When Did We See a Rise in African Americans Pursuing the Arts

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s) was an African-American cultural movement known for its proliferation in art, music, and literature.

Learning Objectives

Discuss the characteristics, themes, and contributing factors of the Harlem Renaissance

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The cultural and political Harlem Renaissance produced visual art, novels, plays, poems, music, and trip the light fantastic toe that represented the flowering of a distinctive African-American expression.
• Along with the artists, political leaders such equally Marcus Garvey founded potent philosophies of black self-determination and unity among black communities in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.
• Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s, during the Nifty Migration in which many African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the Due south.
• While there was no unifying characteristic of the motility, common themes included the influence of slavery, black identity, the effects of institutional racism, and how to convey the feel of modern black life in the urban North.
• Notable visual artists of the movement include Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley, Charles Henry Alston, and Jacob Lawrence.

Key Terms

• Red Summer: The race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities in the U.s. during the summer and early autumn of 1919.
• race riots: Riots caused past racial hatred or dissension. They occurred throughout the 20th century, specially before and during the Civil Rights Move.
• greasepaint: A style of theatrical makeup in which a white person blackens their face in order to represent a negro.

Overview

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in the United states that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. While the zenith of the movement occurred betwixt 1924 and 1929, its ideas have lived on much longer. At the fourth dimension, it was known as the New Negro Movement, named later the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke.

This cultural and political renaissance produced novels, plays, murals, poems, music, dance, and other artwork that represented the flowering of a distinctive African-American expression. Along with the artists, political leaders such as Marcus Garvey founded potent philosophies of self-decision and unity among black communities in the The states, the Caribbean area, and Africa.

At the aforementioned time, activists like Hubert Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance, arguing that the term was largely a white invention that overlooked the continuous stream of creativity that had emerged from the African-American community since 1850.

Harlem's Background

The district of Harlem had originally developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper classes. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the tardily 19th century, the once sectional district was abandoned by whites, who moved farther north.

Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early on 1900s, during the Great Migration in which many sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the Southward. Others of African descent came from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean area, seeking a better life in the U.South. By 1930, 90,000 new arrivals joined the African-Americans already living there, creating a community of nearly 200,000.

Despite the increasing popularity of black culture, virulent white racism continued to bear on African-American communities. Race riots and other ceremonious uprisings occurred throughout the U.S. during the Carmine Summertime of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs, housing, and social territories.

Characteristics and Themes

What characterized the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride and the developing idea of a new blackness identity, that through intellect and product of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and promote progressive politics.

There was no uniting form characterizing the art that emerged, however. It encompassed a wide variety of styles, including Pan-African perspectives; loftier civilization and depression civilization; traditional music to blues and jazz; traditional and experimental forms in literature, such as modernism; and the new form of jazz poetry.

Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of slavery, black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas of performing and writing for elite white audiences, and how to convey the experience of modern black life in the urban North.

New authors attracted a smashing amount of national attention, and the Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to exist published by mainstream houses. Some authors who became nationally known were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Eric D. Walrond, and Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes: Langston Hughes was one of the most well-known writers to sally from the Harlem Renaissance.

A new way of playing the piano chosen Harlem Stride was also created during the Renaissance, and jazz musicians like Fats Waller, Knuckles Ellington, Jelly Curlicue Morton, and Willie "The Lion" Smith are considered to have laid the foundation for futurity musicians of their genre.

Visual artists of the time included Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Leslie Bolling, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Archibold Motley.

Blackness Belt (original painting in colour): Archibald Motley is nearly famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance.

Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas was a notable artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Afterwards completing his BFA at the University of Nebraska in 1922, Douglas moved to New York Urban center, settling in Harlem. Just a few months after his arrival he began to produce illustrations for both The Crisis and Opportunity, the two most important magazines associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

He besides began studying with Winold Reiss, a German artist who had been hired by Alain Locke to illustrate The New Negro. Reiss' teaching helped Douglas develop the modernist style he would employ for the next decade.

Douglas' engagement with African and Egyptian design brought him to the attention of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Locke, who were pressing for young African-American artists to limited their African heritage and African-American folk culture in their art.

In 1926 Douglas married Alta Sawyer. They lived together in Harlem and for the next several years, opened their dwelling to an of import, powerful circumvolve of artists and writers we at present phone call the Harlem Renaissance.

Charles Henry Alston

Charles Henry Alston (November 28, 1907–Apr 27, 1977) was an African-American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist, and instructor who lived and worked in Harlem. Alston was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration'southward Federal Art Project.

Alston designed and painted murals at the Harlem Hospital and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Edifice. In 1990 Alston's bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. became the first paradigm of an African-American displayed at the White House.

In the offset, Charles Alston'southward landscape work was inspired past the work of Aaron Douglas, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco, the latter who he met when they did landscape piece of work in New York. In 1943 Alston was elected to the board of directors of the National Society of Mural Painters.

