Hi guys!
It's time to continue the "Art I love" serie!
The artist I'm going to introduce today is Aaron Douglas, African-American artist who was member of the Harlem Reinassance, the artistic and cultural movement that has influenced the artist we met with the first post of the serie, Faith Ringgold.
Who is Aaron Douglas.
Aaron Douglas born in 1899 in Topeka, a city of Kansas (USA) with a politically active African-American community. His father was a baker and his mother was an housewife with passion for painting. Aaron got his love for art from admirig her mother's watercolor paitings and he demostrated his talent an early age. After Hight Schools he moved to Detroit where he held various jobs and he attended free classes at the Detroit Museum of Art before attending college at University of Nebraska where he received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1922.
He worked as waiter until 1923 and he teached visual arts at the Lincoln Hight School until 1925, but he wanted to take his art carrier to Paris (France), as many artists wanted too at that time. During his journey to Paris he visited Harlem, neighborhood of New York, where he met the members of the Harlem Reinassance who convinced him to stay there and develop his art in the city.
Durig that period Douglas studied art under the German portraitist Winold Reiss who encouraged him to work on the African-centric theme that later would have distinguished the whole Douglas's art.
He worked also as illustrator and art director for some magazines as "The Crisis" (official magazine of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and "Opportunity" (magazine born in association with the Harlem Reinassance), he had pubblications on magazine as Vanity Fair and Theatre Art Mothly. He worked on illustrations for some writers of Harlem Reinassance, being not just an illustrator but thinker and architect of the political ideology of the movement, becoming the leader. Important but with short life was the magazine FIRE!!, published once on December 1926.
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| Cover of the magazine "The Crisis" illustrated by Aaron Douglas. |
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| Cover of FIRE!!! 1926, illustrated by Aaron Douglas |
In 1927 the Ebony Club commissioned the first mural painting, in the next years he joined various exhibitions and worked on many mural artworks both for public and private customers.
In 1944 he received his Master of Arts degree from Columbia University Teacher's College and he moved to Nashville, to found and sit as the chairman of the Art Department at Fisk University, in the same year he was founding director of the Carl Van Vechten Galley of Fine art, where he included artworks from both Black and white artists, encouraging his students to study African-American art and to uderstand its necessity in a white predominating society.
He stopped teaching in 1966 and he died at age of 79 in 1979.
The art of Aaron Douglas.
Durig his carrier Douglas had two different styles: as portraitist he had a traditional style and as illustrator and muralist his style was graphic and abstract.
Encouraged by his teacher Winold Reiss, Douglas has been the first to focus his art on the Africa-American theme, working on the connection between the African and African-American populations, connection represented by the music, the dance, the imaginary and the poetry, focusing the attention on racism and segregation.
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| Aaron Douglas, Untitled (seated man with head resting), oil on canvas, c.1935 |
His art can be defined graphic and abstract, with influences by cubism and African masks inspirations, with implements of the rithm of jazz in the compositions.
The figures are long and edgy silhouettes, they are without faces, bidimentional, symbolic and general, to give a sense of unity between African and African-American people. At the biginnings he used mainly black and white and lately he added a small selection of colors as blues, greens, browns, yellows, mauve.
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| Sahdji (Tribal Women), 1925. |
The illustration "Sahdji" was one of the first artworks inspired to the African-American theme.
Here Douglas experimented with elements from Art Deco, Art Noveau, Cubism and Egiptyan style, as you can see by the female silhouettes on the background.
From the Art Noveau and Art Deco he adopted the abstract geometrical shapes that he arranged symmetrically, the fragmented space and lack of single-point perspective reveal the influence of Cubism.
Women bodies are curvy and twisted, as if they are dancing and the whole composition give a sense on rithm. These are the key elements that Douglas developed and used with his whole art.
Through his carriere Douglas had interest in the representation of Black women and with "Sahdji" he enphasized their beauty: thik lips, curvy bodies and African-American profiles, as opposed to the general idea that white women with their thin lips and straight noses are the ultimate symbol of beauty.
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| Harriet Tubman, 1931. Oil on Canvas |
The mural "Harriet Tubman" was commissioned for the Bennett College for Women of Greensboro, South Carolina.
At the centre of the painting is Harriet Tubman, woman who freed over 400 slaves through her work with the Underground Railroad. The protagonist, represented as a paladin, raises the arms broking a set of shackles, her face is turned toward a group of women and men bent under the load of slavery and with chained arms. Under Harriet there's a cannon with smoke turned toward the right side of the painting, where you can see a group of men, women and children intent on resting, reading, holding a hoe. Concentric cirlcles of different hues (another stylistic signature of Douglas) focus the attention on the smoke of the cannon while a beam of light highlights Harriet.
We can read this artwork as a narration, from the left to the right.
At first we see slavery and bondage, then the abolitionism together with the Civil War (represented by Herriet Tubman and the cannon) and the emancipation (broken chains), at the end we see Black people free to do what they want: providing to their own families, working and farming for themselves, free to enjoy rest, to have access to aducation and to build their communities in urban areas (the towers).
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| The Negro In An African Setting. (From the serie Aspects of Negro Life) , 1934. Oil on Canvas |
In 1934 he made a serie of four murals for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library titled "Aspects of Negro Life". The paintings included The Negro In An African Setting, An Idyll of the Deep South, From Slavery Through Reconstruction, and Song of the Towers. The artworks represent various aspects of cultural history of African-American people, from African roots, slavery, Emancipation, post-Reconstruction, and the Great Migration north.
The Negro In An African Setting, represents life of Black people in Africa before the slavery era. Douglas painted a group of men during a ritual dance, the atmosphere looks joyous and energic.
The focal point is the triangle formed by the bodies of the two men in the centre and by the small totem.
The circle, the different hues and the composition make this painting dynamic. The artist said about this painting "The first of the four panels reveals the Negro in an African setting and emphasizes the strongly rhythmic arts of music, the dance, and sculpture, which have influenced the modern world possibly more profoundly than any other phase of African life. The fetish, the drummer, the dancers, in the formal language of space and color, suggest the exhilaration, the ecstasy, the rhythmic pulsation of life in ancient Africa"
This painting has been criticized by may of his contemporaries who accused Douglas of promoting a stereotyped image of Black people, playig into racism. Many others defended the artsist affirming that his paintings have not made done for a white audience who look passively at Black culture but for a Black audience interested in African cultur as part of its own dignity, proudness and self-awareness.
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| An Idyll of the Deep South (1934). Oil on canvas. |
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| From Slavery Through Reconstruction, 1934. Oil on canvas |
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| Song of the Towers,1934. Oil on canvas. |
Here some more paintings.
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| Charleston, 1928. Gouache |
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| Aspirations, 1936. Oil |
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| Into bondage, 1936. Oil |
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| Congo, 1928. |
Hi hope you enjoyed this article!
I foud very interesting and inspiring doing researches about this great artist of the Harlem Reinassance and share them with you!
I love his graphic style and the use of colors. I love when art is used to tell something important.
What do you think? Do you like Aaron Dougla's art? Let me know your though!
See you soo and fluffy hugs!
Sara and Pablo.
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