33
The Naked and the Nude
A metamorphosis in Locke’s public role began to occur in 1931, putting another spin on the title, “Beauty Instead of Ashes,” his declaration of independence from Du Boisian aesthetics in 1928. In the ashes of the collapse of the Hughes-Hurston-Locke triangle under Mrs. Mason’s patronage lay an exquisite corpse waiting to be reborn—that of a more independent, self-sufficient, self-activating Locke who had been buried for the last four years while he squirmed under Mason’s domination. In basketball language, a man who had depended on a dominant coach and a celebrated team was now going to have to get his own shot, with new, less experienced players. But that would be a blessing, a “saving grace,” as Locke would put it one year later in his retrospective review of a different kind of crash—not the stock market—but the patronage scheme with Mason, Hughes, and soon Hurston.
Another catalyst of metamorphosis had emerged earlier in 1929. The underlying motivation for the Mason patronage scheme had always been desire: Locke’s love of Langston Hughes. As that love withered and began to atrophy in 1929, another infatuation blossomed the same fall that brought the Stock Market Crash to America. Ralph Bunche, newly minted with an MA in government from Harvard, came to teach at Howard University, likely the result of Locke’s maneuvering. Locke had been an unofficial advisor of Howard’s new president, Mordecai Johnson, since 1927 when he rehired Locke and sought his advice on how to recast Howard as a leader in modern higher education. Locke wanted to build a powerhouse social science division, where Locke, uniquely in American higher education, had philosophy housed. Locke always saw philosophy as a science and wanted it to sit atop a social science division staffed with the top Negro scholars from prestigious White universities like Harvard. Bunche had already caused a stir at Harvard, so impressing his professors in government that they offered him a graduate fellowship to stay on campus. But a sixth sense in Bunche told him to come to Howard, the nation’s most powerful Negro university, and join forces with Locke to remake the field of what today is called Black Studies.
For Locke, however, Bunche brought a different kind of grace: the devilishly handsome political scientist enabled Locke to put behind him the love of Langston Hughes and embark upon an intellectual revolution in Locke’s thinking that would move toward a world systems class analysis of the plight of the Negro in the United States. There is no evidence of a romance between Locke and Bunche, but it is clear that Locke was quite taken with the brilliant, slender, and light-skinned young man from Los Angeles who was now a graduate of Harvard. It was not just how Bunche looked—it was that he was a brilliant and supremely well-mannered sophisticate—someone with all of the social intelligence that Locke had without the prickly negative energy that Locke also possessed. Bunche was easy on the eyes and on the social space he glided through so effortlessly that he put everyone else at ease—which is one of the reasons he became one of the most successful diplomats the United States produced in the twentieth century. Whether Locke and Bunche were ever lovers or not, it is clear that they were intimate, close friends, who traveled together, debated often, and worked to each other’s benefit.
Most important, a pattern repeated with Bunche that had occurred with Langston Hughes: a romantic interest or at least an infatuation with an attractive man catalyzed an intellectual transformation for Locke. It had been the love of Hughes, after all, in Europe, that beget the New Negro in Locke’s writing. Similarly, contact with and really learning from Bunche, a very opinionated Marxist political thinker in the early 1930s, began to move Locke off his single-minded focus on race to more recognition of the class and imperialist nature of American oppression. In a sense, Bunche helped Locke return to an earlier formation he had abandoned during much of the 1920s—the Marxist analysis of race contacts and interracial relations he had pioneered in his Howard lectures of 1915 and 1916. Bunche engendered a renaissance of the social scientist in Locke, precisely as Locke began to situate his thinking in the social science division at Howard in the 1930s.
Hired as a professor, and charged with starting a Political Science Department at Howard as part of his job, Bunche was nevertheless relatively poor and after getting married took on additional work as an assistant to Mordecai Johnson, work that Bunche found challenging because of Johnson’s mercurial and bombastic personality—a personality type that Bunche struggled with throughout his long career. Locke too found much to dislike in Johnson, even though Johnson had been the one who had brought him back to Howard. But Johnson represented to Locke and Bunche the vagaries of the old-style Negro leadership, a leadership class that was disproportionately, in their minds, based in the Black church affiliations of those leaders, and the political connections to old-style Washington, where telling jokes to Whites, currying favor, and scooping up money were key parts of the game of Negro-White “liberalism.”
In this context Bunche began to think seriously about what topic he would select for his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, and Locke played an important role. Locke suggested to Bunche that he take an African topic for his dissertation, one aligned with the research Locke had undertaken with Raymond Buell and the Foreign Policy Association. While the final topic came from Buell, the orientation toward Buell and the whole perspective of an African topic came from Locke.1 In those early years of Bunche’s residence as a professor at Howard, Locke mentored him as to how to negotiate his way through the sometimes hostile and intrigue-based academic politics at Howard.2 In Bunche, Locke saw an earlier version of himself, a rebel against the notion that Negro intellectual thought should be confined to the small, the narrow, and the segregated American mindset, which Locke and Bunche saw as being co-constructed by Whites and Blacks in the American context. Africa allowed a way out of petty in-group Negro politics to globalism, a larger and more capacious context in which the calculus of race was changed because globally Black people were more of a majority, but also in need of modernizing intellects such as Locke’s and Bunche’s. A global dissertation opened doors for Bunche that Locke had wanted to open for himself in 1928, but which his limitations as a political scientist kept closed. Now, by putting Bunche in conversation with Buell, Locke achieved a kind of deliverance from the ghosts of his failed Foreign Policy Association paper, by bringing African American eyes, a lived experience of colonialism at home, into the conversation about the future of Africa and global affairs. The point of view of the Black American intellectuals was crucial not only because they were natural diplomats but also because they embodied by heritage and lived experience the discourse of racism.
But the road to approval of Bunche’s final dissertation topic—“French Administration in Togoland and Dahomey”—would be a bumpy one, and Locke would help Bunche traverse it. In a letter to Howard University dean Davis in December 1930 requesting a leave of absence, Bunche stated the leave would be spent conducting research for a doctoral dissertation … “on ‘The League of Nations and the Suppression of Slavery.’ ”3 But the matter was not settled even though Bunche asserted in that letter that the topic had been approved. Some of his advisors at Harvard wanted him to do a dissertation on political activities of Blacks in West Virginia, a relatively narrow topic. Most important, his dissertation director, Professor A. N. Holcombe, favored another topic, a comparative study of race attitudes in Brazil and the United States.4 There was also the implicit problem of a study of slavery in Africa: while the project naturally flowed out of the League of Nations’ demand that under the Mandates System, the colonial powers would suppress slavery in Africa, investigation of such practices might expose Bunche to danger. Most important, Bunche did not want to disappoint Holcombe if the latter was set on having Bunche research Brazilian versus American racial attitudes. But a funny thing happened when Holcombe contacted Edwin Embree, the so-called liberal president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, one of the few foundations that would fund overseas research by a Negro, about the research project. Embree expressed reservations about an “American” doing a comparative study of race attitudes in Brazil and America. According to Holcombe, Embree opined, “The interracial conditions in Brazil are so different from those in this country that I wonder if much can be carried over from the experience in one country to that in the other. As I understand it, there is practically no racial discrimination as among the three bloods that comprise the population: Indian, Negro and Latin. Might there also be some danger that an American student would really be led astray by the position of Negroes in public affairs in Brazil? Indiscreet utterances and reports on the basis of Brazilian experience might really do harm in this country.”5
As Bunche later confessed to Holcombe, Locke had known that the Foundation would not support such a study. “Your letter of February 17 is a very kindly one and has been of inestimable value in aiding me to map out a definitive course … for next year. The statement which you quoted from Mr. Embree’s letter was a distinct surprise and somewhat of a shock to me. His statement is of no little significance in respect to the decision which I have made however. Dr. Locke in particular seems to feel that there is scant possibility of aid from the Rosenwald Fund for the Brazilian study. He thought so before he saw Mr. Embree’s statement and is quite convinced of it now.”6
Eventually, Bunche chose for his dissertation the study of the African Mandates, most likely at Locke’s suggestion. After meeting with Raymond Buell about his thesis topic, also likely upon Locke’s recommendation, Buell refined the topic and gave him a different focus, although still one on the subject of Africa and the Mandates. Rather than try to document the elusive and dangerous practice of slavery under the Mandates, why not do a comparative study of two colonies administered by one nation—France—in Africa to find out if the Mandates proscription to rule in the ex-German colonies under the Mandates was actually better than under traditional colonial rule. When Bunche informed Holcombe of this newly refined African Mandates topic and the dilemma of funding, Holcombe allowed Bunche to choose whichever topic he wished. In July 1931, Bunche received the good news that the Rosenwald Fund had approved financial support for his dissertation research in Africa.
