Harlem Silhouettes

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The murals by Aaron Douglas, the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, are studies in contradictions.They celebrate black culture through the noble caricatures of socialist realism rather than through a more personal, heartfelt viewpoint. They combine traditional motifs from African art with the deco modernism favored by capitalist America. They rely on beams of light and pale colors to express dark themes of slavery and struggle.

These conflicting artistic strains are all too evident in a new survey of works by Mr. Douglas (1899-1979) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The nationally touring retrospective — yet another borrowed show at the museum — inflates the artist's aesthetic as highly original and influential.

It is certainly a wide-ranging look at Mr. Douglas and his contemporaries in presenting 91 works, including murals, book illustrations, jewelry, prints, photographs, drawings and a film.

The artist's life turns out to be more interesting than his formulaic paintings. At its best, the show concentrates on Mr. Douglas' relationship to the black writers and intellectuals of the Harlem-centered movement who sought to express a new cultural identity. They tapped Mr. Douglas to promote their agenda of racial dignity and pride through persuasive visual propaganda.

His most striking work, a 1934 mural titled "Aspects of Negro Life," depicts the history of black Americans from Africa through slavery, Reconstruction, Northern migration and the Great Depression.

It was created for a Harlem branch of the New York Public Library under the Public Works of Art Projects, the first relief program for artists sponsored by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

Unfortunately, the mural's four panels are separated and displayed in the far-flung corners of the exhibit, so their impact as a continuous narrative can't be fully appreciated.

This type of flat, allegorical frieze had been used by other artists, from Puvis de Chavannes in 19th-century France to American modernist Stuart Davis, but Mr. Douglas gave it a new twist with his narrative of black history.

Silhouetted figures of African drummers, black laborers and Union infantrymen symbolize the collective rather than the individual. They convey the populist stereotypes of comradeship, struggle and work so familiar from the Depression-era murals by Mexican painter Diego Rivera and the artists employed by Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.

Superimposed over parts of the scenes are concentric circles and radiating angles in graduated colors that fracture the paintings with the art deco flair of the jazz age. The pictures are so decorous and gracefully composed as to anesthetize the viewer to their weighty subjects.