Countering Improper Visual Representations
Aaron Douglas’s Harlem Renaissance Aesthetic
p. 23-30
Texte intégral
1“Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid1”. In his 1936 publication of Negro Art: Past and Present2 which is considered the first substantial study of African American artists, Alain Locke, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, came back to the function and role of art and stressed its importance as an antidote to stereotypes and unconventional portrayals. During the Harlem Renaissance, art became a propaganda tool to tackle “America’s so-called race problem”3.
2I thus propose to study improperness through the notions of invisibility and visibility and the work of Harlem Renaissance emblematic painter, Aaron Douglas, also named “the father of African American art”. My objective is to show how a black artist of the 1920s challenged the improper representations of his community by deconstructing classic codes to question the notion of identity away from stereotypes in the aim of gaining recognition and of writing, or rather portraying, black American history.
African American Art vs. American Art: Unconventional Connotations
3First of all, it is critical to consider the connotations of the term “African American art” in the context of “American art”. Throughout the 20th century, many words have been used to describe works by African American artists such as “Negro art”, which will be used in this paper as it was in the Harlem Renaissance context, “Afro-American art”, “Black art” and currently “African American art” with or without a hyphen. The different terms enhance how black American artists, along with black models, were made invisible in the American art environment. The exhibition entitled: Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse that took place in Paris in 2019 at Musée d’Orsay (March 26th – July 21th 2019), revealed how Blacks and black models were inconveniently portrayed by white male artists until the first half of the 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic. In her article “The Hidden Figures Revealed by Art4” Cath Pound acknowledges that “the majority of salon painters showed black servants in fantasized harem scenes, often bare-breasted as an indicator of enslavement, emphasizing their exoticism and otherness”. Yet, following the abolition of slavery in 1848, the free black people who had come to Paris were visible in the city and at the same time invisible. Édouard Manet, prompted by his friend Baudelaire, was one of the first painters who discarded exoticism and otherness when he portrayed “Laure5”, a black servant “as a free, wage-earning woman in modern Paris”.
4In America, Blacks were prey to stereotypes as well in literature, entertainment, and paintings. African American artists, however, gradually appropriated visual art to reflect their own experience and in reaction to these stereotyped representations and descriptions they were victims of. The body was the first arena of perception which was invested by a number of black American artists in reaction to improper representations. That is why the examination of African American art involves two goals. First, to recognize the visionary power of the body. In keeping with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the idea is to understand how identity can take shape in/through difference. The second objective is to fix and define notions about race to counter white artists’ norms and inadequate perceptions.
5Philosophical concepts applied to art also shed an aesthetic light on American art history and offer a larger comprehension of artistic processes and creations to confront with racial history. According to Merleau-Ponty6, there is no contradiction between visibility and invisibility. By overlapping, both concepts offer two openings, two possibilities, two scenes where something can happen. Thus, throughout the 20th century, African Americans used various strategies to assert their participation in American social and cultural environment. They used their art to reflect experiences that were unique to them and during the Harlem Renaissance they promoted identity and cultural matters in a changing society, away from white stereotyped portrayals. To step out of the norm, black artists of the Harlem Renaissance created a norm of their own, and their evolution can be interpreted in light of Deleuze’s “faciality” concept since to Deleuze and Guattari, the face functions as a sign of individuality and power and certain assemblages of power require the production of a face”: “Le visage construit le mur dont le signifiant a besoin pour rebondir, il constitue le mur du signifiant, le cadre ou l’écran. Le visage creuse le trou dont la subjectivation a besoin pour percer […]7”.
6Indeed,
Deleuze relate[d] faciality to the close-up in film, the cinematic technique that generally uses a lens of long focal length to bring the face forward and soften the edges of the frame, or else, to the contrary, deploys a lens of shorter length to obtain a facial projection or distortion at the centre of the image while the surrounding milieu is seen in sharp focus8.
Therefore, artists like Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas, brought their experience forward, to obtain a unique and authentic art as conceived by Alain Locke and to counter the white dominant style. The work of Douglas can be interpreted as an apparatus of individualization or “faciality” of the black experience9. At the same time, by isolating the black experience he opened up the invisible to the visible, which illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation. The social, political or religious matters addressed by other artists, such as Walter Ellison (1865-1977) and Vincent Smith (1929-2003) also illustrate faciality. Others, such as William H. Johnson (1901-1970) and Archibald Motley (1891-1981) focused on African American life to explore its energy and vibrancy.