The episode reveals not only Locke’s close advisory relationship with Bunche but also his changing relationship to patronage. From 1924 to 1930, Locke had relied on patrons to finance his numerous projects; by 1931 he was preparing to tap institutional patrons by mastering the complexities and codes necessary to get corporations and non-profit organizations to provide the funds for his projects. While he still relied on Mrs. Mason—and other White women matriarchs—for emotional support and project opportunities, he was shifting funding procurement to institutional networks, governed by men, to garner the money for art and social science knowledge production. Locke adapted to the transformation from individual to institutional support for scholarly and cultural innovation that began before the Great Depression but accelerated during and because of it. As early as 1930, Locke was teaching Bunche how to navigate White institutional patronage, something Locke would soon show himself a master of by mid-decade.
Like the Locke-Hughes relationship, the Locke-Bunche relationship was dialogical. Bunche was a willing and apt student for the lessons Locke had to offer about how to survive in the racial order of American higher education and navigate the world of institutional patronage; but Bunche also taught Locke how to adapt to the 1930s by introducing the older man to the new Black take on class analysis of the Negro problem arising among young Black intellectuals. Indeed, for the next seven years, Locke and Bunche would regularly tussle over the merits of a class-based analysis of the Negro problems versus Locke’s notion that race functioned like class in construction of the modern world. The deeper point was also evident: brilliant young men moved Locke out of his intellectual comfort zones to revise his conceptual frames and advance new ones. Locke’s romantic interest in highly educated young men was a catalyst to move forward intellectually; but the process of intellectual transformation would not be easy for Locke; and it would remain largely clandestine.
That’s because even suggesting the possibility of intimacy in many of Locke’s relationships was explosive. If even the possibility of a romantic relationship between Locke and Bunche had been raised in the mid-twentieth century, it would have crippled Bunche’s future—which included Bunche becoming the chief UN negotiator for the Arab-Israel conflict after World War II. Locke, and certainly Bunche, would understand this and do everything to avoid its consequences. Given this “guilt by association” dynamic, Locke’s pariah status kept him from wielding the kind of power that the married and eminently respectable Ralph Bunche would have in the larger culture.
Despite claiming to friends not to be embarrassed by his homosexuality, Locke and those same friends found numerous occasions to conceal their overwhelming predicament. How were they to transform into neutral public monuments the psychological tensions arising from the fact that they were gay Black intellectuals in love with the male body as something erotic? As much as Locke struggled in the early 1930s to reconcile himself with a dramatic change in the dominant political philosophy, he also struggled with asking young visual artists to be open and revealing about their racial identity while concealing their sexual identities. Given that many of the artists Locke counseled, no less than some of the social scientists he mentored, were either queer or queer-friendly, the question remained for many of them, no less than Locke, how to assert a leadership role in the Black community while indulging in practices that many in that community viewed as disqualifying for its leaders. This explains, perhaps, why Locke remained attached to aesthetics as his main terrain of contestation even in the 1930s: the language of beauty allowed him to shape what many found physically and morally objectionable as uplifting and eternal.
The language of visual beauty helped reconcile two different discourses about the nature of loving men. For example, in his classic study of the nude in art, art critic and historian Kenneth Clark gives us some estimate of what the predicament must have been like. “The English language,” Clark writes, “with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and nude.”7 Nakedness was considered a form of deprivation, of diminishment, an impoverished human object, without clothing, a broken, “embarrassed” body. It was sexual hunger revealed. The nude, on the contrary, was pure, welcome, alive, a work of art to be admired and emulated. How was Locke, the leader of a new Black aesthetic, to lead this community, itself a kind of “embarrassed” body, to see its vulnerabilities, what mainstream American society viewed as moral transgressions, as crucial to the production of art? How could the Black body simultaneously be both naked and nude? Here is where Negro and gay identity coalesced into a problem of how to make the invisible visible and attractive to a wider audience while remaining true to one’s love.
That reconciliation seemed more elusive for Locke as 1931 began. Locke continued to trek to New York to go to Small’s Paradise, a gay community hang-out in Harlem. Inside, with its ornate mirrors, chrome tables, raised and intimate bandstand, Small’s was the perfect environment for Locke and others to do their stealth cruising. But Locke’s protégé and confidant, Professor Richard Long, rejects the idea that Small’s anchored a gay community. “There was no gay community, there was a Black community, and we were in it. We frequented Small’s just like everybody else.”8 What Locke and others found at Small’s, no less than the rest of Harlem, was a welcoming space, where gay Black aesthetics, performativity, even laughter, took and shaped the social mix that was Renaissance Harlem. Since Negro gays had been the lion’s share of contributors to the Negro Renaissance—Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, and others—there was a race celebrity attached to Black gays coming out of the 1920s. Promise of greater respect and inclusion in the Black community may have been part of the reason Locke was, at times, wildly optimistic about the potential of the Negro Renaissance to transform the place of the Negro in American life.
The previously mentioned Sadie T. Alexander, of the Black elite Mossell family of Philadelphia, waited until my formal interview was over, the tape recorder turned off, the questions about Locke’s family’s status—or lack of it—dispensed with, to confide in a hushed but firm voice, “He messed up a lot of young boys.” She said no more, slowly shook her head, and repeated the same mantra, one that must have echoed in her class’s estimation of who Locke was. Very likely she referred to Locke’s relationship with Scholley Pace Alexander, whom Locke was intimate with while the former was an adolescent. Locke’s practice of his homosexuality was viewed as a threat to middle-class standards of appropriate standards of adult behavior. He violated Black Victorian values that she and other Philadelphians held dear. Yet Locke was unapologetic about what he considered love relationships.
Yes—I will plead guilty when the bitter time comes “to corrupting the youth” —but there they are—as Socrates would have said—my spiritual children—Jean Toomer—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Lewis Alexander, Richard Bruce—Donald Hayes—Albert Dunham there they are—can a bad tree bring forth good fruit?9
Socrates, the Greek allusion of homosexual philosopher, allowed for the naked, the “spoiler,” to give birth to the “good fruit” of art, in other words, the nude. Yet Locke must have known of such sentiments as Sadie’s in the Black intellectual communities of Philadelphia and Washington and limited his ability to be a leader of the Black community. Bruce Nugent alluded to the impact that such ostracism had on Locke rather ironically when he stated, “I never understood why Locke was so insecure. He came from the right family.”10 But Nugent knew all too well why such marginalization affected Locke: Nugent had changed his name to Richard Bruce once he became an out gay writer to protect the reputation of his family from censure and derision.
