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Harlem Renaissance Artist Aaron Douglas
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"Emperor Jones" by Aaron Douglas, gouache on board
Whether making small block prints or huge murals, Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas (1898-1979) knew how to swing a design. Within the rectangles of his frames, streamers of light shoot out toward the world, while concentric circles pull your gaze straight into the bull’s eye of the scene.
In a portable mural Douglas did for Harlem’s Schomburg library in 1934, two African dancers tilt back and seem to spin in a centrifuge. Below them, the canvas almost vibrates with the rhythms conga players beat on tree-trunk drums. Douglas also uses geometry to bust his subjects out of their frames. That’s one way he breaks down the walls between art and life.
“There’s Harriet Tubman!” murmured a goateed guy, in a herringbone cap, when he walked into the Schomburg Center’s first floor art gallery on Malcolm X Boulevard and 135th Street on a recent afternoon. He made a beeline for the green and white “Harriet Tubman” painting, which shows her emerging from the bonds of slavery, and paused for a long moment before intoning, “Break those chains!”, like an orator or a poet, launching into a rap.
If the art of Douglas summons up drumbeats and eloquence, it’s no accident. As one of the members of the movement we now call the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas was there in the mid-1920s when Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and a whole generation of young African American artists were listening to blues, jazz and proto-rap and figuring out how to weave those fibers into their own work.
A 1926 portrait painted by Douglas—shortly after he arrived in Harlem from his home state, Kansas—shows a young Hurston sitting upright in a chair, dressed in a proper felt hat. There is little in this conventional pastel to hint at the ground-breaking work that both the painter and his subject were already involved in, but it’s a lovely reminder of the friendships and collaborations that flourished in 1920s Harlem.
Douglas came to New York in 1925 with an art degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln already in his pocket. In Manhattan, he studied art with German émigré artist Winold Reiss and went to work in the mailroom of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, then edited by writer W.E.B. Du Bois. Eventually Du Bois commissioned Douglas to design covers and illustrations for the magazine and write art criticism too. During the twenties, Douglas also did book jackets and illustrations for poets and writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson.
In 1926 Douglas and a group of Harlem friends, including Hughes, Hurston, Wallace Thurman and Richard Nugent, started a cutting edge magazine, Fire!! that published younger writers and discussed things like jazz, the blues and homosexuality—controversial subjects in those days. Two beautiful line drawings Douglas did for the magazine—one of a preacher and another of a painter—bring to mind Alexander Calder’s wire sculptures done around the same time in Paris and suggest the wide range of styles Douglas worked in.
After the first issue of Fire!! was attacked by Harlem’s older generation, Douglas and his friends were unable to raise money and the magazine folded. But the young, African American modernists had officially announced their arrival on the New York scene.
At the Schomburg exhibition, which ran from August 30-November 30, you could see how Douglas was influenced by the artistic currents of Cubism and German Expressionism—even before he traveled overseas. During the twenties, he was fired up by the European interest in African and Egyptian art and—as an African-American artist—he integrated elements from all these traditions into his very own way of seeing.
Douglas’s black-and-white silhouette prints for poems by Langston Hughes, and his grey-tone illustrations for James Weldon Johnson’s book of sermons in verse, “God’s Trombones,” show what a master designer he was. To this day, his use of flat shapes and silhouettes continues to influence many African-American artists. Even the art star of the moment, Kara Walker, owes a debt to the pioneering work of Douglas.
By the late 1920s Douglas had expanded beyond prints, canvases and illustrations and begun to paint murals in public spaces. The flowering of his public art coincided with the Great Depression. The worldwide economic collapse that began in 1929 and continued through the 1930s hurt almost everyone. But those who had been poor to start with—including most African Americans—suffered most of all.
Douglas and some of his friends were lucky. As artists, they were hired by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and, later, the Work Projects Administration (WPA) to paint murals, write guidebooks and collaborate on many government-funded projects. Even though Douglas was happily employed during much of the thirties, watching his people struggle with unemployment and poverty politicized him.
The murals he painted during the thirties deal with social and historical themes and look out at the world in a way his earlier work hadn’t. Commissioned by PWAP in 1934 to paint “Aspects of Negro Life,” a four-mural series for Harlem’s Schomburg Library, Douglas created some of his most memorable works. His riffs on African-American culture and history still hang in the Schomburg today, as a testament to what is possible when an enlightened government supports a talented artist.
Standing in front of the mural of the tilting dancers recently, I was mesmerized by its movement and rhythm. With its Afro-Cubist composition, it radiated a level of energy few murals do. Yet, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the muted mauve colors. Everything—from the palm fronds edging the scene, to the drum skins and the near-naked bodies of the dancers—was one shade or another of grayish purple. Why would Douglas create such a vibrant design but choose such a somber pallet? I wondered.
As I circled the room, studying each of the four large works in the series—all painted in muted mauves or gray-greens—I found myself wishing they were brighter and more color-saturated or even painted in black, white and grey, like Picasso’s mural, “Guernica.”
