| Artist: | Douglas, Aaron |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Aspects of Negro Life: Into Bondage | |
| Date of Work: | 1936 | |
| Nationality: | African-American | |
| Context: | ||
| Movement: | Harlem Renaissance | |
| Medium: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: Douglas was commissioned in 1934 by the W.P.A., part of Roosevelt's "New Deal" program following the stock market crash of '29 and the ensuing Depression. Roosevelt's plan was simply to put America back to work, including its artists. Douglas received a commission to paint 4 murals on African American history for the Harlem branch of the Hew York Public Library. He titled them "Aspects of Negro Life." This panel is the follow-up to the joyous "Negro in an African Setting" mural: called "Into Bondage," it shows the strong, proud Africans in chains, being marched off to slave ships that will take them to America (the diaspora). It is a scene of paradise lost. The imagery reflects Alain Locke's ideas about "the New Negro," which were 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 history. African American artists were thus encouraged during the "Jazz Age" of the 1920s to explore that "inner thing of blackness." Douglas creates a public mural art in an educational setting as both a history lesson and an act of cultural self-identification. Style: looking to Africa for inspiration, Douglas creates a mural image on a grand scale that proudly displays natoive Africans 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 figures 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 simplicity of form a complexity of compositional overlays and faceted planes of light, which show the influence of Art Deco's sleek sophistication, with its angular, geometric hard-edges, its stylized contours, and its musically rhythmic patterns. 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. This government commission for 4 murals by Douglas is one of the last great examples of an ambitious Harlem Renaissance project. | ||