Harlem was not so much a utopia as a hideout where the exiled could behave in ways unacceptable in Black Victorian circles farther south. The punishing winter of 1931 exposed how much Harlem was not a utopia, that Locke’s predictions of its escape from the conditions that rendered other Black communities little more than slums were fanciful, in part, because of the sexual freedom he experienced there. The Great Depression exposed that Harlem was not a quilombo but an economic dependent of the rest of New York, especially White New York. Speakeasies closed; cabaret shuttered; and Whites stopped trekking up to Harlem to kick up their heels, a la Negre, to spend their non-existent weekly checks. Their hungry eyes and surplus capital were gone. Harlem was naked before the rapacious forces of capitalism, as Black unemployment quadrupled and death from cold, hunger, and illness staggered Harlem as it did the rest of America. On his trips there, Locke could see the unemployed all around him. The dimes he habitually handed out to beggars at bus stops hardly seemed adequate now. Those beggars were his friends, former artist protégés, and prospective New Negroes. Had he “messed up a lot of young boys” by making them think they could escape the hellhole of labor marginality by becoming poets instead of bellboys?
Just as Locke felt no compunction about sustaining himself with young lovers, he felt no remorse about his predictions of a new era of freedom in Harlem now that the Depression had dawned. Rather, in his “retrospective review” of the literature of 1930, published the following February, he called the first true year of the Great Depression “This Year of Grace” and portrayed the economic collapse of Harlem and the art movement as an act of providence that would help advance a sustainable renaissance.
The much exploited Negro renaissance was after all a product of the expansive period we are now willing to call the period of inflation and overproduction; perhaps there was much in it that was unsound, and perhaps our aesthetic gods are turning their backs only a little more gracefully than the gods of the market-place. Are we then, in a period of cultural depression, verging on spiritual bankruptcy? Has the afflatus of Negro self-expression died down? Are we outliving the Negro fad? Has the Negro creative artist wandered into the ambush of the professional exploiters? By some signs and symptoms. Yes. But to anticipate my conclusion—“Let us rejoice and be exceedingly glad!” The second and truly sound phase of the cultural development of the Negro in American literature and art cannot begin without a collapse of the boom, a change to more responsible and devoted leadership, a revision of basic values, and along with a penitential purgation of the spirit, a wholesale expulsion of the money-changers from the temple of art.11
Expressed here was the pent-up frustration shared privately with Mrs. Mason for years about the cheap and sexualized sensationalism of late-1920s Negro art. Locke the Arnoldian moralist was ascendant in these remarks. There had been too much nakedness on stage. Where were the classical nudes of true art Locke wanted the Negro to produce in America? Unwilling to call out “money-changers” like Carl Van Vechten or “betrayers” like Wallace Thurman by name, Locke posed the problem as an identity politics: “I think the main fault of the movement thus far has been the lack of any deep realization of what was truly Negro, and what was merely superficially characteristic. It has been assumed that to be a Negro automatically put one in a position to know; and that any deviation on the part of a white writer from the trite stereotypes was a deeply revealing insight. Few indeed they are who know the folk-spirit whose claims they herald and proclaim.”12 Here was the part of Locke that the young radicals hated—his willingness to switch to a Du Boisian language of moral condemnation once the tide turned against the aesthetes and dandies. And that last line would be something that Zora Neale Hurston would have said applied to Locke as much as anyone else.
Locke adopted that language to cover up a sobering reality—Black artistic production had collapsed in the face of the economic depression. There was less “bad art” because there was less “art” overall. Producing less art never produced better art in the long run, at least in the history of the Western civilization he wanted Negroes to emulate. Nevertheless, Locke tried to make the best of it. “It is, therefore, significant that this year has witnessed a waning of creative expression and an increasing trend toward documentation of the Negro subject and objective analysis of the facts.” He tried to utilize the metaphor of tempering to extract a progressive message from the situation. “And with all the improvement of fact and attitude, the true Negro is yet to be discovered and the purest values of the Negro spirit yet to be refined out from the alloys of our present cultural currency.”13 Whatever his pronouncements, the facts of weaker and lesser production came out in the structure of his “retrospective review” for that year, which included more reviews of White-authored books about Negroes and more sociological literature, such as James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan, which Locke enthusiastically reviewed. The reality was that of contraction and not refined expression on the creative side, something that he acknowledged, ironically, with a tepid review of Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter. Despite his involvement in its production, he concluded: “As it is despite immaturity of narrative technique, this novel is one of the high-water marks of the Negro’s self-depiction in prose.”14 Such a line could not have endeared him to Hughes or the other Negro authors who were once his raison d’être. The signal was clear. Locke was pivoting away from being the promoter of Negro literature to being its critic.
But Locke needed a new creative field to plow even as he included more and more social science literature in his reviews. He needed a new arena of aesthetic knowledge while he gradually redefined himself as a social scientist as well as a humanist and fine arts scholar. He found that opportunity in a calling—to advance contemporary art as the most important new terrain on which to turn sexuality into enduring aesthetic form. It came to him, once again, as a calling from a woman, an older White woman, as was usual in his life, but this time, a woman connected to a system of institutional patronage.
In January 1931, Mary Beattie Brady, the director of the Harmon Foundation, asked Locke to contribute an essay to a catalog that would accompany the Foundation’s exhibition of contemporary Negro visual artists that year. Five years earlier the Foundation had started awarding prizes for exemplary achievement in scholarship and social reform by Negroes. This small, privately held and managed foundation had emerged from real-estate tycoon William E. Harmon’s vision of providing opportunities for Negroes to develop Christian morals, habits of thrift, and assimilation of Western civilization. Aside from recognizing existing Negro artists, Harmon Foundation prizes stimulated the production of African American visual art as all manner of artistically inclined Black people sent in material to try and secure the cash prizes, which ranged from $100 to $400. In 1928, the Foundation took the next step and began putting the best art submitted on exhibition at the International House, a social service organization on Riverside Drive in New York. It gained higher visibility for the program when Brady got Alan Bement, a judge, to allow the Foundation to have its 1931 exhibition in the prestigious Art Center on the Upper East Side of New York. This reflected Brady’s desire to become a major player in the Negro art world in New York and her sense that the Foundation’s program would never be taken seriously unless it appeared in a museum-like setting.
While Negro literary activity declined precipitously after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Black visual arts production accelerated, in part because of the Harmon Foundation’s patronage, but also because other institutions, such as the Howard University’s Fine Arts Department and the Harlem Arts Workshop, had nurtured young visual artists who had begun to emerge as the late-blooming flowers, as Locke put them, of the Negro Renaissance. Lois Mailou Jones, a graduate of the School of the Museum of Art in Boston, had won honorable mention at the Harmon Foundation awards exhibition in 1930 for Negro Youth. She had also been recruited the year before by James Herring at Howard to teach painting and design to a new generation of Negro art students. Archibald Motley, whom Locke met in Chicago along with Richmond Barthé, had won a Harmon Foundation prize in 1927; in 1929, he had a one-man show at the Ainslee Galleries in New York. Brady’s invitation to Locke showed that she realized she needed a major Black intellectual to validate the Foundation’s program if it was going to be taken seriously among the broader Negro art world.
Locke had harbored huge aspirations for a visual arts awakening as part of the Negro Renaissance. The visual arts were more conservative than the literary, Locke observed, with the result that painting was slower to move away from the domination of “caucasian idols” than poetry. But the visual arts were crucial to the movement because of the greater power of the visual to change Black self-conceptions of Beauty. Advances were not being made, though, in the 1920s, except through scattered works by European artists. Auguste Mambour, even more than Reiss, fused modernism, especially cubism, with a romantic image of the Black as subject. Mambour’s canvasses throbbed with the allure, dignity, and mystery of the Black subject on its own terms—not as an answer to any White American discourse. Beauty in Blackness could only be achieved by artists detached enough from the White and the Black American discourses to ignore them.
