| Artist: | Douglas, Aaron |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Opportunity | |
| Date of Work: | 1926 | |
| Nationality: | African-American | |
| Context: | ||
| Movement: | Harlem Renaissance | |
| Medium: | magazine cover | |
| Subject: magazine cover for "Opportunity," a periodical devoted to Alain Locke's concept of "The New Negro," which was at the core of the Harlem Renassiance movement. Locke believed that just as Greek and Roman art were studied as the classics in Western art, African art would be the foundation for a new cultural identity for "The New Negro." Locke knew that Picasso had used African art in the invention and development of cubism; he called for an identifiable racial art style and aesthetic based on what he called "African elements" as part of his people's legacy; an embracing of one's ancestral arts. African American artists were thus encouraged during the "Jazz Age" of the 1920s to explore that "inner thing of blackness." Douglas creates a stylized portrait of "the New Negro" here, using a tribal arts simplification of form coupled with an Art Deco, modern geometric edge that speaks of the past and the modern present, Africa and America. It is a self-conscious act of cultural identification. Style: looking to Africa for inspiration, Douglas creates an image that proudly displays "Negroid" features in a stylized (but not caricaturized or stereotypic) way. His signature style was what he called "Egyptian form": figures silhouetted in profile with the eye rendered from a frontal viewpoint, as in ancient Egyptian art. Here the silhouetted figure and setting are elegantly simplified and abstracted in accordance with the style of the non-mimetic tribal arts or so-called "primitivism" of African sources. Douglas adds to this the sleek sophistication of Art Deco, with its angular, geometric hard-edges and stylized contours. The image both references an infatuation with "primitivism" and modernism at one and the same time. Context: "In the very process of being transplanted," wrote Alain Locke, "the Negro is becoming transformed." Locke was referring to the Great Migration from 1913 to 1946, when many African Americans seeking work and more freedoms moved from the rural, mostly agricultural South to come live in the urban, industrialized North. There, especially in New York's Harlem, a Renaissance occurred as gifted artists, writers, performers and musicians of color all started to emerge and build an amazingly vital community. A city Negro or black urbanism with a fashionable style all its own characterized what came to be known as the "Jazz Age" during the 1920s. "The Negro was in vogue." New opportunities, indeed, opened up as the Cotton Club became the place to go; the performers were all black, but the audience was still all white; segregation, sad to say, was thus still in effect even in Harlem. But talents like Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Josephine Baker began to receive worldwide interracial recognition, bringing their brand of music and art, which embraced elements of African culture as well as modernism, into the dominant culture. There was an optimism about "the New Negro," a concept promoted by Howard University professor of philosophy, Alain Locke. It was a time, he believed, that African Americans could break into the various institutions of the dominant culture through the arts, which would be the first step in championing the rights of black people everywhere. In 1929, the stock market crashed and so did the blues; the Jazz Age died with the Depression. Duke Ellington, and others, went to Europe to play; the Swing Age was about to be born. | ||
