By Stephen May
NEW YORK CITY — Archibald J. Motley (1891–1981), a leading figure in the Chicago version of the Harlem Renaissance, was a creative, independent painter of national importance. A complex and diverse artist, he stood at the crossroads of the central movements in Twentieth Century American figurative painting.
Through sensitive portraits, imaginative renderings of African tribal myths, Southern landscapes and his best-known works, genre scenes that convey the lively social life of Chicago’s Bronzeville during the Jazz Age and beyond, he sought to communicate the universality of the African American experience.
In recording everyday life in Bronzeville, Motley was profoundly influenced by the rhythms, vibrant color and dissonant and melodic harmonies of jazz. Motley’s paintings bring us the dance halls and storefront churches, the streets and social clubs of Chicago’s African American community from the 1920s to the 1940s, a period called the New Negro Movement. In all of his work, Motley utilized a Modernist sense of color and composition in images whose subject and spirit drew on his ethnic heritage.
A welcome, revelatory exhibition, “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through January 17. Organized by the Nasher Museum at Duke University and curated by Duke professor Richard J. Powell, this is the final venue for the show, which has already been seen at four other locations.
“The exhibition,” says Sarah Schroth, director of the Nasher Museum, “pays scholarly and visual attention to the most obvious aspect of Motley’s art: its radical privileging of color, emotional expressionism and atmosphere over naturalism or social reality…. Under Motley’s aegis the various people and places he encountered were transformed into chromatically charged scenes of compositional dynamism, artistic matters imbued with nonillusionistic colors and a part-organic, part manufactured vitality.”
Born in New Orleans, Motley was the grandson of ex-slaves and the son of a Pullman porter who was Roman Catholic and of Creole ancestry. The family soon moved to Chicago, which Motley made his lifelong home. The fact that he grew up in a mixed neighborhood provided him with sources and material for paintings of the rich culture that blacks brought to the urban scene. His art was racially informed but colorfully embellished by having lived as a child in a mixed Chicago neighborhood.
While at the Art School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1914–18, Motley executed highly accomplished figure studies in oil. In their subdued coloring, careful attention to modeling and slightly broken brushwork, they reflect his embrace of the academic training and approach to painting that characterized that conservative institution. As art historian Amy M. Mooney points out in her exhibition catalog essay, Motley “held himself to the technical standards of the National Academy of Art, yet rejected the racism inherent in its aesthetics and policies.”
Motley’s portraits were largely stimulated by his own initiative and interest in painting his sitters as he knew, saw and felt them. One of his early likenesses won the Frances Logan Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Motley achieved a measure of success with numerous portraits of family members and paid models executed in the 1920s and early 1930s. Sensitive and insightful, his likenesses demonstrate his strong feeling for composition and skin tone. Motley executed a series of portraits of racially mixed women in which he emphasized the importance of variety of skin tone, saying that he was “trying to fill the whole gamut” from black to light to those in-between. These likenesses of racially mixed women, says Mooney, “contributed to a broader visual campaign that promoted black women’s self-acceptance, pride of appearance and control over their own physical selves.”
“Mulatress with Figurine and Dutch Seascape” reflects Motley’s sensitivity to skin color, clothing and female accoutrements as well as the influence of his academic training, as do his portraits of his white wife. “Portrait of My Grandmother” is a moving, insightful likeness of a woman Motley clearly loved and admired for her indomitable spirit.
A highlight is “The Octoroon Girl,” an insightful depiction of a fashionably dressed, handsome, strong-willed woman (whose ancestry is one-eighth black) who confidently looks directly at the viewer.
Although technically conventional, “Mending Socks” broke new ground in the dignified, sensitive treatment of his maternal grandmother and won critical favor. The subject is depicted as a pious woman of gentle benevolence surrounded by books and other objects that emphasized the highly sophisticated nature of her culture. A contemporary Washington, D.C., newspaper critic saw in “Mending Socks” a “theme which has universal appeal, a theme essayed by the great masters of the past, Rembrandt, Whistler [and] therefore ambitious. To say that it has been treated in this instance with real dignity means much.” The painting was voted the most popular work in one exhibition.
In 1928, Motley won a Harmon Foundation Gold Medal and had a solo exhibition at the New Gallery in New York City, only the second time a black artist had received such recognition. The first was Henry O. Tanner. The influential foundation sought to use art as a means for promoting social betterment and interracial harmony and to demonstrate “Negro genius.” Respected New York Times critic Edwin Alden Jewell found Motley’s portraits in a traveling Harmon Foundation exhibition “slick, accomplished, highly individual work.”