That change in perspective seemed to be evident among younger contemporary Black artists emerging by the early 1930s who were producing a few works of genuine beauty. When Locke attended the Harmon Foundation exhibition held in January 1930, he was stunned by the artists and their recent work. There was Malvin Gray Johnson, whom Locke would later describe as the first true modernist Black painter, turning out gems, like his poignant study, Meditations. Locke liked the bold prints of his Howard University colleague, James Lesesne Wells; but Locke’s most propitious discovery was the darkly handsome William H. Johnson, the most radically modernist artist of this younger generation of Black painters. Johnson channeled Van Gogh, Soutine, and even Picasso in “earthquake” landscapes and disturbingly off-kilter portraits whose underlying forms seemed to be alive and in constant motion. Held up in his Harlem loft for much of 1929 painting feverishly, he had headed back to his native birthplace, Florence, South Carolina, in the fall of 1930. There, he caused a public uproar by erecting an easel outside the local whorehouse and painting the house of ill repute in garishly brown and red colors in the middle of the day. Narrowly avoiding arrest—either for painting the bordello or for being a Negro painter—he came north and spent a few nights at Locke’s apartment.
Most likely the stay did not result in the kind of romantic bliss Locke would have liked. The heterosexual Johnson was on his way back to Denmark and his Danish wife, Hokscha, whom he adored. The focus of this visit was not sexual, but economic. Having produced over a dozen canvases down South, Johnson wanted Locke to act as his agent and sell his work, for which Johnson expected to find a ready market in the wake of his having won the gold medal at the Harmon Foundation exhibition. Locke agreed and hid the small cache of paintings in his apartment. But he must have wondered to whom he was going to sell the wildly expressionistic paintings. It was one thing for bohemian judges in New York to see Johnson’s work as brilliant and quite another to get the bourgeoisie, White or Black, of Washington to put one of these canvases up in their parlors. Fortuitously, Langston Hughes, with whom Locke was still friendly, had stopped by while Johnson was at Locke’s apartment. As a gesture of admiration for Hughes’s accomplishments, Johnson gave Hughes a painting. Suddenly Locke’s apartment at 1326 R Street was beginning to seem like what he always wanted it to be—a crossroads of Black talent who met there, loved one another, and exchanged art and ideas because of him.
Thus, when Brady’s invitation to write the catalog essay came early in 1931, Locke jumped at the chance. Her invitation was really a way to get Locke’s help in curating the exhibition. Locke didn’t mind; he threw himself into contacting and cajoling artists to submit their best work. While chagrined at Motley’s refusal to send work, Locke believed he was too arrogant after he had had a one-man exhibition at a White gallery. Nevertheless, the effort netted some impressive work. Brady granted Locke’s request to include some of the small African sculpture from the now-permanent location of the Harlem Museum of African Art at the 135th Street New York Public Library. That collection helped ground Locke’s argument in the catalog that the contemporary Negro artist was a harbinger of an ancient and spectacular career as a visual artist in Africa, which Locke hoped would experience a rebirth among Black artists in contemporary America. Perhaps most gratifying was Locke’s personal rewards from working with Brady. While more distant emotionally than Mason, Brady was more sophisticated about stroking Locke’s ego. She named one of the prizes the Locke Portrait Prize, given that year to Edwin Harleston for “The Old Servant.” As Locke noted to Brady when he received the catalog and learned of the honor, “I was in ignorance of the beautiful personal surprise tribute which it contained until a few hours ago. Imagine my surprise and pleasure. Really I know nothing that I would rather have had—for recognition so seldom comes so appropriately.” Then, to deflect attention from himself, he added, “Of course, all of us down here [at Howard] are enormously pleased at the prize won by young Wells,” a teacher in the Art Department at Howard.15
The exhibition was critical to Locke publishing the first article on contemporary Negro art in a mainstream art history journal, the American Magazine of Art, that September. The magazine had contacted Locke directly during his work as guest curator of the exhibition because it wanted an article on this “event” of the New York art world by the reigning interpreter of Negro aesthetics. Locke seized on the opportunity not only to cement his reputation as the voice of the Negro visual artist but also to re-narrate American cultural history from what Black people created out of their experience of it.
The American Negro as an artist is completely different from his African prototype. In his homeland, his dominant arts were the decorative and craft arts—sculpture, metal-working, weaving … design, but in America, the emotional arts have been his chief forte … his chief artistic expression music, dance, and folk poetry. Why should this be? There is an historical reason. Slavery not only transplanted the Negro, it cut him off sharply from his cultural roots and his ancestral heritage, and reduced him to a cultural zero by taking away his patterns and substituting the crudest body labor with only the crudest tools. This slavery severed the trunk-nerve of the Negro’s primitive skill and robbed him of his great ancestral gift of manual dexterity. Alexandre Jacovleff, the Russian artist … has well said of Africa—“A continent of beautiful hands.” This fact is really a symbol—the hardships of cotton and rice-field labor, the crudities of the hoe, the axe, and the plow, reduced the typical Negro hand to a gnarled stump.16
Later, Black critics and artists would complain that Locke’s characterization was inaccurate, but what Locke was doing was crafting a compelling mythology.
Locke had to convince a skeptical contemporary visual art audience to see paintings, sculpture, and drawings by Negroes as art. He did it by reversing the typical narrative of modernism: rather than the broken, decentered Western subject, who had entered a “wasteland” in modernity, Locke suggested no modern subject better epitomized the psychological breach with all that he knew, held true, and needed to anchor his identity than the Negro, the former African, the ex-slave. America’s past was the Negro’s “wasteland” and, through an almost alchemical renaissance, a new Black subject had put himself back together and reclaimed a lost facility—the visual arts. However fantastic the story, the evidence was in stunning black-and-white photographs of such appealing portraits as Edwin Harleston’s “The Old Servant” and William H. Johnson’s “Sonny,” but also visualized in the decorative excellence and superb design of James Lesesne Wells’s “The Wanderers” and such other Negro “modernists” as Hale Woodruff and Aaron Douglas.
What separated the New Negro contemporary artists from their White American fellow travelers was that the Negro modernist came bearing a racial gift from the African tradition. Locke’s favorite from the Harmon show received his most loving notice in the article. “Sargent Johnson’s bust Chester is particularly striking; it has the qualities of the African antique and recalls an old Baoule mask. It is a long stretch from an isolated Negro sculptor living and working in California to the classic antiques of bygone Africa, but here it is in the captivating naive bust for even the untutored eye to see.”17 Johnson’s work perfectly exemplified Locke’s renaissance aesthetic—that the New Negro artist was rewriting the contemporary history of modernism by reconnoitering with the past to bring forth a sustainable modernity in American culture. By making a compelling argument for the New Negro visual artist as a racial modernist, Locke also created a market for their work, not only among bourgeois Negroes but also still-liberal-leaning Whites. Getting the American elite to see these objects as high aesthetics was important to getting Negroes seen as artists; but characterizing race as a creative visual space was crucial to creating an uplifting mood for buying and displaying this art.
The downside of the exhibition and the article was that they led nowhere. The Harmon Foundation did not hold an exhibition the next year, and Brady did not offer Locke the opportunity to become a permanent curator of Negro art for the Foundation. As was so often the case throughout his career—whether at the Survey Graphic, Opportunity magazine, with Mason—no one allowed Locke to lead the initiative. Since most of the insiders of the racial improvement organizations knew he was gay, Locke was not respectable enough to front an operation such as the National Urban League, a conservative Black advocacy group. With the Harmon Foundation, Brady reserved for herself the role of director of Negro artists and the coordinator of exhibits. While it was quite likely Brady was a lesbian, it was quite another thing to hire a gay Negro in an all-White Christian benevolent institution. Like other organizations of the 1930s strapped for cash and operating on lean budgets, the Harmon Foundation felt there was little need to employ him full-time when they could obtain his services largely for free.
