African American Art and Critical Discourse Between World Wars

[F]or African American artists, their struggle for inclusion has often been met with various strategies to justify their continuing marginalization.

Lowery Sims

The lovely thing about art criticism, perhaps its only redeeming virtue and its best shot at historical transcendence, is that it offers lubricated penetration of the unconscious of the cultural mainstream, of the mechanisms that produce, perpetuate, and render invisible the maintenance of privilege.

Catherine Lord

In The New Negro, his celebrated anthology published in 1925, cultural critic and philosopher Alain Locke marshalled impressive evidence that America was on the threshold of a black artistic coming of age. ¹ With the subsequent emergence of an African American cultural intelligentsia, and the flurry of artistic activity we have come to know as the Harlem Renaissance, it seemed an opportune moment to consider the possibility that a characteristically “Negro” art had developed in America and to speculate on its contribution (past, present, future) to the formation of national culture. During the interwar decades, this emphasis on racial distinctiveness created an audience for visual art made by Americans of African descent. However, as an invention of the 1920s, the category “American Negro artist” soon found itself suspended between the rhetoric of cultural nationalism and the reality of a segregated society as yet ill-equipped to fulfill its democratic promise.

Within the black community during these years, lively exchanges on the nature of black creativity were consistently framed in terms of a dynamic interaction of race and nationality. But critics writing for mainstream publications underscored the separateness of “Negro art” from the over-arching category “American art.” As exposure to so-called “Negro art” grew, alongside it there emerged a set of critical constructs, rooted in the discourse of racial difference, that collectively functioned to isolate black artistic production from mainstream cultural practice. This article will argue that the critical reception of African American artists during the interwar decades created a foundation for what Charles Gaines has called the “theater of refusal,” a discursive space wherein the marginalization of black artists is enforced through art criticism. As Gaines suggests, African American art understood largely in terms of constructs of racial identity remains fairly resistant to alternate narratives and models of historical analysis, resulting in a critical practice that “punishes the work of black artists by making it immune to history and by immunizing history against it.” ²

I

The artistic production of the “New Negro,” as described by Locke, sought both to affirm a positive racial identity and to claim a place for black artists in American culture. African American writers such as Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the creation of great art was a mark of racial maturity; they proposed that the black population would gain greater respect because of the demonstrated talent of its artists. In its headier moments, the leaders of this so-called Negro or Harlem Renaissance believed in the capacity of artistic expression to alter deeply ingrained assumptions of black inferiority and eliminate prejudice, a phenomenon scholar David Levering Lewis has referred to subsequently as “civil rights by copyright.” ³

Paralleling the Harlem Renaissance and its aftermath was the forecast of a renaissance on a national level that would eventuate in the creation of an authentic American art. Apologists for the Harlem Renaissance and the American Renaissance alike called for the development of unique artistic idioms that would reflect specific cultural identities. In the context of both movements, the interwar decades were characterized repeatedly as periods plagued by confusion and uncertainty as American artists struggled towards mature expression. Claims were made on both fronts for the eventual emergence of a coherent culture that would embody individual expression as well as collective racial/national identity. ⁴

Historians of the Harlem Renaissance have long recognized the interdependence of these respective phenomena. For example, Nathan Huggins, in his seminal history of the Harlem Renaissance, understood the creative dilemma of the African American as a variation on the larger problem of American creativity. ⁵ At the root of intense cultural self-consciousness, Huggins argued, both in the...