Between Africa and America the Negro, artistically speaking, has practically reversed himself. In his homeland, his dominant arts were the decorative and the craft arts—sculpture, metal-working, weaving—and so the characteristic African artistic virtuosities are decoration and design. But in America, the interpretive, emotional arts have been the Negro’s chief forte, because his chief artistic expression has been in music, the dance, and folk poetry. One single strand alone has connected the ancestral and the new-world art—the age-old virtuosity in dance and pantomime. Except for this, the American Negro as an artist is completely different from his African prototype.
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 cultural zero by taking away his patterns and substituting the crudest body labor with only the crudest tools. Thus slavery severed the trunknerve of the Negro’s primitive skill and robbed him of his great ancestral gift of manual dexterity. Alexandre Jacovleff, the Russian artist whose drawings of African types are to date unsurpassed, has well said of Africa—“A continent of beautiful bodies, but above all of beautiful hands.” This fact is really a symbol: with virtuosity of muscle has gone a coördination resulting in great beauty. But 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, incapable of fine craftsmanship even if materials, patterns, and incentives had been available.
In a compensatory way the artistic urges of the American Negro flowed toward the only channels left open—those of song, movement, and speech, and the body itself became the Negro’s prime and only artistic instrument. Greatest of all came the development of the irrepressible art of the voice, which is today the Negro’s greatest single artistic asset. Thus the history of generations is back of the present lopsidedness in the Negro’s art development, and the basis of his handicap in the graphic, pictorial, and decorative arts explains, as well, his proficiency in the emotional arts. No comment on the contemporary advance of the Negro in the plastic and pictorial arts would be sound without this historical perspective. For in his latest developments in formal fine art, the Negro artist is really trying to recapture ancestral gifts and reinstate lost arts and skill.
Considering this, the early advent of American Negro artists in painting and sculpture was all the more remarkable. As might be expected, however, this early art was of a purely imitative type, but not without technical merit. The two pioneer instances were Edward M. Bannister of Providence, Rhode Island, a landscapist of considerable talent, and founder, oddly enough, of the Providence Art Club; and Edmonia Lewis, our first sculptor, who studied in Rome in the early seventies and executed many very acceptable portrait busts in the current pseudo-classic style. And another pioneer instance is R. S. Duncanson, of Cincinnati, figure painter, landscapist, and historical painter, who achieved considerable recognition between 1863 and 1866 in London and Glasgow. It is characteristic of this period, 1860 to 1890, that the Negro artists were isolated and exceptional individuals, imitative though, judged by contemporary American standards, not mediocre and almost entirely lacking in race consciousness. They were artists primarily and were incidentally Negroes.
The next generation also lived and worked as individuals, but despite their academic connections and ideals, with a sentimental shadow of race hanging over them. The outstanding talents that matured during this period (1895–1915) were Henry O. Tanner, William Edouard Scott, painters; and Meta Warrick Fuller and May Howard Jackson, sculptors. Of these, of course, Mr. Tanner is by far the best known and recognized. However varied their talents as artists of this transitional generation, they have much in common. All of them products of the best American academies, their talents were forced into the channels of academic cosmopolitanism not merely by the general trend of their time, but also by the pressure and restrictions of racial prejudice. So they not only matured under French instruction and influence—three of them were products of Julian’s Academy—but have received their earliest and widest recognition abroad. Instead of being the challenging influence and special interest that it is for the Negro artist of today, race, by reason of circumstances beyond their control, was for them a ghetto of isolation and neglect from which they must escape if they were to gain artistic freedom and recognition. And so, except for occasional sentimental gestures of loyalty, they avoided it as a motive or theme in their art.
