the politics of the Harlem Renaissance expanded far beyond the writings of Du Bois and Locke. The swirling ideological maelstrom of the time period, however, was rarely captured elsewhere in the show. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, essentially the forerunner of twentieth-century Pan-Africanism, was only mentioned once in the show, despite its indelible impact on the ideology of Black uplift. Equally absent was the Russian Revolution, which many Harlem Renaissance writers watched with hope and awe as they were pushed towards more radical positions in their own work. As the Palmer Raids tore through Black neighborhoods in 1919 at the dawn of the first Red Scare, Black communists were learning from the triumphs of the Bolsheviks and organizing in cities and towns across the United States. As Charisse Burden-Stelly has noted in her recent Black Scare/Red Scare, the white supremacist mode of governance of the USian state had fomented a popular association between communists and Black radicals of all stripes—pushing both groups together to produce new and dangerous forms of resistance.
The Met’s Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is a must-see experience. It closes on July 28, providing ample time to visit, ideally multiple times. It captures the workings of the minds at the bleeding edge of modernity in a world spinning almost-too-quickly for most to comprehend. Even so, entering the show with knowledge of these political currents can only serve to improve one’s experience, especially as we attempt to parse the shifting tides of our own time. To end, I leave you with a poem from Langston Hughes, who sought to capture his own sense of hope for the future—not one of assimilation into capitalist modernity, but of imagining life outside of it.
Lenin
Lenin walks around the world.
Frontiers cannot bar him.
Neither barracks nor barricades impede.
Nor does barbed wire scar him.
Lenin walks around the world.
Black, brown, and white receive him.
Language is no barrier.
The strangest tongues believe him.
Lenin walks around the world.
The sun sets like a scar.
Between the darkness and the dawn
There rises a red star.
-Langston Hughes