As 1932 dawned, Alain Locke was watching a literary movement he had helped create wither and die. Wallace Thurman, one of the bright lights of the movement, drank himself to death at the age of thirty-four. Thurman had been able to publish some fiction, but even here, like Locke, he was mostly an expository writer. Some blamed Thurman’s death on his ebony skin color, or rather, his own personal revulsion at it; others on his revulsion at his homosexuality and his impossible desire for permanent cohabitation with a young, blond man; still others on his failure as a writer to live up to the unrealistic expectations he imposed on his work and that of others. But when Locke wrote Mason, whom he still confided in and leaned on, he attributed the movement’s failures to its Black subjects: “Things seem to be at an awful ebb—but of course we drained our own pond long before the great ebb came along. In fact, it is rather a pity that we have the general depression as an alibi. I am challenged with that whenever I criticize the young Negroes who certainly had their chance.”18 Increasingly, despite his seeming cordiality toward Hughes, Cullen, and even Paul Robeson, Locke privately blamed them for not living up to the standards of ideal form he had sought to impose on their work as a critic and supporter.19
One of the remaining bright spots for Locke was Hurston. In the aftermath of the “Mule Bone” debacle, Hurston had disappeared for awhile, as she expressed to Mason, “to find out what I can do.” What she could do was to come up with another play, really an opera, titled The Great Day, which also, promptly, found a company willing to produce it. Mason, though, still controlled the rights to the material Hurston had collected, which served as the story or stories upon which the play was based. Thus, Hurston came back to Mason and Locke to get permission and money to produce the play. Mason assigned Locke to manage Hurston’s play and refused to allow her to use some parts of the material. As the play limped toward its opening in January 1932, Mason’s grip on the production tightened. She rejected changes the director wished to make to the script and sent Locke to view the rehearsals. At one point, she dispatched Locke to Hurston’s house where he delivered Godmother’s “message straight and without emotion. The effect on her was immediate. It was like an electric shock that shook a drunken man out of his stupor. She realizes now the rightness of your vision; I set to work revising the program on her kitchen table, with her peering over my shoulder. It is much improved now and she agrees with the changes.”20 Most likely, given Locke’s good literary taste, the program was sounder after his intervention. In another hour or so, he also wrote the notes for the opera that appeared in the program, which was probably left unfinished for fear it would not meet with Mason’s approval. Here again Locke seemed unaware of the impact of his enormous intervention into Hurston’s work. Eventually, Mason counseled him to stop insisting on additional changes because of the emotional strain on Hurston. Locke’s perfectionism, a tendency toward endless revision, was given free rein because of Mason’s leverage.
This perfectionism also hindered Locke’s ability to become a published creative writer. The critic overwhelmed the voice that wished to sing its own song in poetry, prose, or drama. The literary and artistic training and exposure he had imbibed at Central High, Harvard, Oxford, Berlin, and avocational study among aesthetes on both continents had inculcated in him a higher level of aesthetic criticality than he could achieve creatively in his poetry or prose. Some of the anger he must have felt at that dilemma made its way into his often crushing critical attitude on the work of first-time Black writers. What he could not see was that his weddedness to the ideal form, the nude rather than the naked, made it more difficult for the artists he advised to grow under his tutelage. Locke’s inability to let go as a writer might be connected to his struggle to accept his racial identity, as Mason seemed to suggest. But it also was related to his ambivalence about his own sexuality and his inability to publicly address it or support writers who openly confronted it. Locke could not allow himself to be naked in public.
In private, however, Locke could at times break through. In fragments of abandoned narratives in the papers he preserved and donated to Howard University, some of it is quite stunning in its psychological and sexual daring. “In a moment,” one story narrates, its beginning having been torn away.
It was done—He lay beneath the horse a great lump of mass with the print of the horses shoes on his forehead. Years later he could not understand why he feared to grasp tightly the thing he loved—why he could not picture pleasure without pain—why there was never the complete wedding of the spiritual + mental in the consummation of desire. He had heard his mother say—Yes—the Herndons are coming (dislikes white people)—done for a visit (cannot stand patronage-sulks) they will take the guest room, of course. R. will have to sleep with Herman—not with ___ with his grey-green eyes and yellow freckled body, red brown hair, but with H full of ___ bronze dark brown eyes with brows as heavy and coarse and black as a horse’s mane—with phallus dark + lovely to look upon—he had overheard his sister tell another girl: “It is the most perfect one I’ve ever seen just like a brown dill pickle[.]” [T]oday he has an insatiable appetite for dill pickles (puts salt on grapefruit) (try ____ on it). He was in bed first—H came in turned on the light—” If the light bothers you Rich I’ll undress in the dark.” “No, no, it doesn’t bother me at all (favorite phrases) I’m not sleeping anyway (I’m not hungry).” But he closed his eyes not too tightly (craftiness stealth) H was undressing—He watched him take off every garment.
(Carson’s effusive). He saw his body strong, slim + brown—while the older boy put on his pajamas he was caressing the fine arms of the smooth brown body (faster approach). H is now in bed—he sleeps very fitfully—he slides his legs in sleep over the younger boy is wide awake. He begins to snore. R caresses his thighs—then very stealthily he opened the pajama pants.21
In this writing Locke drew a scene of homoerotic intensity that captured his own stealthy approach to sexuality.
Locke’s postmodernist prose unveils Black desire, one that prefers the Brown body over the White that Thurman and even Bruce Nugent obsessed over in their lives and in their writings. While Locke had White lovers, his story reveals a desire to find in the Black body a kind of home, regardless of his ambivalence about Blackness and Black people. And Locke also longed for a future in which the transgressive act of loving people of whatever race or color would be accepted and even celebrated. But in the 1930s, the act of esteeming the Black body as transcendently desirable was a courageous step made against the various and sundry racial and sexual discourses that made Whiteness the desired object of Black affection. In some respects it is tragic that Locke could not write such prose in books that could see the light of day in the 1930s. Not only would it have cleared a space for him as a creative writer, but it would have cleared a space for the homoerotic imagination to emerge in American literature rooted in the Harvard aesthetes. Locke suppressed that creative voice in favor of the voice of the critic, who would channel the anger of the unfulfilled creative writer into critical reviews of others who also failed to tell the truth about themselves in print, but dared to print something anyway.