Because of her more completely American experience, May Howard Jackson, the sculptress, was first to break away from academic cosmopolitanism to frank and deliberate racialism. She was followed about 1907 (largely because of her commission to do commemorative Negro historical reliefs for the Jamestown Exposition) by Mrs. Fuller, who has continued since to work in the double vein of her earlier Rodinesque style and a very stylized idealization of Negro types, more exotic and Egyptian than realistically racial. The career of Mr. Tanner, professionally successful as it has been, is in this respect at least typical of the tragedy of this generation of Negro artists. Beginning under the realistic influence of his American teacher, Thomas Eakins, Tanner’s early work showed marked interest and skill in painting Negro and Norman and, later, Jewish peasant types. It was the heyday of the regional school and but for his exile and the resentment of race as an imposed limitation, Tanner’s undoubted technical genius might have added a significant chapter to the Jules Breton, Joseph Israels school of the half-romantic, half-realistic glorification of peasant life. Instead Tanner’s work became more and more academic in treatment and cosmopolitan in theme; while for a treatment of Negro types in the style of this period we have to rely on sporadic canvases by white American painters like Winslow Homer, Wayman Adams, Robert Henri.
But this generation, Tanner especially, did have, after all, a constructive influence upon the American Negro artist though not in the direction of the development of a special province of Negro art. They were inspiring examples to the younger generation and convincing evidence to a sceptical public opinion of the technical competence and artistic capacity of the Negro artist when given the opportunity of contact with the best traditions and academic training. This is taken for granted now, but largely as a result of their pioneer effort and attainment.
But the younger generation of Negro artists since 1915 have a new social background and another art creed. For the most part, the goal of the Negro artist today projects an art that aims to express the race spirit and background as well as the individual skill and temperament of the artist. Not that all contemporary Negro artists are conscious racialists—far from it. But they all benefit, whether they choose to be racially expressive or not, from the new freedom and dignity that Negro life and materials have attained in the world of contemporary art. And, as might be expected, with the removal of the cultural stigma and burdensome artistic onus of the past, Negro artists are showing an increasing tendency toward their own racial milieu as a special province and in their general work are reflecting more racially distinctive notes and overtones. In 1920, the One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street Branch, in Harlem, of the New York Public Library began special exhibits of the work of Negro artists, which, having continued to date, have given showing to over a hundred young artists. In 1927, public-spirited citizens of Chicago pioneered with a special “Negro in Art Week” series of talks and exhibitions of the work of Negro artists, a programme that has been repeated at centers as far south as Atlanta and Nashville, as far north as Boston and Rochester, and as far west as San Diego and Los Angeles. Most influential of all, the Harmon Foundation has, by a five-year series of prize awards for Negro artists, with an annual New York show and extensive traveling exhibition of a considerable section of the same throughout the country, not only stimulated a new public interest in the Negro artist, but incubated more young talent in these last five years than came to maturity in the last twenty. As has been aptly said, “The public consciousness of Negro art has grown to be nation-wide and practically worldwide in the last decade.”
And so, at present, the Negro artist confronts an interested public, and that public faces an interesting array of productive talent. Without undue violence to individualities, these contemporary Negro artists may be grouped in three schools or general trends: the Traditionalists, the Modernists, and the Africanists, or Neo-Primitives, with the latter carrying the burden of the campaign for a so-called “Negro Art.” Even among the traditionalists, there is considerable of the racial emphasis in subject matter, but without the complementary adoption of any special stylistic idioms, directly racial or indirectly primitive. But conservatism on this point seems doomed, since the young Negro artist has a double chance of being influenced by Negro idioms, if not as a deliberate racialist or conscious “Africanist,” then at least at secondhand through the reflected influence of Negro idioms on general modernist style.
