Modernisms in the Visual Art of the Harlem Renaissance

This study examines the complex relationship of the visual art associated with the Harlem Renaissance, to notions of "modernism" that were prevalent in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. The meanings of "modern" and "modernism" are historicized in the words of the artists themselves, as well as in the rhetoric of Alain Locke and other leading proponents of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition, the role of language and painting in the attempts of Locke and the artists to reconcile the alleged paradox over modernity and black cultural specificity is investigated. The first chapter examines the various critical definitions that were assigned to modernism during the period of the Harlem Renaissance. First, the distinction between the late twentieth-century, formalist definition of modernism, and the plurality of styles and meanings that were identified as modernism during the period of the Harlem Renaissance, is examined. Then the influence of early twentieth-century formalism, specifically in the writings of the English critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, on the artists and patrons associated with the Harlem Renaissance is examined. The association of modernism with the "new," or the "up-to-date," is traced in the artwork and writing of the period. Then the use of primitivism by the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and the complex relationship of modernist primitivism to the establishment of a new identity for the American Negro artist, is examined. In Chapter 2, the role of modernism in the construction of a paradigm for the modern Negro artist is investigated through the art, and the words, of the painter Aaron Douglas. The complexity of Douglas's conception of himself as an American and a Negro artist is analyzed in the context of definitions of "race" that were accepted by his white and black contemporaries, and in relation to the various definitions of modernist practice that were studied and adopted by Douglas and other Harlem Renaissance artists. Alain Locke, as well as Fritz Winold Reiss and Albert Barnes, are shown to have significantly influenced Douglas's ideas about modernism and modernist primitivism. Through the work of Aaron Douglas, this chapter demonstrates that there was a plurality of accepted definitions of modernism, or that there were many different modernisms, in the visual art of this period. Finally, Chapter 3 surveys the significant art historical scholarship concerning the visual art associated with the Harlem Renaissance over the past eighty years, to reveal the central role that changing definitions of modernism, and notions of black cultural specificity, have played in the development of a paradigm of modernist formalism in American art that excluded the modernisms of Harlem Renaissance artistic practice. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that, just as predominantly formal readings of American modernist art have tended to obscure underlying meanings of its various modernisms, so too have largely formalist interpretations of the art associated with the Harlem Renaissance effectively masked its subtle and complex relationship to other contemporary American styles that were considered to be modernist during the 1920s and 1930s.