That Locke continued to focus his attention on the racial dimensions of his American experience rather than the sexual he explored in private or the class basis that Bunche focused on came in part because the racial experience so painfully constrained Locke’s public life—especially in his attempts to continue his connection with Beauty and the ideal form in art. An incident in 1932 makes the point powerfully. With the decline of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke was increasingly stuck in Washington, D.C., where his increasingly “long and unbroken stay” brought on unbridled “stagnation.” One way out of that stagnation was to go to the theater; but in Washington, that was an impossibility because of segregation. Locke thought he found a way to combine the naked and the nude when he went to see the play Lysistrata, “a successful, ribaldly pictured sex-strike of the Greek women which forces the Athenians and Spartans to make peace and recognize women’s rights.” But here again, it was the racial that structured Locke’s experience of the art. “I had a time seeing it at all. When I got in at Baltimore, I telephoned a student friend, Dr. Bowman, now interning at the Negro hospital there … [and they] took a cab to the Maryland Theatre. The Colored doorman started to open our cab door as we drove up—but on noticing me desisted—my first real intimation of what we were in for. Bowman is fair—I hadnt chosen him for that—but instantly saw that I must use strategy—so I gave him the money for the two tickets.” Once they were inside, having selected the less challenging mezzanine, an usher rushed up and told them to take their tickets to the box office. “Why No answer.” Then, the doorman joined them and encouraged them to get their money back. When the dispute continued, the manager came up and asked if they were “colored. Why certainly—we wouldnt be anything else. That startled him.” When he stated there were “certain restrictions,” Locke challenged him as to what he was going to do about it. In the end, the refusal to be segregated netted them two tickets in the balcony. Although the White couple they were seated next to got up and moved, another came and took their place without self-consciousness or concern. Though Locke criticized this show as well—its “amateur troupe” was not up to the director’s aspirations—and enjoyed the play’s “paganism,” the dominant narrative of his recounting to Mason was “just what an unnatural life being a Negro involves.” Locke was the Black body in the mid-Atlantic states, not the nude.22
A welcome escape from America came that summer of 1932 when Locke went to Europe and told Mason he was taking with him Ralph Bunche, who was going to Geneva to conduct research for his dissertation. Also on the trip was Louis Achille, a French man of color, whom Locke had recruited to teach French at Howard, and Señor Eusebio Fuertes, a young Basque instructor in Spanish at Howard, who, according to Achille, had been “recruited by Dr. Spratlin on one of his trips to Europe.”23 Locke was so taken with Bunche that he confided to Mason that he was thinking of going on to Geneva with Bunche, if Mason thought it the right time (she had told him it was not the right time in 1927). On the way, the two of them spent some time in Paris, where Bunche spent considerable time in the archives of French colonial administration. Achille’s photographs of Locke and Bunche at a Parisian cafe show them engaged in spirited discussions, although with Bunche largely listening to the lecturing Locke. Clearly, Locke as the man who had already traversed the terrain of Geneva and the League of Nations Mandate policy had much to share with the younger man.
Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, and Seńor Eusebio Fuertes at a sidewalk cafe on Place de la Sorbonne, Paris, July 1932. Photograph by Louis T. Achille. Courtesy of Louis T. Achille.
Bunche, Fuertes, and Locke at a sidewalk cafe on Place de la Sorbonne, Paris, July 1932. Photograph by Louis T. Achille. Courtesy of Louis T. Achille.
But there was another aspect to these photographs. Commenting on them in a letter, Achille described Locke’s easy manner as in contrast to the photograph of him mounted in the reading room of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University—in the more formal photograph of Locke at Howard in dark suit and whitening hair. “The look on his face is interested and attentive, quite different from his relaxed smile, like Bunche’s at the Parisian cafe. Unfortunately, this, his best photo, shows only his mask.” But in the second photograph of Bunche reading a paper and Locke looking smilingly at the camera, Locke had dropped “the mask” and sat at ease as the Black dandy in Paris. Achille’s comment, reminiscent of Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” shows Locke could drop the mask and be naked—a Black gay cosmopolitan intellectual at a cafe with Bunche, Achille, and Fuertes—abroad. Bunche’s easy familiarity with Locke also suggests that he was dropping a mask, but also charting his own path with the older man’s support.24 Walking with Locke and Fuentes to his left in another photograph, Bunche is very much himself the Black dandy abroad, wearing his cocked white hat at an angle that is almost pimpish.
Such photographs show that Bunche was both with Locke and independent of him, on close terms and yet his own man. Bunche would not falter as Locke had five years earlier. Instead, Bunche would go on alone to Geneva and also to French Africa to do on-the-ground comparative research on French colonialism in Africa.
Bunche, Locke, and Fuertes on Place Edmond Rostand, where Boulevard St. Michel and Rue Soufflot meet. In the background is the Pantheon, Paris, July 1932. Photograph by Louis T. Achille. Courtesy of Louis T. Achille.
The resultant dissertation, “French Administration in Togoland and Dahomey” was a tour de force, thoroughly researched and powerfully written that won a prize for Bunche when finished in 1934. Some even argued it led to the establishment of the field of international studies at Harvard as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry and research. The success of the dissertation was due not only to his obvious competence as a political science scholar but also because Bunche brought a level of criticality to the study of colonialism that situated the particularities of the administration of Togoland and Dahomey in a larger narrative of the failure of imperialism. That had been lacking in Locke’s Foreign Policy Association paper. At the same time, Bunche preserved the New Negro “third way” strategy of Locke’s FPA report by avoiding simply a doomsday assessment of Africa’s future. Rather, Bunche, like Locke, suggested that a way out could be on the horizon if Europeans approached Africa anew with a rational plan by which it too could partake of the democracy and self-determination that the West said was the self-evident right of all peoples. Bunche had succeeded also because he was the attractive ideal of the young handsome African American scholar, something that eased his way into the French archives and administrators as well as the hearts and minds of his Harvard professors. Bunche was the nude, rather than the naked, messenger of de-coloniality.
For Bunche produced something more nuanced than simply a typical Marxist analysis of colonialism. Perhaps because of Locke’s influence, the dissertation shows that racial dehumanization of the victims distinguishes colonialism from other forms of capitalist greed, a key point in Locke’s much earlier Race Contacts and Interracial Relations lectures. Something of that earlier document’s acid critique of the racist self-deception, overt manipulation, and denigration of the African by the European echoes in Bunche’s dissertation.25 Indeed, the self in self-deception is perhaps Bunche’s best arrow into the heart of imperialism. For Bunche shows how imperialism is a mix of motives, sometimes humanitarian, sometimes naked greed, but always self-interested and self-congratulatory, so that even when helping the African, the European is really writing the history of Europe’s glory in the African’s mind.
Bunche’s dissertation, which Locke most likely read and commented on, stressed the point that Locke had struggled with personally throughout his education—that European arrogance was not simply economic exploitation, but a warping of African minds such that they found it difficult to properly value what was valuable in their own traditions after internalizing Europe’s doctrines. This had been Locke’s struggle from the days at Harvard when he trudged out to an African American church to try and accept the brilliance of Dunbar as central to a self-appreciative Negro literature. It was the struggle he had failed to take up when he declined to go south to study southern Negro culture with Zora Neale Hurston. Here, in a social science dissertation, was Locke’s dilemma but also his message going forward after the tough tutelage he had received from Hughes, Hurston, and even Mason—that ridding this “miseducation,” as Carter G. Woodson put it, was part of the necessary project of de-colonization of the Negro artists’ mind.
Early in January 1933, Locke got his chance. Brady contacted Locke urgently requesting that he contribute an essay to that year’s exhibition catalog of work by Black artists. After skipping the 1932 exhibition, the Harmon Foundation had decided to take another chance on exhibiting what was now a much larger group of competent Negro artists. Because the decision to hold the 1933 exhibition was made late in December 1932, Brady approached Locke at the last minute. “We would like you to do an essay on ‘The Negro in Art’ for the catalogue, which we realize is very short notice, but hope it will not be too difficult as you can revisit some of the positions you outlined in your Mount Holyoke paper.” Brown even felt entitled to outline what Locke should say in the essay, telling him that they wished he would “link the creative work of the people here with that of the Cuban.”26 Locke did not to write extensively about the sculpture of Teodoro Ramos Blanco, although he had nothing against the Cuban artist whose work had come into the Foundation’s purview through the advocacy of Arthur A. Schomburg. Locke saw himself in competition with other intellectuals like Schomburg or Cloyd L. Boykin, director of “The Primitive African Art Center” in New York, who were making advances in the field of contemporary African and African American exhibitionary practice where he, with the Harlem Museum of African Art, had failed. Boykin had gotten a Carnegie Corporation grant to fund the Primitive African Art Center, whereas Locke’s own request for museum funding had been turned down. If he was to fend off competitors and assert his own dominance in the field of Negro visual arts, it would be by creating an intellectual rationale for why Negro artists were valuable in the America of the 1930s, not by serving merely as a collector or institution builder.
