Summary: The Spread Of The Harlem Artistic Movement

The Spread of the Harlem Artistic Movement Black artist previously were producing art that reflected European Influence. However it was during the Harlem movement that the artist own identity took on a new meaning. The Harlem Renaissance which began in the 1920’s finally allowed artists to analysis their own selves, their ethnic, and their culture by utilizing their heritage. This ethnic expression developed a realistic movement of cultural and Americanism. African American artists during this period began to gain self-confidence, pride, self-value, and self-admiration while they struggle for community and ethnic independence. Harlem was the place that every African American wanted to be including the Caribbean’s. Southerners took
refuge in search of a new lifestyle, a new change, and a new soul. Harlem Renaissance also known as the “New Negro” movement, James Lesesne Wells, was a leading graphic artist, art teacher, and a successful printmaker and designer. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 02, 1902, his work reflected the life of the Harlem Renaissance.
Wells father was a Baptist minister and his mother a teacher. Wells mother was his inspiration, she encourage him to assist with her art instruction in her kindergarten classes. Wells won first prize in painting and second prize in woodworking at the Florida State Fair. “He obtained his training at Lincoln University and Columbia University and at the National Academy of Design” (96). After graduation, Wells created block prints to illustrate articles and publications such as Willis Richardson’s Plays and Pageants of Negro Life. His work was included in an exhibition of, “International Modernist”, In April 1929 the New Art Circle of Gallery owned by J.B. Neumann. Later in 1929, he was invited to join the Art facility at Howard University as a crafts teacher. He taught clay modeling, ceramics, sculpture, metal and block printing. It took him two years to convince the school that he and linoleum cutting belonged in the College of Fine Arts. In the 1940’s Wells produced many compositions on African themes, he was well known for using several
media arts such as block printing, etching, and lithography of which African Fantasy and Primitive Girl are some examples of his work. African Fantasy is a perfect name for this piece as it is of a nascent origin as the same in Primitive Girl, which emerges out of the New Negro movement, the work constitutes Wells’ celebration of the essence of African ancestral arts vibrantly articulated by his signature vocabulary of pattern, rhythm, and contrast. The etching in both works is well balanced, as the lines and shades are in embryonic form that captivates such pureness. The color scheme is sophisticated, this modern composition draws question to the imagination. The Wanderers (1934), also has a rich interpretation of three migrant females. The rich hues of color is very prominent in its interpretation of expression, carrying the vision of imagination one step further. The earlier work of the same subject, The Wanderer (1931) is even more symbolically proactive as all of the elements in subject’s world (landscape, animal, and human) blend together in a unique individual abstract design. Wells influenced was woodcutters, such as Albrecht Durer and the German Expressionist-Ernst Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Muller, And Emile Nolde. Wells felt the prints was a way of communicating African American History and concerned. So in 1933-1934, Wells dedicated himself to mostly print making, he stated that he, was becoming aware of the social and economic situations of that time and the rising of the “New Negro”, he felt that the graphic arts would give itself willing to the plan and ideas of the related issues. Beauford Delaney, born on December 30, 1901, in Knoxville, Tennessee, later moved to Boston. He studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the Copley Society, and the South Boston School of Art, but consider himself self-taught as it was unlikely that his name was on any of the attendance rosters. However, his associations with the professional artist and teachers contributed to his artistic knowledge. In 1929 the energy of the Harlem Renaissance caused Beauford Delaney moved New York’s Greenwich Village, where he resided on Greene Street, which he painted countless times. The Greenwich Street painting is an abstract of color and lights that may have represented a release from the repression of home as well as a refusal to express himself.
In a delimited manner he worked as a telephone operator at the Whitney Museum in his early years, In the early 1930’s at a few of his compositions were on exhibit these works were known as figurative compositions of New York Life.
He would receive commissions for his portraits from his friends and admirers including writer, Henry Miller, Marian Anderson, and Al Hirschfeld. These payments allowed him to maintain the cost of his studio and art supplies by his fellow peers who took interest in his Abstract representation know later as abstract expressionism. He had reproduced tight friendships with writers such as James Baldwin whom he would later paint a portrait of. Delaney-gained inclusive acknowledgement for his pastels portraits of well-known African Americans such as W.E. B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington. In 1954 Delaney moved to Paris and spent his remaining years till his death on March 26, 1979. Delaney was known for his friendly nature with people and his love for mankind manifest in his paintings and drawings that stretched from the representational to the
abstract. Dr. Selma Burke, born on December 31, 1900, in Mooresville, NC, Burke was a world renowned sculptor and painter. Although Burke’s parents encourage her interest in art they also recommended a more marketable career. Burke was fortified by her mother to pursue a practical career, Burke, trained as a certified nurse. While working as a nurse she became involved in the Harlem Renaissance and served as a sculptor’s model, all the while preparing to become an artist. She received a M. F. A at Columbia University and later studied art in Europe. Burke was mainly a sculptor, she crafted figures of rugged beauty from wood, bronze, or stone, hewn in a style of almost classical realism. She owes her inspiration to her childhood days on her parents cotton farm, She would squeeze the clay on the farm in her hands, and she states that it was then she had her first experience with sculpture. She was a dedicated teacher, In 1944 President Roosevelt posed for the artist and her completed bronze plaque was unveiled by President Harry Truman in 1945. It can be viewed on the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D. C.; the image was also used on the American ten cent piece (dime). Since the coin bears the initials of the engraver, John Sinnock, Selma Burke has never received proper credit for the portrait. Burke felt that, “Parents should bring things home to their children offering them opportunities early so that they can grow up being aware, self-confident and fearless” (Lewis 99). She provided other African Americans support, help, and motivation during the time of the depression. Some of Burke’s most notable sculptures include Temptation (1938), Despair (1951), Fallen Angel (1958), Mother and Child (1968), and Together (1975). An earlier work Jim (1930’s) depicts her skill in portraiture, in which strong characteristics in the subject give energetic nobility. She also created a nine-foot statue of Martin Luther king, Jr., she completed in her eighties. She died at the age of ninety-four. Lois Mailou Jones, born on November 3, 1905, in Boston, MA she educated at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at Howard University as well. She also studied in New York at Teachers College and, in 1937, attended the Academie ulien, Paris. She became a professor of design and watercolor painting at Howard University for forty years. Many of the art-teachers who are currently contributing to the African American art movement were her students. Jones was an artist who painted and influence others during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Jones began her career at a time when racial prejudices and gender discrimination were strong in American culture. Her artistic style and reason were intertwined by several cultures-French, Haitian, African, and American. This mixtures of influences promotes richness in ethnicity and expression of colors.in her work. Jones art is intriguing to the naked eye, full of spirit and growth. Her compositions are realistic in taste. Jones work of the Negro Boy illustrates self-respect. The use of geometric shapes and bright bold beautiful colors in her work of Deux Coiffeurs d’ Afrique, is an exhilarating composite composition, the lower part of the composition expresses the conventional form, mixing the African influence with Cubism along with her African American experience with a geometric back ground. Jones work shows that she have master the arts in different discipines. Art during the Harlem movement was an outlet for African American artist during this period who decided to accept themselves through self-expression and their heritage. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that gave blacks a new begging through the arts which allow them to exploit their ethnicity while creating a new America for blacks across the world.

Works Cited

Lewis, Samella. African American Art And Artists. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Ltd., 2003.