Modernism, Primitivism, Neo-Primitivism, Harlem Renaissance, Imagining Africa

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Aaron Douglas
Into Bondage (1936)

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Man Ray

Noire et Blanche (1926)

from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Harlem On Our Minds" in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997):

This New Negro movement, which took at least three forms before Alain Locke enshrined it in the Harlem Renaissance in 1925, took its artistic inspiration from citizens across the Atlantic in Europe. First, in the early 1890s, Dvorak declared the spirituals to be America's first authentic contribution to world culture and urged classical composers to draw upon them to create sui generis symphonies. A decade later, Pablo Picasso stumbled across "dusky Manikins" at an ethnographic museum and forever transformed European art, as well as Europe's official appreciation of the art from the African continent. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon--the signature painting in the creation of Cubism--stands as a testament to the shaping influence of African sculpture and to the central role that African art played in the creation of modernism. The Cubist mask of modernism covers a black Bantu face. African art--ugly, primitive, debased in 1900; sublime, complex, valorized by 1910--was transformed so dramatically in the cultural imagination of the West, in such an astonishingly short period, that the potential for the political uses of black art and literature in America could not have escaped the notice of African-American intellectuals, especially Du Bois, himself educated in Europe and cosmopolitan to the core, and Alain Locke, Harvard trained, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1906 and thereafter a student of aesthetics in Germany in the heady years of the modernist explosion. If European modernism was truly mulatto, the argument went, then African-Americans would save themselves politically through the creation of the arts. The Harlem Renaissance, in so many ways, owes its birth to Euro-African modernism in the visual arts. This Renaissance, the second in black history, would fully liberate the Negro--at least its advanced guard. (16-64)

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Archibald J. Motley Jr
Blues 1929
Oil on canvas, 80 x 100.3 cm
Collection of Archie Motley and Valerie Gerrard Browne
© Archie Motley

Archibald J. Motley Jr
(1891-1981)

Archibald J. Motley Jr was one of the first of several artists to concentrate on African American life in his paintings. Even though he never worked or lived in Harlem, his work provided a foundations for much of the work that became identified with the Harlem Renaissance. Motley is best-known for his portraits and genre scenes of Chicago's Black Belt.

"In his painting Blues, Archibald J. Motley Jr. placed this notion of an enticing, performance based black agency into immediate visual action. Set in Parisian 'Black and Tan' club (where a clientele comprised mostly of blacks from South Africa, the Caribbean and the US would fraternize, dance, and listen to the latest black American music), Blues gives form, colour, and meaning to the Harlem Renaissance idea of a part aural, part performative act of black enchantment. Motley's dense composition of cabaret patrons, wine bottles, musicians, instruments, and seemingly disembodied arms and legs all add up to a pictorial gumbo of black creativity: a painted space where musical layering and sexual partnering parallel a fractured, cubistic approach to art and representation. But unlike the emotional and cultural distance to artistic subject matter found in the circa 1920s cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, Motley's Blues is bold in its racial and cultural locus for modernism, and assertive in its aesthetic privileging of black performers."

Paul Gilroy,'Modern Tones',
Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance