Harlem Silhouettes

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.

This “public” style was only one of several vocabularies used by Mr. Douglas during his career. Tucked into the back corners of the show are landscapes, portraits and city scenes painted in a more realistic and sometimes impressionistic way. Several etchings and drawings, including a wistful print of a young window shopper, reflect a sensitivity to the real world of people and places that is missing from the murals.

Born in Topeka, Kan., Mr. Douglas studied fine arts at the University of Nebraska and, after graduating, taught art at a high school in Kansas City, Mo. He moved to Harlem in 1925, after reading a magazine article on the black cultural mecca, to join young artists interested in celebrating their African heritage.

Writer and philosopher Alain Locke soon invited Mr. Douglas to contribute illustrations to his book, “The New Negro: An Interpretation,” which examined transformations in black culture as a result of the great migration from the South.

By the late 1920s, the artist was creating bold designs for the National Urban League’s journal, Opportunity; and the NAACP’s magazine, Crisis. He created images for poems written by Langston Hughes and a cover for the only issue of Fire!!, a magazine started by Mr. Hughes and others to inflame conservatives. The silhouetted figures and graphic shapes of these illustrations would later be translated into his larger history paintings.

Like the other black artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Mr. Douglas sought alternative expressions to those sanctioned by the white establishment, but his greatest influence came from Europe. Winold Reiss, a German emigre whose work is also represented in the show, introduced him to African art by way of European modernism and became his mentor in New York.

Story Continues →