He created murals for the Harlem Hospital, Golden State Mutual, American Museum of Natural History, Public School 154, the Bronx Family and Criminal Court, and the Abraham Lincoln High Schoolhouse in Brooklyn, New York.

Mod Medicine: Alston's landscape at the Harlem Hospital is a significant work of the Harlem Renaissance.

Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life. But non only was he a painter, storyteller, and interpreter, he also was an educator. Lawrence referred to his fashion as dynamic cubism, though by his own account the chief influence was non then much French fine art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.

He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with brilliant colors. He as well taught, and spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Washington.

Lawrence is amongst the best-known 20th-century African-American painters. He was 23 years old when he gained national recognition with his 60-panel Migration Series, painted on cardboard. The series depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural S to the urban Due north. A part of this series was featured in a 1941 upshot of Fortune Mag. The collection is now held by two museums.

Lawrence'south works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art, the Museum of Modern Fine art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Reynolda Business firm Museum of American Art. He is widely known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as epic narratives of African American history and historical figures.

Jacob Lawrence, Self Portrait: This painting, done in 1977, exemplifies the vivid use of color in his work.

American Regionalist Art

Regionalism refers to a naturalist and realist style of painting that dominated American rural painting in the 1930s.

Learning Objectives

Define the American painting style of Regionalism

Fundamental Takeaways

Key Points

• After World War I, many American artists rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Evidence and European influences such as those from the Schoolhouse of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt bookish realism to describe American rural scenes.
• Past the 1940s there was a strong debate amid the Regionalists and the Social Realists in rural areas, whose work addressed social, economic, and political bug; and the Abstract artists in New York City who embraced Modernism.
• Using a realist arroyo, the artistic focus of Regionalism was to create scenes of rural life past artists who shunned city life and rapidly developing technological advances.
• Regionalist style was at its elevation from 1930 to 1935, and is all-time-known through the so-called Regionalist Triumvirate of Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, and John Steuart Curry in Kansas.

Key Terms

• social realism: An creative movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts that depicts social injustice and economical hardship through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles that often depict working-class activities every bit heroic.
• School of Paris: A school of art that represented the importance of Paris equally a center of Western art in the early decades of the 20th century, and where a grouping of artists including Picasso, Chagall, Mondrian, and Matisse created in the styles of Postal service-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism.
• Arsenal show: The 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized past the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. The exhibition ran in New York City's 69th Regiment Arsenal from February 17 until March 15, and became an of import result in the history of American art, introducing New Yorkers to modern fine art.

Overview of American Regionalism

Regionalism, also known as American scene painting, refers to a naturalist manner of painting that was prevalent during the 1920s through the 1950s in the Usa. Later Globe War I, many American artists rejected the modernistic trends that emanated from the Arsenal Show and European influences, choosing instead to prefer an academic realism to describe American rural scenes.

Partly due to the Great Depression, Regionalism became ane of the dominant art movements in America in the 1930s (the other being Social Realism). At the time, the United states was notwithstanding a heavily agronomical nation with a much smaller portion of its population living in industrial cities such as New York City or Chicago.

A debate betwixt brainchild versus realism had been ongoing since the 1913 Armory Show, and this continued throughout the 1930s among Regionalism, Social Realism, and Abstract art. By the 1940s this debate evolved into two camps that were divided geographically and politically:

1. The Regionalists and the Social Realists who primarily lived in rural areas and whose work addressed social, economic, and political issues.
2. The Abstruse artists who primarily lived in New York City and embraced Modernism.

Regionalism'southward eventual loss of condition in the fine art world is mainly a effect of the ultimate triumph of Abstract expressionism, when Modernist critics gained power in the 1940s.

The Regionalists and the Social Realists

Using a realist approach, Regionalist artists shunned metropolis life and its rapidly developing technological advances to create scenes of rural life. In Grant Woods's pamphlet Revolt Against the City, published in Iowa City in 1935, he asserts that American artists and buyers of art were no longer looking to Parisian culture for subject field affair and style.

Wood wrote that Regional artists interpret the physiography, industry, and psychology of their hometown, and that the competition of these preceding elements creates American culture. He wrote that the lure of the city was gone, and hoped that art of the widely diffused "whole people" would prevail.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere: This painting by Grant Forest, done in 1931, exemplifies a typical Regionalist depiction of pocket-size-town America.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Regionalist art was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the American heartland. Much of the piece of work conveyed a sense of nationalism and romanticism in depictions of everyday American life.

During the 1930s, these artists documented and depicted American small-scale towns and rural landscapes, too equally cities; the works which stress local and pocket-size-boondocks themes are oft called American Regionalism, and those depicting urban scenes, with political and social consciousness, are chosen Social Realism.

