The Blockbuster Exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at The Met
Text and Photographs by Monika Hankova
The Metropolitan Museum presents a long-awaited show entitled The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the first on the subject in New York City since 1987, displaying more than 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, and film, incl. seldom-seen works from special collections and historically Black colleges. The show explores art work by the artists associated with the “New Negro” movement – as the Harlem Renaissance was originally known – which took place in the 1920s and ‘30s when millions of African Americans started to move away from segregated Jim Crow South.
The first gallery, “The Thinkers”, shows portraits of distinguished intellectuals – leading Black writers, performers, and composers – often members of The 306 group. This group was an influential forum named after a building on West 141st Street, where some famous artists had their studios, hosted open houses and gave classes. Visitors included acclaimed poet and novelist Langston Hughes, philosopher Alain Locke, historian and civil right activist W.E. B. Du Bois, and others. L. Hughes, whose powerful, realistic portrait with imaginative details (dated 1925) by German-born American Winold Reiss (1886–1953) is on view in this gallery, embraced jazz and blues as the creative expressions of Black modernity.
Further galleries explore different topics ranging from portraiture, cultural history and philosophy painting, international African diaspora, to activism and beyond. These include “Portraiture and the Modern Black Subject”, “A Language of Artistic Freedom”, “Family and Society,” and others. Scenes showed in “Everyday Life in the New Black Cities” were often set in New York’s Harlem, South Side of Chicago, as well as in San Francisco or Philadelphia. The Harlem Renaissance artists embraced “the urbane demeanor, joyful camaraderie, and vivid styles of the era while also capturing poverty and morally ambiguous behavior across class lines.” On view are for example colorful portraits by Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891–1981), a chronicler of American-African life in Chicago, who often used non-naturalistic colors while depicting different every day scenes of city life, such as in Picnic (1934). His bright portraiture contradicted stereotyped images and aimed to educate whites on the politics of the skin tone. One entire section “The New Negro Artist Abroad: Motley in Paris” is dedicated to his intense, joyful paintings of Parisian cafe scenes, cabarets, and night life scenes. Motley like other Black artists lived for a certain period of time in Europe and described the feeling of greater personal freedom there. Motley spent one year in Paris in 1929 and created there several paintings – scenes of cafe life, dance club scenes, etc. But still, besides his fame and fame of other New Negro artists, his works rarely entered European museum collections.
Similarly, in “Luminaries” and “Nightlife”, the figures portrayed here – mostly performing artists from the worlds of opera, musical cabaret, and film – found fame and stardom in Europe at a time when Black performers in the US faced career restrictions. This gallery also displays works by principal contemporary Black life photographer James Van der Zee (1886–1983) whose extraordinary black-and-white photographs are the most comprehensive documentation of the period. In Nude, Harlem (1923), which is his perhaps most iconic photograph, the artist depicts a private moment of vulnerability in a domestic space. In “Family and Society” gallery, there a few extraordinary paintings, such as Laura Wheeler Waring’s Mother and Daughter (1927) depicting then controversial topics of racially mixed families.“Its very existence was a disruption of the silence on the subject within certain segments of the society.”
The exhibition’s signature image located in “Portraiture and the Modern Black Subject” section is vibrant and powerful Woman in Blue by William Henry Johnson (1901–1970) dated ca. 1943, which was basically found in a store room of the Clark Atlanta University during the preparation of the show, and it is shown besides other distinctive paintings by the same artist, such as Mom and Dad or Street Life, Harlem. Woman in Blue exemplifies Johnson’s signature portrait style, in which a monumental figure is placed within a tightly cropped pictorial space.
The entire show concludes with exquisite multi-panel work Coda: The Block (1970) shown in the very last gallery, a lovely tribute to Harlem by an American artist, author, and songwriter Romare Bearden (1911–1988). The work comprises of six panels of which each presents an aspect of life that resonates with the portrayals of the neighbourhood by Harlem Renaissance artists (for example corner grocery store, children at play, barbershop, etc.).
The mainstream museums and art history publications usually saw the Harlem Renaissance as a marginal rather than a major movement, and this important and comprehensive show not only revisits modernism but also establishes the critical role of the Harlem Renaissance in the history of art. The exhibition curator, Denise Murrell, who hopes for subsequent exhibitions in the near future, asserts: “The Harlem Renaissance should be central to how we think about the modernist period. It should be essential to the way we define and articulate not just African-American identity but American identity.”
“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” on view at The Met through July 28, 2024.