7To individualize the black experience in America, Aaron Douglas chose to resurrect his African heritage and to focus on Africa, which helped him move away from unconventional representations to impose other representations of black models in keeping with Alain Locke’s perspective. Douglas felt that, by virtue of an “essence” shared by people of African descent, he understood and was more entitled to African sensibility better than Whites and thus prone to proper representations. This is how he increased the collective visibility of Blacks by integrating the black experience to American history.
African Roots to Counter Stereotypes and Improper Artistic Representations
8The cultural and artistic movement of the Harlem Renaissance (1924-1928), centered in the large black population of New York City, was aided by a surge of books, popular magazines, and scholarly journals. Seeking to rekindle a sense of pride and accomplishment within the black community, the New Negro Movement, as it was called, sought its heritage and sense of self in an African aesthetic. Its chief apologist Alain Locke asked African Americans to create a self-reliant art based on their relationship with Africa10. Locke called for a racial style; yet, Africa was reduced to a cultural trope and the complexity of African culture was totally ignored.
9Encouraged to investigate connections between Africa and Africans, Aaron Douglas was the first visual artist of the period to adopt Locke’s recommendations. The influence of African masks can be seen with one of his first covers for Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, in February 192511. With this cover, the influence of Africa corresponded to the perception and vision of his time. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonization unearthed African masks which arrived on the art market scene. Western collectors and artists, who praised African masks, developed a certain idea of Africa and of its authenticity, which Douglas didn’t escape. Partly in response to European modernism and its appropriation of African art, his illustrations in black journals such as The Crisis, Opportunity, and Survey Graphic, redefined the representation of Blacks. Black males who were seen as “Old and uneducated” became “New Negroes”, or modern, educated men who had overcome domination thanks to education and culture.
10In his seminal 1925 essay entitled “Enter the New Negro”, Alain Locke advocated for the mythic Old Negroes (aunties, uncles, sambos, mammies, and the like) to be replaced by a new generation of proud, emancipated, and thoroughly modern blacks away from unproper representations and white dominant norms. Douglas rejected old stereotypes and proposed a modern vision of Blacks evolving in an urban industrial setting. His models illustrated the energy and power of black males and their participation in the development of the US, but his creations were hybrid forms which relied on the works and caricatures of white artists such as Miguel Covarrubias, for instance.
11Refusing to be spoken for, many African American artists appropriated a complex system of representation concerned with societal types and habits that reinforced differences but also perpetuated them. Douglas, like other black artists, defined a new black aesthetic which reflected their own experiences but based on existing white artistic norms. Douglas employed literary themes to represent universal subjects such as self-discovery, religious faith, and mythic origins. His productions were hybrid or in-between, liminal art forms.
From Improper Representations to Black Aesthetic
12To quote Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, Douglas “articulated difference” in a moment of “expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment12”. To push the analogy with Bhabha’s concept further, Douglas’s hybrid aesthetic emerged because of “the third space” which is this transitional, in-between space of “confusion and paradox, or liminality, within the context of [post]colonialism13”.
13To offer his own personal style, Douglas gradually came to oppose “the organizing principles that structure, define and speak on behalf of the collective assemblage of organs, experiences or states of being14”. In this respect, his work also corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s other concept of “Body without organs”:
[…]The Body without Organs is a process that is directed toward a course of continual becoming, [and] it cannot break away entirely from the system that it desires [to] escape from. While it seeks a mode of articulation that is free from the binding tropes of subjectification and signification, it must play a delicate game of maintaining some reference to these systems of stratification, or else risk obliteration or reterritorialisation back into these systems15.
Douglas’s creation of a group of murals entitled Aspects of Negro Life is a case in point. In 1935 he received a commission to create a mural cycle in the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library, located in Harlem. The series depicts the migration of African Americans from a mythical tribal existence in Africa to enslavement in the Southern American colonies and from liberation after the Civil War to life in modern, urban environments during America’s jazz era.
14Douglas created this edenic image of life in ancient Africa before the horrors of slavery. In The Negro in an African Setting he conjured a personal romantic vision of a continent he never visited. Uniting past and present, the fetish that floats in the center of the composition reminds of the spirituality that infuses many aspects of African and African American life. In his liberal borrowing of forms from Egypt to West Africa, which he interpreted in a highly sophisticated Art Deco style, Douglas created an Africa that was purely of the imagination but that corresponded to the representation Blacks expected during the jazz era. His style reflected an African aesthetic transformed by the American experience and, above all, by modernity. His work illustrates what Bhabha calls the “realm of the present” and which he defines in The Location of Culture as this moment where space and time cross to produce a new identity16. Douglas had already decided to show black contribution to American culture and society when he accepted Fisk University project in 193017. Here is how he presented his work at Fisk University: “I have tried to show three things that have affected the Negro in his progress in this country: first, his religion; second, emancipation; third, his education18”.