That same year, a visit to family members in rural Arkansas prompted Motley to try his hand at landscape painting. His Arkansas portraits and genre paintings explore the rural roots of Chicago’s African Americans.
Motley received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929, which he used for a year of study and painting in Paris. So strong was the nightlife theme for Motley that his Parisian vignettes connected in style with those of Chicago, the only difference being that participants in the Parisian works were usually white. An exception was a view of blacks strolling fashionably along the streets and cabarets of the French capital. In perhaps his best-known painting, “Blues,” he captured the languid yet exciting mood of night life among Paris’ expatriate African American and French West Indian community. He had already painted views of Chicago’s cabaret scene, but in “Blues” he found inspiration directly from contemporary jazz, breaking new ground in style and composition.
Returning to Chicago after a yearlong stay in Paris, Motley created paintings and murals for schools and hospitals under the aegis of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. In some murals, he treated history scenes. Others reflected the WPA’s spirit of democratic populism.
Motley looks natty in “Self-Portrait (Myself at Work),” dressed in a smock and beret and wielding a brush and expansive palette smudged with various paint colors. A Neoclassical statuette stands on his worktable and, as a practicing Roman Catholic, a crucifix hangs on the wall. He seems to be working on a depiction of a very light-skinned nude.
Although he did not reside in Chicago’s predominately black Southside, preferring instead to live in a mainly white neighborhood, Motley traveled to Bronzeville, as the Southside was known, to observe the characters of the black inner city that he portrayed in his work. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, he began creating the intensely colored, jazz-inspired paintings of everyday street scenes and club life in Chicago’s African American community that made him one of the nation’s preeminent black artists.
Busy streets at night, men in poolrooms, as in “The Plotters,” and romantic couples dining, dancing and flirting in parks, gardens and night clubs were among his favorite subjects. Painted with an awareness of sociological realities, from relations between the races to the durability of Southern ways in a Northern metropolis, Motley’s Bronzeville images, such as the colorful and animated “Black Belt,” are generally optimistic and charged with the energy of the streets.
Motley’s urban American images are informed by a Modernist aesthetic and animated with the excitement of jazz. He treated such subjects in a broad, simplified, stylized manner distinct from that of his portraits. Some of his most interesting canvases were painted in the mystical glow of evening that enveloped beer joints, massage parlors, churches and social establishments where barbecued and fried chicken were sold.
Standouts over the years include “Holy Rollers,” “Gettin’ Religion” and “Hot Rhythms.” In the latter, the stylized, animated band musicians in the foreground set the tone for the buxom, scantily clad dancers in the background.
During this time, his work was showcased in major national and international exhibitions of black art of the day. This was even though, as an independent spirit, Motley resisted being categorized as a black artist.
During visits to Mexico in the 1950s Motley lightened his palette in response to the bright colors of the landscape and architecture he found there. He returned to portraiture and landscape painting, two genres in which he had not worked for more than two decades. His Mexican work ranges from high-keyed, colorful, small-scale landscapes to large scenes of Mexican peasant life that show the influence of Mexico’s social realists, notably Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. “Another Mexican Baby” and “Roadside Conference” reflect the influence of Rivera and company.
Although he lived and painted in Chicago, Motley was an exemplar of many of the qualities of the Harlem Renaissance artists, notably his predilection for painting with simplicity and directness. As the former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Mary Schmidt Campbell, has observed of the Harlem Renaissance painters, “Their work has the look of something new, something raw and deliberate, a tradition freshly crafted and conceived. If they contributed anything, they contributed the sense that, for the first time, the black artist could take control of the images of black America.”
Motley’s output slowed in the last three decades of his life as he experimented with new styles and manners, including abstraction and allegorical images.
Toward the end of his life, Motley “thought of his art as being an important statement about the American scene, the color line and the pursuit of racial equality in America,” according to preeminent African American art historian David C. Driskell. “In a career that stretched from…1919 to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s,” observes curator Powell, “Motley privileged color, expressionism and atmosphere in his paintings of black America, rendering flesh and brick alike into blazing spectacles, and the beloved community into a hothouse of urban energy and raw, unapologetic reality.”
Published by the Nasher Museum in collaboration with Duke University Press , the 171-page exhibition catalog is generously illustrated and contains useful essays by Driskell, Mooney, Powell and other Motley authorities.
In spite of the fairly widespread knowledge of his work and the critical acclaim it attracted, Motley’s paintings found few buyers during his lifetime. Today, he is recognized as one of the founding figures of Twentieth Century African American art with a track record at auction to match.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is at 99 Gansevoort Street. For information, www.whitney.org or 212-570-3600.