Might the painter have been colorblind? I quickly discarded that simplistic answer. Surely, Douglas made a conscious decision to go for the dull shades of hospital corridors and jungle camouflage. Was this his way of rejecting the stereotyping of black Americans, even as his paid tribute to their roots on the African continent?
Later I found an article about an art restorer who--in 2003--had worked on the murals Douglas painted in 1930 for the library at Fisk University in Nashville. Douglas himself had done restoration work on his murals, thirty years after he’d painted them and—the more recent restorer discovered—in 1969, Douglas had taken the opportunity to change his own color palette, making the murals darker and more somber than he’d painted them originally.
For me, this only deepened the mystery of Aaron Douglas and his color choices. I wished I could go back in time and ask the man a few questions over a cup of coffee.
“So, what are your thoughts on color theory?” I would query him, as we sipped our java and watched the crowds pass the windows of an old-time coffee shop on Lenox Avenue. “What’s with the mauve half-tones and the camo greens?”
Then maybe Mr. Douglas would launch into a long, philosophical explanation. Or maybe he’d just reply tartly, “That’s the way I like it.”
Either way, I would have my answer. Of course, it can never happen—not in this life. But, at the Schomburg, I did meet a woman who knew the artist back in 1958.
“He was my neighbor across the hall, when I was a student at Fisk,” she was telling the goateed man in the herringbone cap. Now who wouldn’t be tempted to eavesdrop on that?
“I knew him. But I had no idea who he was. Every now and then he’d come out of his door at the same time I was coming out of mine. And I’d peer into his apartment and see paintings on the wall, and I’d think—not bad. Not bad at all! Now I wish I’d asked him if I could buy one.”
Never one to stay out of a good New York conversation, I couldn’t resist interjecting. “Excuse me. But what year was that?”
“I started med school there in 1958,” she answered with a faraway look in her eyes. “Aaron Douglas must have been around 59 years old at the time.” Then she and her goateed guy said goodby to me, and they were off, into the Harlem afternoon.
I’d already spent a couple of hours perusing the Douglas exhibit, but my day with Aaron Douglas wasn’t over yet.
“Are you a writer?” asked an octogenarian with a beard and wispy white hair, who approached when he saw me scribbling in my spiral notebook.
“Yes,” I answered. “So am I,” he said. And he immediately started talking about the influence of German expressionism on Douglas.
“I read he painted a mural at the Harlem YMCA. Do you know if it’s still there?” I asked.
“I don’t. But the Y is just up the street. I think we should go over there and find out,” he answered. And so we did.
It was getting dark and windy as we walked east on 135th Street toward the historic old Y, where famous African Americans including Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin have stayed. Not so very long ago, many of Manhattan’s hotels, and even the YMCAs downtown, accepted whites only. The Harlem Y has provided a haven for generations of black men who have come to the city.
In the lobby of the Y, a young woman looked at us curiously. “Can I help you?” she asked.
When we told her we would like to see the mural by Aaron Douglas, she led us into a vault-like room where a group of elderly men sat around folding tables.
“In just a minute we’ll be serving dinner here to the people in our transitional housing program,” she explained.
We looked up to see a half-moon-shaped mural in blacks, whites and grays, set into a vaulted arch. Under a canopy of leaves, silhouetted figures danced, while others knelt or tilted their heads toward heaven. In the center, a tall figure in a top hat and tails stood beside a tiny woman whose starchy skirt stood out around her like a bell. To one side, a man in a bowler hat sat, plunking a banjo. It was a scene that seemed to speak from a distant time, like a dusty hymnbook that lay open to a half-remembered tune.
The lights in the room were dim, but we could see that paint on the mural was peeling.
“It looks like it could use some restoration work,” I commented to a smiling man who walked over to introduce himself as the transitional housing specialist.
“Indeed it does,” he agreed. “And it was just restored recently. But the dampness is seeping through again.”
It was time for dinner to be served, and we were ushered out to the lobby. In a minute, we’d thank the staff, and head down the windy street again. But before we left, I couldn’t help but turn around and look into the big room once more.
Inside there was a muffled hum as the somber-faced gentlemen lined up for their plates of food. It was a melancholy scene that could as easily have come out the1930s as the twenty-first century.
Then I looked up into the shadows of the vaulted arch and it seemed to me that the figures in the Douglas mural had formed a circle. Slowly, they swayed back and forth, and, from somewhere in the distance, I thought I could hear a voice singing, strong and clear.
Note: The show “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist” closed on November 30. But the four murals, “Aspects of Negro Life,” will be back on view in the Shomburg Center’s general research and reference room soon. His mural “Evolution of the Negro Dance” is on display at the Harlem YMCA.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York NY 10037. Phone: 212-491-2259
YMCA, Harlem Branch, 180 West 135 Street, New York NY 10030. Phone: 212-912-2113
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