15Aaron Douglas represented the evolution of Blacks throughout history and in keeping with the identity and cultural questionings of the jazz age era. He confirmed his modern style and visual narrative that evokes art, industrialization, history and the link with the past in Africa and the present with slavery in America. His work functioned as propaganda at the service of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals to glorify and represent black pride as well as the social and spiritual progress of the black community.
16In the 1940s, Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence were more favored than Douglas. In 1941 the publication of Twelve Million Black Voices by Richard Wright was a turning point as his approach on racial and social issues was illustrated by photographs that expressed the reality of Blacks in the United States. Curiously enough, Douglas was accused of not creating pure black art and of relating instead to what Whites wanted to see. He was thus blamed for improperly representing Blacks and the black experience. By the 1950s Black Arts Movement artists considered Douglas’s work was no longer in keeping with the black experience and far away from BAM artists’ political militancy and celebration of black achievement. Nevertheless, in 2007, the Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas19) revealed his work to a large public, and eventually presented him as the “father of African American art”.
17By making the social and racial issues of the Harlem Renaissance visible, Douglas revealed what it meant to be Black in the first half of the 20th century and how improper representations could eventually be countered thanks to artistic productions.
Notes de bas de page
1Alain Locke, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of his Essays on Art and Culture, New York, Garland, 1983. See also Locke’s essay “Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art”, in Negro Art: Past and Present, Eastford, Martino Fine Books, 2020 (1st ed. : Washington, ANFE ,1936)
2In this study, the work of the most important African artists is presented in detail, including descriptions of their principal works in all visual mediums.
3Alain Locke, “The Negro in Art”, Christian Education, Vol. 15, Iss. 2, 1931, p. 98-103.
4Cath Pound, The Hidden Figures Revealed by Art, BBC Culture, 21 March 2019, www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190320-how-art-history-erased-black-people.
5I refer to Édouard Manet, Portrait of Laure also known as A Negress (1862-1865) as well as Olympia (1863). Google Arts & Culture reveals that “Paris’s ninth and 17th arrondissements were home to a diverse, multi-racial community of artists, writers, and workers. Home to impressionist artists such as Manet and Renoir, the neighborhood also housed several artists and intellectuals of color, including author Alexandre Dumas […]. These neighborhoods were also home to art models like Joseph” and Laure. Joseph was a well-known Haitian model who appeared in Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa. Laure, the Black servant I mention here, was painted by Manet on three separate occasions. More details on the black model Joseph can be found on Google Arts & Culture: Joseph: A Celebrated Haitian Model in 19th century Paris, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/YQVBQHr1FmMF-Q.
6Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible suivi de Notes de travail, ed. Claude Lefort, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Tel », 1979 (1st ed. : 1964).
7Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, op. cit., p. 206.
8Tom Conley, “Faciality”, in Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010 (1st ed. : 2005), p. 101-102.
9In his 2019 article, Claudio Celis Bueno mentions that “portrait painting was used as a mechanism to individualize powerful subjects”. See “The Face Revisited: Using Deleuze and Guattari to Explore the Politics of Algorithmic Face Recognition”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 37 ,Iss. 1, 2019, p. 73-91.
10See Alain Locke, Negro Art: Past and Present, op. cit.
11This cover can be seen online on the periodic Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, 1925-1907, Vol. 3, Iss. 25, https://archive.org/details/sim_opportunity-a-journal-of-negro-life_1925-07_3_31/page/198/mode/2up. Other covers by Douglass can also be seen on Princeton University website Graphic Arts, “Artists of ‘Opportunity’” https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2020/07/30/artists-of-opportunity/.
12Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 2004 (1st ed. : 1994), p. 6.
13Kalua Fetson, “Homi Bhabha’s Third Space and African Identity”, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Iss. 1, 2009, p. 23-24.
14Kylie Message, “Body Without Organs”, in The Deleuze Dictionary, op. cit., p. 37-39.
15Ibid., p. 38.
16See Kalua Fetson, “Homi Bhabha’s Third Space and African identity”, art. cit., p. 25.
17See “Negro in America” from the Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, a series of murals painted by Aaron Douglas between 1930 and 1939 for Fisk University. “Negro in America” can be seen in the university’s South Reading Room of Cravath Hall in Nashville.
18Aaron Douglas, “Fisk University Becoming a Cultural Centre”, New York Times, 13 September 1931, XX.
19The Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas) organized an exhibition in 2007 entitled Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.
Auteur
Université Jean-Monnet Saint-Étienne, ECLLA
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