Paint that Thing! Aaron Douglas's Call to Modernism

In the Preface to the 1999 book The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935, a disclaimer is briefly put forward to explain why the art of the Harlem Renaissance and, specifically, the works of painter Aaron Douglas, are not included in that study. I won't reiterate all the reasons, but it is worth repeating two points made at the very end of the accompanying endnotes for this disavowal. The first rationale is that "the newest scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance" is less about "individual figures" and more about "racial interactions and crossovers between black and white communities in the 1920s in both Paris and New York." This observation is followed by how future scholarship "needs to think more about how the European fascination with black American life enhanced self-understanding and self-picturing in Harlem.…" In other words, a more pressing charge over a critical focus on Douglas and other Harlem Renaissance artists (in this study's findings) might entail the role that their Euro-American counterparts played in helping to shape black identity.¹

In another survey, Art Since 1900: Modernism/Antimodernism/Postmodernism (2004), none of the reticence of the aforementioned study is present, and Aaron Douglas figures in this text as the creator of "an original modern black art." In the book's description of one of Douglas's signature works, recognition of his harnessing of "the American Precisionists' sharp angles and exuberance for the industrial landscape" for the purposes of "expressing black pride and history" situates Douglas within the same modernist impulses explored in The Great American Thing, but without apology or foregrounding him within the larger Euro-American visual art project. While it could be argued that Art Since 1900, with its broader European focus and privileging of transatlantic art theories realizes the proposals concerning future Harlem Renaissance scholarship as set forth in The Great American Thing, Art Since 1900's willingness to carefully recap previous Harlem Renaissance scholarship and highlight important artists like Douglas, arguably, sets this book apart in terms of a more inclusive and accurate art history.²

Rather than pitting these two views of Aaron Douglas against one another, I see an opportunity to expand upon both and build a sustainable argument for Aaron Douglas's suitability, if not his centrality, to an early twentieth century, American modernist enterprise in art. However, unlike the standard narratives of modernism which are eternally moored in a Euro-American axis of non-illusionism, cubistic fracture, and declarations of artistic independence, I want to further trouble these already turbulent waters with a decidedly African-American vortex of ideas and sensations. Aaron Douglas was completely aligned with these cultural rumblings, and through his work, we can trace his evolving vision of an art that, not unlike the other moderns discussed in assorted art history texts, bonds twentieth century visuality with the particular states of mind, body and spirit that marked many women and men of that era.

This will be done in two ways. First, by examining the circa 1920s and 1930s equation of modernity equaling blackness.³ I use Aaron Douglas's art as a template for a certain kind of fascination with black American life. But rather than locating this intrigue within the simplistic framework of a cross-racial voyeurism, I want to broaden and deepen our sense of this interest, largely through a comparison of the "race films" of director Dudley Murphy with Aaron Douglas's work. I hope to demonstrate that this vogue "for all things Negro" frequently operated on a subterranean level: a psychological plane that veers from a social realist model and, instead, enters an impressionistic purview (which, in its most spectacular form, employs the medium of cinema to visualize this conceptual break).⁴

Secondly, I want to argue for a shift in understanding the American Negro through the lens of urbanity and a kind of hybrid, part organic, part architectonic paradigm. I want to revisit the love affair among jazz age visual artists with tall buildings and urbanity, but propose that Aaron Douglas was especially implicated in making city...