Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance

Amy Helene Kirschke, Amy Helene Kirschke

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626742079
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art américain

Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier. Including seventy-two black-and-white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers. In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.

CHAPTER ONE

HARLEM AND THE RENAISSANCE: 1920–1940

Cary D. Wintz

What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin? This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the movement we know varyingly as the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question it is necessary to place the movement within time and space, and then to define its nature. This task is much more complex than it might seem.

Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis. It was also traditionally viewed as a male-dominated movement, although it was acknowledged that women poets and writers played a role, but generally as second-tier talent. The names that dominated were male writers—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and others; promoting and guiding the movement were other men: Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles S. Johnson. Jessie Fauset was given some slight credit as a minor novelist, but little was said about her role in nurturing the movement. The significance of Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston would not be fully acknowledged for a half century after the end of the Renaissance. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. However, there was no analysis of the developments in these fields. Likewise art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, but little or no analysis of the work of African American artists. And there was even less discussion or analysis of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater.

Fortunately this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it as a national movement with connections to international developments in art and culture that places increasing emphasis on the nonliterary aspects of the movement, and, of course, brings the participation of women more fully to the center of the movement.

In this essay, I will provide a brief introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, focusing largely on time and place in the emergence of the movement in literature, musical theater, music, and the visual arts. Although of necessity it is limited in scope and detail, I hope to bring awareness to the complexity of its subject.

Time

First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held almost one hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Club on Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League’s monthly magazine, conceived the event to honor writer Jesse Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There is Confusion. Johnson planned a small dinner party with about twenty guests, a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, he agreed only if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist.

So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over one hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group, calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the “new literary age” emerging in America.¹

The Civic Club dinner significantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper’s, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his magazine as soon as the poet finished reading them. As the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, then offered Charles S. Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Under the editorship of Alain Locke, the “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” number of Survey Graphic hit the newsstands March 1, 1925.² It was an overnight sensation. Later that year Locke published a book-length version of the “Harlem” edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Interpretation.³ In the anthology Locke laid down his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a collection of poetry, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on art, literature, and music.

For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the birth occurred three years earlier when Shuffle Along opened at the Sixty-Third Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Along was a musical play written by a pair of veteran vaudeville acts—comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles and composers/singers Eubie Blake and Nobel Sissle. Most of its cast featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had only minor roles in the production, were on their way to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significanceof the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller accomplished something that the other great African American performers—Cole and Johnson, Williams and Walker—had tried, but failed to achieve. “We did it, that’s the story,” he exclaimed, “We put Negroes back on Broadway!”⁴

Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Along as a seminal event in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. It introduced him to the creative world of New York, and it helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process it introduced white New Yorkers to black music, theater, and entertainment and helped generate the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, just arrived in the city, the long-range impact of Shuffle Along was not on his mind. In 1921 it was all about the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was “a honey of a show”:

Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Besides, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Nobel Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second act. Trixie Smith sang “He May Be Your Man, But He Comes to See Me Sometimes.” And Caterina Jarbors, now a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to see it innumerable times. It was always packed.⁵

Shuffle Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring. And, the show was a critical and financial success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned three touring companies. It was a hit show written, performed, and produced by blacks, and it generated a demand for more. Within three years nine other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies.

Music was also a prominent feature of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term Jazz Age was used by many who saw African American music, especially the blues and jazz, as defining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American experience around the turn of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread across the country, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years before to World War I.

Blues and black blues performers such as musician W. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were popular on the vaudeville circuit in the late nineteenth century. The publication of W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” in 1912 and the first recordings a few years later brought this genre into the mainstream of American popular culture. Jazz reportedly originated among the musicians who played in the bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, but it is doubtful that any one person holds that honor. According to James Weldon Johnson jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor’s Twenty-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band there as “a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was called the Memphis Students—a very good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis. There was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass.”⁶ Seven years later composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, one of the “Memphis Students,” took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall; during World War I, while serving as an officer for a machinegun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow officer Nobel Sissle, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.

Following the war, black music, especially the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, but very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem one club opened after another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Nobel Sissle, of course, was one of the team behind the production of Shuffle Along, which opened Broadway up to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles.

The visual arts, particularly painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat later in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. One of the most notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. Later that year his first pieces appeared in Opportunity and ten Douglas pieces appeared as “ten Decorative Designs” illustrating Locke’s The New Negro. Early the next year, W. E. B. Du Bois published Douglas’s first illustrations in the Crisis. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Fire!!, and his role designing book jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the most high-profile artist clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to late 1920s. And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this period.

More significant in launching the art phase of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. The early stirrings of the African American art movement in Harlem followed a 1919 exhibit on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s work at a midtown gallery in New York, and an exhibit of African American artists two years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Even more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933 the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American art. Initially the exhibits were held in New York, but beginning in 1929 the exhibits traveled across the country following their New York debut. Also the Harmon Foundation developed catalogs for the exhibits that attempted to define the nature and the appropriate aesthetic for black art. Alain Locke was influential in the activities of the Harmon Foundation. He served as a judge for the Harmon prizes and influenced the black aesthetic promoted by the foundation in their catalogs and exhibits. While some African American artists and intellectuals accused the Harmon Foundation of exerting undue influence on African American art, and harming young artists by prematurely displaying their works, the foundation’s work certainly provided financial support for artists through its prizes and travel grants and effectively publicized African American visual arts through its exhibits and catalogs.

The Harlem Renaissance was also linked to the social and demographic changes impacting African Americans in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. The most visible of the social forces was the black migration that had begun in the early twentieth century, accelerated during the war, and continued through the 1920s, bringing from the South the hundred thousand or more who would transform Harlem into the Negro metropolis, and impacting cities across the country—north, south, and west. The result was an increasingly urbanized African American population that was national in scope rather than being largely confined to the old South. This migration directly impacted the Harlem Renaissance. Along with the thousands of mostly poor, working-class blacks coming north into Harlem were the musicians, writers, poets, artists, dancers, actors, editors, publishers, critics, businesspersons, professionals, and intellectuals who created and nurtured the Harlem Renaissance. This pattern was repeated in Chicago and other northern cities, as well as in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other cities of the South and West.

Adding to the creative ferment of the period was social and political upheaval. World War I brought in its wake a series of devastating race riots culminating in the 1919 outbreaks in Washington and Chicago, as well as the 1921 Tulsa riot. During this period traditional African American leadership was in a state of transition. The death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 had temporarily left Du Bois and the NAACP as the dominant political voice among African Americans. However, black politics shifted as Marcus Garvey mobilized tens of thousands of supporters and confronted the NAACP and the African American establishment with a mass political movement championing black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, while A. Philip Randolph and the Messenger challenged traditional black leadership from the socialist left. Du Bois, who had turned fifty in 1918, stumbled in his efforts to address issues raised by the world war, and largely failed to connect with the younger, more strident black voices emerging in politics and in the arts.

Place

Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as complex as defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is central to the Harlem Renaissance, but it serves more as an anchor for the movement than as its sole location. In reality the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence across the United States, the Caribbean, and the world. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and only a relatively small number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance period. And yet, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Island north of Central Park and generally east of Eighth Avenue or St. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch village, it evolved over time. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it housed the country estates of the rich, and it remained largely rural or semirural through the mid-nineteenth century, with a mix of poor squatters in the marshes and mudflats along the Harlem River, and weekend homes of the wealthy in the uplands. Following its annexation by the city in 1873 the marshes and mudflats were filled in and building lots were sold. The resulting ...