Some artists depicted images as a way to render to a simpler fourth dimension abroad from industrialization, whereas others sought to make a political argument and lent their art to revolutionary and radical causes.

Cut the Line: This 1944 artwork past Thomas Hart Benton shows the launch of a Tank Landing Transport (LST). Benton is considered past many art critics to be the quintessential American creative person of the 20th Century, and during World War II was commissioned by Abbott Laboratories to produce artworks near the Navy.

Regionalist style was at its superlative from 1930 to 1935, and is best-known through the so-called Regionalist Triumvirate of Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, and John Steuart Back-scratch in Kansas.

Other artists of the motility include John Rogers Cox, Alexandre Hogue, Dale Nichols, and William S. Schwartz. Many artists involved in the motility studied with or nether Benton at the Kansas Urban center Art Plant (KCAI), such every bit John Stockton de Martelly, Frederic James, and Pat Potucek.

American Gothic: Grant Woods'due south best-known work is this 1930 painting, which is also one of the most famous paintings in American fine art, and 1 of the few images to achieve the status of universally recognized cultural icon, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream.

Photography during the Great Depression

During the 1930s and 1940s, photography evolved in terms of its technical possibilities besides equally its part every bit an art form.

Learning Objectives

Describe the evolution of photography from 1930–1945

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• In 1935–1936 both Kodak and Agfa introduced new colour film technologies that allowed for the proliferation of color photography for the start fourth dimension.
• Social realism extended to photography, and depicted social injustice and economic hardship through unvarnished pictures of life'south struggles. Working-class activities were ofttimes depicted as heroic.
• Group f/64, led by Ansel Adams, was a group of vii San Francisco photographers who shared a common photographic way characterized past precipitous-focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint.
• The FSA funded a number of photographers to document the realities of the Low and who created the iconic images that we even so see today.

Central Terms

• Harlem Renaissance: An African-American cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s and is characterized past a proliferation of music, literature, poetry and dance.
• pictorialism: A school of artistic photography that emphasized using photography to mimic certain styles of contemporary painting, and flourished in the belatedly 19th and early 20th centuries. Images were typically characterized by a soft focus and color or brushstroke manipulation.
• Cracking Depression: A major economic collapse that lasted from 1929 to 1940 in the United States.

Overview

The period from 1930–1945 in American history is marked by the Slap-up Low and the outbreak of the second Globe War. During this fourth dimension, both photography and sculpture expanded into new realms of creative expression, heavily influenced past the club and times.

Photography

Photographic engineering continued to expand throughout the 20th century. Kodachrome, the offset modern integral tripack (or monopack) color film, was introduced by Kodak in 1935, and Agfa's similarly structured Agfacolor Neu was introduced in 1936. These new technologies immune for the proliferation of color photography for the first time, and currently available color films still employ a multilayer emulsion and the aforementioned principles, most closely resembling Agfa's production.

Social Realism

Social realism, also known as socio-realism, became an important art movement during the Smashing Depression in the 1930s. Social realism depicted social and racial injustice, and economic hardship through unvarnished pictures of life'south struggles, and frequently portrayed working-class activities as heroic.

The movement was largely a style of painting that typically conveyed a message of social or political protest edged with satire; however, it as well extended to the art of photography. Prominent photographers at the fourth dimension included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Doris Ulmann, Berenice Abbott, Aaron Siskind, and Russell Lee, among several others.

Each of these artists sought to describe the world–and oftentimes the poverty–they saw around them with the realistic portrayal that merely photography could provide.

The FSA

The Farm Security Administration, part of the New Deal, was an effort during the Depression to gainsay American rural poverty. The bulk of the program was directed towards rural rehabilitation, just it is too known for funding the work of a number of photographers.

From 1935–1944, the Subcontract Security Assistants employed several photographers to document the effects of the Great Depression on the population of America. The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public.

Under Roy Stryker, the Information Segmentation of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, were fostered by the FSA project.

Migrant Female parent: The explanation of the prototype reads: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Female parent of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California." Lange'southward image of a supposed migrant pea picker, Florence Owens Thompson, and her family has become an icon of resilience in the confront of adversity.

Group F/64

Aslope social realism, another approach to photography, referred to as directly photography, was also gaining momentum. Grouping f/64 is perhaps the near well-known case of this art movement.

Grouping f/64 was a group of seven, 20th-century San Francisco photographers who shared a mutual photographic mode characterized past abrupt-focused and advisedly framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialism motion in photography that had dominated much of the early on 20th century, but moreover they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and establish objects.

Photographers involved in the group included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston.

Yosemite Trees with Snowfall on Branches, by Ansel Adams: Ansel Adams was one of the co-founders of Group f/64, a group of photographers known who shared a common style characterized past sharp-focused and carefully framed images.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/art-in-the-us-during-the-1920s-and-1930s/

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