Noteworthy among the traditionalists are William Edouard Scott, of Indianapolis, portrait and mural painter; William Farrow, of Chicago, landscapist and etcher; Laura Wheeler Waring, of Philadelphia, landscapist and type-portraitist of considerable distinction; Palmer Hayden, of New York and Paris, marine painter of talent; Albert A. Smith, of New York; and the late Edwin A. Harleston, of Charleston, South Carolina, whose genre studies of Southern Negro peasant types have competently filled an important niche in Negro painting. His prize canvases of The Bible Student and The Old Servant are permanent documents by reason of their double artistic and social significance, and it is much to be regretted that his talent expired just at the point of maturity and recognition. The work of four women sculptors, Meta Warrick Fuller, May Howard Jackson, Elizabeth Prophet, and Augusta Savage, despite individual variation in competence and style, would all fall in the conservative category, with a common attitude of heavily idealized and sentimentalized portrayal of racial types and character.
It is this saccharine, romantic quality that has given the younger modernists their foil; they aim at hard realism and verge at times on the grotesque and the satirical. The Old Snuff-Dipper of Archibald Motley, or the Self-Portrait of Lillian Dorsey, or Meditation of Malvin Gray Johnson shows these new notes boldly and unmistakably. In this attitude, they have reinforcement from their young modernist contemporaries, but it represents a peculiar psychological reaction and achievement when a persecuted group breaks through the vicious circle of self-pity or compensatory idealization and achieves objectivity. Apart from the artistic merit of the work—which is considerable—the social significance of the recent canvases of William H. Johnson tells an interesting story. Born in Florence, South Carolina, this dock-working night-school student of the National Academy of Design, protegé of Charles Hawthorne and George Luks, disciple of French ultra-modernism with strong influences of Rouault and Soutine, came back from four years in Europe to paint in his home town. The result is a series of landscapes and portrait studies that reek with irony and satire and that probably will not get local appreciation till long after he has put his birthplace on the artistic map. His ironic picture of the town hotel paints the decadence of the old régime, and his quizzical portrait study of Sonny, a Negro lad with all the dilemma of the South written in his features, is a thing to ponder over, if one believes that art has anything important to say about life.
The other two modernists of note and promise are Hale Woodruff, of Indianapolis, now painting in France; and James Lesesne Wells, of New York, this year’s Harmon award winner. Mr. Woodruff paints landscapes of originality, and his color has a warm beauty that, in spite of abstract formalism, seems characteristically racial. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, has a pronounced mystical lean, which makes his ultra-modern style all the more unusual and attractive. Some of his work has recently been acquired by the Phillips Memorial Gallery, and in terms of accomplishment and promise, Mr. Wells must be rated as one of the most promising of the younger Negro artists.
His work in design and decorative black-and-white media is strong and original. But, as a black-and-white artist, Mr. Wells is a conscious “Africanist.” That is, he goes directly to African motives and principles of design for his inspïration. Another of the younger decorative painters, Aaron Douglas, does also; in fact, he has been doing so since 1925 and therefore deserves to be called the pioneer of the African Style among the American Negro artists. His book illustrations have really set a vogue for this style, and his mural decorations for Club Ebony, New York, the Sherman Hotel, Chicago, and the symbolic murals of the Fisk University Library are things of fine originality. It is in sculpture, though, that the neo-primitivism of an attempted Negro style has to date most clearly expressed itself; in fact it is my opinion that sculpture will lead the way in this direction. So the work of our two younger sculptors, Richmond Barthé and Sargent Johnson, takes on more than individual significance. Both are consciously racial, with no tendency to sentimentalize or over-idealize, and their style emphasizes the primitive. Barthé’s West Indian Girl has a proud, barbaric beauty that matches Claude McKay’s glorification of the primitive in the lines:
“To me she seemed a proudly swaying palm Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.”
Sargent Johnson’s bust Chester is particularly striking; it has the qualities of the African antique and recalls an old Baoulé 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 this captivating, naïve bust for even the untutored eye to see.
Single instances do not make a style, nor can propaganda re-create lost folk-arts, but it is significant that directly in proportion as the younger Negro talent leaves the academic and imitative vein, it becomes stronger; and that the more particularistic and racial it becomes, the wider and more spontaneous is its appeal. And so, the immediate future seems to be with the racialists, both by virtue of their talent and their creed.
