Clifford Thompson at Commonweal: “For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” So wrote Alain Locke in the anthology The New Negro (1925), often considered the founding document of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement of which Locke is generally recognized as intellectual impresario. “The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality.”
However, Locke added, “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” That emancipation largely took the form of creative expression—the literature, music, and visual art that flowered in the 1920s and ’30s and reflected the experiences of millions of African Americans who, seeking opportunity, migrated from the South to the cities of the North and Midwest. Many settled in New York City’s Harlem, including writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, as well as music and entertainment luminaries like Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.
And when it came to the Black Americans’ effort to, in Locke’s phrasing, “see” themselves, that was the work, quite literally, of the Harlem Renaissance’s sculptors, photographers, and, especially, painters: African Americans using the visual arts to represent who and what they really were, in all their richness, variety, and humanity, to avoid looking to others for cues for seeing themselves. In New York City’s first full-scale museum show since 1987 devoted to the work of that artistic movement, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, on view through July 28. Comprising some 160 works of art and curated by Denise Murrell, it is a stunning exhibition.
Harlem, as Locke wrote in The New Negro,
is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another.
More here.