Sitting at Howard University, Locke hammered out a new statement of his critical position on contemporary Negro art in less than a week, jettisoning his old argument that Negro American art was mainly important as a twentieth-century continuation of the genius of African art. But in pivoting away from “the African,” Locke was actually building on the notion implicit to a de-colonial view that contemporary Negro artists were so warped after internalizing European notions of White supremacy that they found it difficult to properly value what was valuable in their own traditions, especially the Black body itself. This time he drove that point home by exploiting a dichotomy that had always existed as a subtext in his visual and literary art criticism of Black cultural production in America—the distinction, first emphasized in 1926, between Negro art and Negro artists.27 Locke ratcheted up the argument into a categorical imperative in 1933: without Negro art—a distinctive effort to represent the Negro (or Negroness) in art—there was little rationale for special attention to or exhibitions for the Negro artist. International modernism, through which African art had entered the American mind, was dead, buried in part by the anti-modernism unleashed by the Great Depression. Negro artists needed a new reason for Whites to think about their art, and to find that Locke decided to contradict Marc Connelly’s comments in the 1931 catalog that Negro art as such did not exist. What Locke saw, despite being thoroughly grounded in the socially constructivist anthropological argument about race, was that the very need for a separate exhibit, put on by a philanthropic organization like Harmon, rather than a New York art gallery or American museum, to give Negro artists an adequate showing, showed that prejudice by Whites against Blacks in elite cultural spaces was a historical formation. American art was a racial formation. This was one reason such a separate show and a separate domain called Negro art existed. Exclusion of the Negro as artist was not because of talent, but because the Negro face and form—color, figure, and culture—were denigrated by the ruling majority as realities that Whites sought, perhaps unconsciously, to erase from the representation of the American. That marginalization had created a separate sphere of meaning, interpretation, and perception that crystallized into a distinctive form that Locke called Negro art. A victim of the segregated thinking in America about intellect and culture, Locke reasoned that such an art argued for a fundamentally cultural pluralist vision of America. This was true, in fact, of Connelly’s work, the play Green Pastures, even if Connelly, perhaps a bit self-consciously, denied it. There was a distinctive Black culture in America, a system of speech, belief, gesture, and attitude that Connelly had portrayed, somewhat paternalistically, on stage. Was it not, therefore, the responsibility of the Negro artist to portray that reality visually in American art, and thus escape the negative cultural discourse about Negro-ness that even many Negro artists had internalized? Was there not a way for Negro artists to give meaning to their work by choosing to explore, develop, and reveal the beauty in the Black face and form that the culture of Whiteness sought to cover up? Locke thought so and said so in his catalog essay, “The Negro Artist Comes of Age.”
Although Mary Beattie Brady published Locke’s essay in that year’s catalog, she did not agree with its analysis and said so when the two of them appeared on a radio broadcast designed to advertise the exhibition and the work of the Harmon Foundation. Locke started off the discussion by suggesting that he was going to be provocative and asserted that in essence the Negro artist was nothing without Negro art. Brady took the bait. “Well, it is all well and good to be provocative. But can you prove it?” Locke was ready. “I think that I can. … Indeed, I turn to the Harmon Foundation exhibitions themselves as my proof. Is it not the case that in prosecuting the prize awards and exhibitions sponsored by the Harmon Foundation, you discovered that you had to make propaganda for Negro art in order to stimulate and strengthen the Negro artist?” Brady conceded that that had been the case, “but I don’t want the public to think we created the Negro artist.” Locke retorted: “No one could think that from the historical record. … The occasional Negro artist is almost as old as American art itself. In the 1850s, Edmonia Lewis (a Boston Negro woman) was a recognized sculptor in Rome, and in the 1870s, Wm. Duncanson, a Negro mural painter who had won recognition in England, Scotland, and France, was decorating the mansions of the patrician families of Cincinnati,—the ancestral Tafts and Longworths.” Yes, Brady concurred, and offered that they like other American artists, had to go abroad for training and recognition. “But more so,” Locke continued, “in the case of the Negro artist. He not only went abroad for his start but stayed like Tanner, whenever he could, for the finish. Unfortunately, along with this went a disdain for the Negro subject. Many Negroes were so influenced by the after-effects of prejudice and handicap that they refused to paint Negro types.”28
Here lay the heart of Locke’s argument. Prejudice was internalized by its victims and then lived out in their avoidance of what prejudice taught them to despise—their own image. Suddenly, Brady agreed: “Why we even ran into that attitude with some of the younger Negro artists as late as 1927.” Alon Bement, the director of the Art Center where the exhibit was held, also participated in the radio program, and tried to move discussion back to the American context Brady had outlined earlier. “After all, should we blame these Negro artists? American artists for a long while avoided the American Scene and native material.” But Locke would not let them off the racial hook. “Yes, but for the Negro artist, there was a special reason. You see, no one, but especially an artist, likes to be pinned up in a ghetto, and as long as the Negro theme was expected of the Negro artist and imposed upon him by outside opinion, it was bound to seem a handicap rather than an opportunity—a ball and chain restriction instead of wings of inspiration.”29
Fearing perhaps that Locke was dominating the entire program, Brady turned to the two artists also invited to participate for their comments. Romeyn Lippman from Boston spoke first. “I think the Negro artist should have the whole world of art for his pasture. I search for the paintable idea, whether it be the Negro subject or some other theme. In my opinion subject-matter depends upon the temperament of the individual artist, and the fundamental element in his success is the mastery, after years of experimentation, of the technical problems involved in saying in a masterful way whatever he wishes to say.”30 Allan Crite, another artist from Boston, commented, “I myself prefer the Negro subject, and have been specializing in depicting what hasn’t yet been expressed,—the typical life of ordinary colored people today as I see it about me. I also think the Negro institutions, schools, churches, and the like, ought to sponsor art expressed in terms of our own racial traditions, using them both historically and symbolically.”31 Bement seemed to concur that Crite had utilized Negro themes persuasively, such as in his painting of a Negro church.
