Arguably the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas (1899‱979) employed a style that has been called geometrical symbolism in murals, paintings and illustrations. Combining angular Cubist motifs and a distinctive Art Deco dynamism with traditional African and African American imagery, he evolved a bold new visual vocabulary that reflected both current realities and hopes for a better future.
As preeminent African American art historian David C. Driskell once put it, Douglas’s style was “an intriguing blend of abstract construction with objective perception.” Presenting forceful ideas in a memorable artistic form, Douglas vividly captured the spirit of his time and established a new black aesthetic and utopian vision. Opening doors for African American artists and involving them in a dialogue with Modernism, his radical work had a lasting impact on the history of art.
African American philosopher and visionary Alain Locke called Douglas the “father of black American art.” Indeed, his work clearly influenced such major black artists as Romare Bearden, William H. Johnson, Lois Maillou Jones, Jacob Lawrence and Hale Woodruff.
Nevertheless, Douglas’s role and art have often been overlooked in the years since his death. Today, there is increasing recognition of the quality of his output, the significance of his achievements within the artistic movements of his time and the importance of his teaching legacy.
The revival of national appreciation for this special artist’s oeuvre has culminated in the first nationally touring retrospective of his work, “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist,” on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) through August 3. Organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas (where it opened last September), the exhibition brings together more than 80 paintings, prints, drawings and illustrations. Portraits of Douglas, printing plates, sketchbooks, ephemera and works by contemporaries put the artist’s career in context.
The show was organized by Susan Earle, the Spencer’s curator of European and American art, and coordinated here by SAAM’s senior curator, Virginia Mecklenburg. Together, the exhibition and catalog successfully carry out Earle’s mission “to claim Douglas’s historical significance and rightful place in the history of American art and culture.”
The exhibition examines the artist’s evolution through three places closely related to his career: Kansas, where he grew up; New York, where he took center stage in the Harlem Renaissance, and Nashville, Tenn., where he taught for 29 years. Where portable, his large-scale public murals are shown with accompanying preparatory studies. In situ murals in New York and Nashville are represented in a video. A display of magazine and book illustrations documents Douglas’s ability to combine art and text in creating powerful, socially engaged images.
Born and raised in Topeka, Kan., in 1899, the son of a laborer and housewife, Douglas was known in school as a reader of Dante and Shakespeare and a talented artist. Working as a busboy and dishwasher, he put himself through the University of Nebraska, where his artwork stood out. He became a regular reader of the NAACP’s monthly, The Crisis , edited by W.E.B. Dubois, and the National Urban League’s Opportunity , edited by Charles S. Johnson, progressive journals with creative works by African Americans.
After teaching art briefly in Kansas City, in 1925 he moved to New York City, joining in the creative ferment of Harlem, the cultural capital of black America. Douglas met writer, photographer and patron of black artists Carl Van Vechten, for whom he did book illustrations, and former Howard University philosophy professor Locke, Du Bois and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, an extraordinary flowering of African American art, writing and music. He was greatly influenced by studies with German émigré Winold Reiss, a white painter who specialized in African American subjects.
Douglas did book and magazine illustrations for the NAACP and the National Urban League, and illustrated Locke’s The New Negro , an anthology of historical, political and sociological essays that served as a manifesto of the movement. Locke acquired one of the illustrations, “Rise, Shine for Thy Light Has Come,” and later bequeathed it to Howard University.
Up to this time, African American artists tended to concentrate on creating art that fit in with the work of white artists and, therefore, stood a chance of being accepted by the white art establishment. By contrast, to advance the New Negro movement, Locke urged black artists to draw on their African and American roots to forge a vital new visual aesthetic.
In all, Douglas illustrated 13 books by such acclaimed authors as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. He created some of his most famous easel works for civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse , first in gouache in 1927 and then in oil in 1935. Among the 1935 standouts are “The Creation” and “Noah’s Ark,” which reflect the influence of Egyptian relief carving, Cubism and Art Deco design.
Douglas’s collaboration with writer and fellow Kansan Hughes was particularly close and prolific, including a number of book jackets for texts by Hughes. Displayed in the current exhibition is a striking 1941 pen and ink drawing, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers (for Langston Hughes),” that evokes the profile of the writer. For the cover of Arthur Huff Fauset’s For Freedom: A Biographical Story of the American Negro , 1927, Douglas designed a compelling image of angular, silhouetted black figures, two of them linked with chains of slavery, amid African scenery.
In 1926, he married Alta Mae Sawyer, a school teacher, who often posed for paintings. That same year Douglas created a striking red and black cover for a journal about younger black artists that presented highly stylized profiled and silhouetted figures, including a slit-eyed sphinx, in a manner that melded contemporary Art Deco designs and ancient Egyptian imagery. By this time, bolstered by the support of Locke, Du Bois and others, Douglas had become the “visual tastemaker for black artists” of the Harlem Renaissance, says Driskell.
A one-year fellowship exposed Douglas to the modern European and African art collected by Dr Albert C. Barnes at the Barnes Foundation, and he spent another year studying in Paris.