However, a truly representative racial style and school of art are as yet only in the making. Reviewing a recent exhibit of the work of Negro artists, Cyril Kay Scott comments on its imitative and derivative character, saying “it is almost purely Parisian and New York art done by Negroes, with almost nothing of the simplicity and directness of folk-art, and little assimilation or use of the African primitive art, which has so profoundly affected the great European modernists.” Mr. Scott is right in wishing that some American Negro artists would delve “into the marvelous and beautiful background which is their racial heritage.” He is very probably right in thinking that should they do so, “they could make to their age a contribution that would be unique” and which would “surpass the enthusiastic and conscientious efforts of even the great men of our time who have made such splendid use of the inspiration of Negro art.”
But this provocative criticism by the Director of the Denver Museum of Art overlooks one explanatory and extenuating fact: the young American Negro artist must evolve a racial style gradually and naturally. A sophisticated or forced exoticism would be as ridiculous at the one extreme as the all too-prevalent servile imitation is at the other. Moreover, most American Negro artists have not yet been exposed to the influence of African art. Their European contemporaries have been, and likewise the European-trained American artist. As recently as 1927, the first attempt was made to bring the Negro artist and the lay public in direct contact with African art. After an exhibition of the BlondiauTheatre-Arts Collection of sculpture and metal work from the Belgian Congo, part of this collection was purchased as the permanent and traveling collection of the Harlem Museum of African Art, organized at that time, and has since been housed in the exhibition rooms of the One Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Street Branch of the New York Public Library. The project was organized to preserve and interpret the ancestral arts and crafts of the African Negro, and to make them effective as fresh inspiration for Negro art expression and culture in America. Though yet so recent and meagre a contact, the work of several contemporary Negro artists has begun to reflect African influences. There are marked traces in the motives and design structure of the work of Aaron Douglas; reflected idioms—through European exposure—in the work of William H. Johnson and Hale Woodruff; and definite suggestions, as we have already noticed in the sculptures of Richmond Barthé and Sargent Johnson.
These are good omens for the development of a distinctively racial school of American Negro art. Naturally not all of our artists will confine their talents to race subjects or even to a racial style. However, the constructive lessons of African art are among the soundest and most needed of art creeds today. They offset with equal force the banalities of sterile, imitative classicism and the empty superficialities of literal realism. They emphasize intellectually significant form, abstract design, formal simplicity, restrained dignity, and the unsentimental approach to the emotions. And more important still, since Africa’s art creed is beauty in use, they call for an art vitally rooted in the crafts, uncontaminated with the blight of the machine, and soundly integrated with life.
Surely we should expect the liberating example of such an aesthetic to exert as marked an influence on the work of the contemporary Negro artist as it has already exerted on leading modernists like Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Epstein, Lipschitz, Brancusi, and others. Indeed we may expect even more with a group of artists becoming conscious of an historical and racial bond between themselves and African art. For them, rather than just a liberating idiom or an exotic fad, African art should act with all the force of a rediscovered folk-art, and give clues for the repression of a half-submerged race soul. The younger generation seem to have accepted this challenge to recapture this heritage of creative originality and this former mastery of plastic form and decorative design and are attempting to carry them to distinctive new achievement in a vital and racially expressive art. One of the advances evident in a comparison of the five successful annual shows of the works of Negro artists, sponsored by the Harmon Foundation, along with marked improvement in the average technical quality, has been the steadily increasing emphasis upon racial themes and types in the work submitted. Thus the best available gauge records not only a new vitality and maturity among American Negro artists, but a pronounced trend toward racialism in both style and subject. In this downfall of classic models and Caucasian idols, one may see the passing of the childhood period of American Negro art, and with the growing maturity of the young Negro artist, the advent of a representatively racial school of expression, and an important new contribution, therefore, to the whole body of American art.