Then, Locke asked Bement directly what he noticed at the first exhibit of Negro artists assembled for the Harmon Prize competitions in 1927. “I went to this exhibition expecting to see the Negro through the eyes of the Negro artist. Not that I expected the Negro artist to limit himself entirely to the Negro theme, but after all any artist expresses best that which he knows best and most intimately. So I was quite disappointed at the scarceness of the Negro subject, the prevalence of the conventionally academic, and in many places an obvious strain of weak imitation.”32 Now, with the validation of White authority, Locke’s views compelled Brady’s assent: “We were all disappointed,—and surprised. From this first exhibit it looked as if the Negro had been made, in reaction to prejudice, half-ashamed of himself.” With his point made by the Whites, Locke could return to crediting the Foundation for its work in advancing both the Negro artist and Negro art. “So that is why, I suppose, you have made it since then an objective of the Harmon Foundation’s encouragement of Negro art to try to free the Negro artist from this handicapping idea as much as your other objective of developing more interest and better technique among Negroes in art.”33
Bement chimed in. “Well, Miss Brady, I was surprised at the rapid success you had. It was your third Harmon show in 1931 that I noticed a decided change. Here the Negro subject and native materials predominated, and many new painters and sculptors seem to have sprung up overnight from the magic wand of racial expression. And it was amazing to see how the technical quality of the work improved as the Negro came to closer grips with his own subject matter.” It went unsaid that Locke had been pivotal in locating much of that art that seemed to “have sprung up overnight” in the 1931 exhibit and convincing some reluctant Black artists to participate. “Yes I particularly remember the difference between Malvin Gray Johnson’s first academic fishing-boats and his vibrant Virginia landscapes, later. And the difference between Wm. Johnson’s cubistic Southern French landscapes and his remarkable portrait sketches of South Carolina folk types.” Bement concluded: “Yes, the Negro artist has as much to gain by coming home spiritually as the American artist in general.” He then allowed Locke his conclusion: “Of course it is the same movement, only the Negro’s path has been longer and harder. Still is, I should say.”34
After this debate, Brady, according to a later interview she gave in the 1970s, said she feared that Locke was advocating a form of “Black nationalism” in his essays for her catalogs and, presumably, in this debate. And Romeyn Lippman perhaps had a valid reason to react negatively to Locke creating a canon that would exclude the works of artists who avoided Negro subject matter. But what Locke outlined was profound—that art had been a psychological process by which the Negro artist became a subject by rendering himself or herself in pictures and sculpture. In doing so, Locke outlined an important theory of the artist’s relationship to society. Unlike Du Bois who advocated that Black artists produce art propaganda against White propaganda, Locke argued a more subtle transformation that needed to occur for Black people, as well as White people, to see Beauty differently—and in new places.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing about the debate on the radio was how it marked a transformation in Locke, in how he had learned over the last four years, to deal with maternalism. No longer was he bowing and scraping before a know-it-all who happened to be White and female and in control of cultural capital—or real capital—that he needed. He seemed to have realized after the debacle of the Mason patronage scheme that he was as needed for these transracial interventions to succeed as the woman at the apex of maternalistic structures of patronage. His ideas were more correct, more deeply rooted in the psychology of liberation than theirs. And he was not going to keep quiet about them in front of other people as he had done so often in Mason’s shadow. Finally, Locke had heard the famous admonition in 2 Corinthians of the King James Bible: “come out from among them, and be separate!”35
In his remarks to Brady about what happens to Negro artists who create Negro art, Locke revealed that a process of “purification” to remove the self-disgust and self-avoidance that American racism taught Negro artists when they looked at the Negro face and form had to be undertaken for the Negro artist to create great art. Bement confirmed that such had occurred over the course of the Harmon Foundation exhibitions. That disgust blocked artists’ ability to be profoundly creative in whatever work they did as an artist. A catharsis, Locke argued, must start within, because much of the weakness of the work produced by Negro artists derived from failure to come to terms with themselves.36 In the terminology that the art historian Kenneth Clark uses, it is to return to the Negro the capacity to look at himself or herself as a nude, as the ideal of human form, and not just the naked.
But Locke goes one step beyond Clark: through New Negro art, the image undergoes a transition not merely from the naked to the nude, but from an object alienated from its creator to a mirror of the artist’s community. In that process, the elements of the entire culture are recombined, reconfigured, and made into something wholly new that can—if allowed—transform society. That’s what Brady was instinctively afraid of—that a Negro art would destabilize the implicit hierarchy, or dethrone the “Caucasian ideals” inherent in the notion of beauty in the West. In Brady’s racial imaginary, that would lead to “black nationalism.” In Locke’s imaginary, it would lead to a world of “beauty that included our racial own.” Unconsciously, even while working for Negro artists, Brady maintained a sense that White artists create art that is beautiful and that Black artists need to rise to that standard, instead of a sense that the entire system in which White artists themselves operate needed to be changed to birth a world of beauty welcoming to all. In the end, art had to be a path to truth, a transforming truth of the person creating it, if art was going to do what was most necessary for humanity and especially the Negro: provide a path to subjectivity and a voice in a silencing world. Ultimately, the grander role of the Negro artist was to foment a process of radical liberation from the discourses of White supremacy in the wider population itself. That was his or her raison d’être.
What Locke aimed at came together better the day the Harmon Exhibition of Contemporary Negro Art officially opened in February 1933, when a moment of celebration was captured in a film made by the Harmon people. The moment occurred when Locke was reunited with Barthé in front of one of Barthé’s sculptures. In the film, Locke and Barthé pose before a life-size plaster torso painted black.37 The two men appear, smiling, shaking hands in front of the torso, a sculpture that went largely unnoticed by the judges and did not win a prize. Yet the posing, smiling gentlemen signal its specialness and its secret. Its specialness comes from the fact that it is one of a pair of sculptures: one, the ideal of a white torso, chunkier, stockier, more muscular; and, the second, the one in the Harmon show, the ideal Black physique, leaner, slenderer, svelte, and of course, Black. For Barthé and Locke, this torso represented an ideal toward which the Negro body tended, especially those young bodies they had known intimately themselves. Barthé’s torso was a conversation about the multiple discourses of the beautiful that coursed through the ideal he had loved—the classical tradition of the Greek and Roman body—as well as the lessons of African sculpture, with the slightly elongated torso embodying African principles of design. Rather than an Afrocentric creation, Barthé’s torso was a hybridic triumph, interweaving classical, ancient African, Italian Renaissance (Michelangelo), and modernist sculptural traditions and sexual insights into a thoroughly African American ideal. Moreover, his was not a decadent image, but a sculpture that visualized a new Black masculinity. That self-acceptance was part of a process not only of rebellion against the notion of self-disgust that the European had inserted into the African’s mind, as Bunche narrated in his dissertation, but also a process of racial and sexual de-coloniality in the African American’s mind.
The sculpture’s secret was that under the cover of a Negro art Barthé had created an icon of Black homosexual desire, a sculpture whose beauty came also from the way that the body curled and shifted from the hips upward into a stance that was both Black and gay. Here was a love of the Black body rendered in plaster as a carnal ideal Locke and Barthé both recognized and celebrated. Through the nude, they had smuggled the naked into the Harmon Exhibition. Here, under the cover of Blackness, was another “return of the repressed,” though unseen or unrecognized by most of the bourgeois Black and White visitors at the reception. And this Black body was exhibited under the auspices of a Harmon Foundation whose founder, William E. Harmon, had written his checks for the awards and prizes for, as he put it, “good darkies.” Here, two “good darkies” stood in front of this body, rendered Black and beautiful and desirable for those who knew what they were looking at.
The sculpture was a triumph too for Barthé since five years earlier a similarly full-figured naked Negro had been rejected for an outdoor sculpture in Philadelphia. In the climate of the 1930s, with the head and legs removed, with the allusions to classicism strengthened, and yet with the homoerotic pose as prominent in the sculpture as ever, Barthé had created a sculpture that represented both Locke’s Black and homosexual selves.
Locke had “midwifed” a Black visual arts that made visible his sexual orientation in ways that he never achieved in Black literature. That such nakedness could be expressed may have been in some small degree because Locke was working with Mary Beattie Brady, who herself may have been a lesbian. As the maternal mother, she was more like his mother in allowing him the freedom to express his sexuality, and he was able to do that, in a hidden, closeted, subterranean way, through Negro visual arts. In some ways, the Black visual artists were more successful in creating art that was about their fundamental concern. There was still the contradiction that Locke wanted them to be upfront and explicit about their race, but not their sexual orientation. But the form—the visual—was about revealing, and as revelation of the body, it engaged—at least here, the naked, Black sexuality. That also brings out why Locke was always insisting so much that Black artists had to reveal their race: it was a metaphor, a code, for their sex. He wanted to come out, but couldn’t; so, if not sexually, he at least wanted them to come out as Negro. But art was like a mask behind which the institutions of art always wanted Black—and homosexual—artists to hide, who they really were, people defined as not human in the canon of Western art. Locke had turned his mask into a nude.
Male Torso by Richmond Barthé. Photograph by Gregory R. Staley. The Howard University Gallery of Art, Permanent Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Alain Locke.
Sculpture of Alain Locke by Richmond Barthé. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.