Starting in the early 1930s, Douglas executed a number of Modernist mural commissions for such sites as Bennett College for Women, Fisk University, Harlem YMCA and Chicago’s Sherman Hotel.
Active politically, he joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s, and as head of the Harlem Artists Guild, he demanded more black participation in the Works Project Administration’s (WPA) art program. “Scottsboro Boys,” circa 1935, a stark pastel that Earle calls Douglas’s “most important portrait,” depicts two of the nine young black men who were falsely accused of rape and sentenced to death in a 1931 Alabama trial that aroused international condemnation and was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court. Echoing compositions by Reiss, “Douglas focused on the essential humanity and dignity of his subjects,” says curator Wendy Wicks Reaves of the National Portrait Gallery, which owns the drawing.
Douglas celebrated the role of black slaves and other African Americans in building American cities in “The Founding of Chicago,” a 1933‴0 gouache. It features a monochromatic, stylized, silhouetted depiction of Chicago’s founder, coonskin cap-wearing, shovel-toting Haitian-born Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, flanked by an enchained mother and freed baby, contemplating the future urban vista of the Windy City.
In 1934, commissioned by an agency under the WPA, Douglas painted an important four-panel cycle, “Aspects of Negro Life,” for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Characterized by his signature silhouetted figures arranged in geometric compositions and a muted palette, the artist’s enormous mural begins with images of life in Africa and continues across the Atlantic to vignettes of slavery, lynchings and urbanization in the United States. “From Slavery Through Reconstruction,” measuring 57¾ by 138¼ inches, combines in a frieze format an array of muted, shadowy figures symbolizing struggle, harsh reality, emancipation, optimism and hope for a brighter future.
Douglas painted four boldly modern murals, commissioned by the Harmon Foundation, for the Hall of Negro Life at the largely segregated 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Evoking the epic saga of African Americans, the murals chronicled the progression of blacks from enslavement in Africa to hopeful Americans.
One of the two paintings still intact, “Into Bondage,” is a compelling depiction of silhouetted, enchained African figures traversing a lush African landscape headed for slave ships that will carry them to the New World. The stalwart poses of the central man and woman, heads uplifted and manacled hands parted, suggests that “their bondage will not last for eternity,” says Howard University professor Rene Ater in her catalog essay.
“Aspiration,” which also measures 60 by 60 inches, employs an array of blues, violets and pinks, with yellow accents, to showcase three stalwart African American figures representing architecture, science and arts and literature, respectively, gazing toward a distant factory surmounted by skyscrapers in a city on a hill.
When numerous white visitors, impressed by the quality of the murals, questioned whether a black man had actually painted them, organizers installed a sign reading: “These murals were painted by Aaron Douglas, a Negro artist of New York City.”
Douglas’s resilience in the face of racial prejudice typified his career. As Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, puts it, “Douglas’s native optimism and sense of himself and his art helped ensure that he was decidedly not ‘torn asunder’ despite societal racism.”
In the late 1930s, Douglas began a three-decade career in the art department at historically black Fisk University in Nashville. In addition to teaching, traveling to the Caribbean and Mexico and earning a master’s degree from Columbia Teacher’s College, he began painting works for Fisk buildings. “Building More Stately Mansions,” 1944, for Fisk’s International Students Center, reflects his confidence that African Americans can learn from the past “to carry us on to new and higher levels of achievement.”
In the 1960s, he repainted portions of the expansive murals depicting the saga of African Americans that he had created for the Fisk library 35 years earlier. In 2003, the murals were extensively restored.
In the last decades of his life, Douglas traveled widely, giving lectures and contributing artworks to exhibitions all over the country. A number of etchings and prints emanated from a summer studying printmaking at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, including “Window Shopper,” circa 1955, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Soon after his retirement from teaching, Douglas reprised an earlier motif, including silhouetted yet racially identifiable figures, from his “Aspects of Negro Life” murals of 1934, for the governor’s residence in Madison, Wis. In “Song of the Towers,” 1966, as the artist described it, “an ever-expanding series of concentric circles&re powered by the Negro’s love of freedom as represented by the Statue of Liberty and his devotion to the arts as represented by the uplifted horn.”
Douglas’s star has risen with the resurgence of interest in African American art, and the growing recognition of the key role he played in introducing Modernist motifs to black artists.
As Driskell observes, “Aaron Douglas was&⁴he artist to whom the architects of the Harlem Renaissance looked for new aesthetic directions in African American art.” The current exhibition is a fitting tribute to the breadth, vigor, innovation, inspiring example and remarkable artistic impulses of this singular figure in American art history.
After closing in Washington, the exhibition travels to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, August 30⁎ovember 30.
The accompanying, 253-page catalog is edited by curator Earle and it features perceptive essays by Ater, Conwill, Driskell and Richard J. Powell. Published by Yale University Press in association with the Spencer Museum of Art, it is priced at $45.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is at Ninth and G Streets NW. For information, www.americanart.si.edu or 202-633-7970.
