The Flat Plane, the Jagged Edge: Aaron Douglas's Musical Art

My subject today is Aaron Douglas and music—the flat plane and the jagged edge. I will survey Douglas's theorization of the relationship between music and visual art, and explore how it plays out in his use of concentric circles to structure his compositions. Zooming in, I will consider Douglas's aesthetic of smooth flatness and jagged texturation alongside that of his musical contemporary, Duke Ellington. As I make my case about Douglas, I will also reflect on one of Douglas's sons in the realm of music-inflected visual art—an important inheritor of the flat plane and jagged edge—Romare Bearden.

By way of preface, I want to urge that we interdisciplinary scholars of art campaign to return art history—which somehow has been defined outside the scope of the "back to basics" thrust of contemporary curricular studies—to the standard liberal arts course list. This campaign should radiate from art history departments as well as its allies, academic units beyond art history as such. As champions of interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship and learning, American studies and African American studies should take the lead in this campaign. These departments and programs typically have embraced literature and history (the starting-place disciplines for American studies) as well as politics, but now that these interdisciplinary fields have come of age, they must become more steadfast in their embrace of what the Greeks called musika: the ancient term signifying not only music but muse-inspired expression in theater and literature, dance and visual art.

This only makes sense for serious study of the American scene. For it is impossible to understand 1920s America without considering Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Katherine Dunham and Loie Fuller, Ernest Hemingway and Jean Toomer, as well as Willard Motley and Aaron Douglas. Douglas and these others should be part of the academy's increasingly broad and variegated conversation on modernism, American and otherwise. This year I'm using an office at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where the librarians report that by far the most requested topic among all readers, regardless of age or background, is the Harlem Renaissance. It is fair to summarize the Harlem Renaissance's political motive as simply-put but sweeping—it was nothing less than, in Langston Hughes's definitive modernist phrase, "to make the world anew." I won't dwell on this sprawling subject today, but surely the continuing Harlem Renaissance, the U.S. black modern movement, has involved visual art, including movies and dance ("African art in motion"),¹ as a central aesthetic/political project.

Concerning this prefatory issue of black art and the academy, how do we as scholars help correct the longstanding inattention to African Americans' work in the field of visual arts? Notwithstanding the general acceptance of Jacob Lawrence, Douglas himself, Romare Bearden, and, more recently, Roy DeCarava and Kara Walker, the nation's galleries and museums have remained stubborn bastions of the white cultural elite. (The recent retrospective of Bearden's work at the National Gallery of Art was that institution's first one-artist show by an African American.) Perhaps the reason for this scandalous cultural lag is that supporting black visual artists requires substantial amounts of money—far more than it costs to buy records, attend concerts, go to movies, or read books. It also involves the sea-change of recognizing forms of black cultural production which are not necessarily experienced as entertainment.²

When it comes to the modern, scholarship across expressive and racial categories is called for: Picasso and Diaghilev, Virginia Woolf and Matisse, Ellison and Bearden, Billie Holiday and Hemingway, Morrison and Max Roach, Zora Neale Hurston and the blues, and—as we'll see—Aaron Douglas and Duke Ellington. Through their art (and sometimes directly, face to face), these artists speak to one another. Such dynamic conversation in the making of the modern is the subject of my presentation today.

My focus, as I have said, is Aaron Douglas and music. What I offer is more meditation than finished article, more improvised hypothesis than thesis...