The Met’s Harlem Renaissance Show Is Outstandingly Joyful

This “New Negro” buried Jim Crowe caricatures under plurality and dimension: there was literature from W.E.B. Du Bois, jazz by Louis Armstrong, paintings by Archibald Motley and Laura Wheeler Waring, and magazines like The Crisis (The official magazine of the NAACP, of which W.E.B. Du Bois was the founding editor) pieces of all of which The Met proudly presents. Yet the reach of the Harlem Renaissance extended well past New York’s city limits to the cultural scenes of Chicago, as well as Paris and London as African and Caribbean migrants made their way across Western Europe. 

Curator Murrell’s triumph lies in the steady, forceful, but playful articulation of the notion that the movement was unrestrictedly global, it spanned a variety of media, and it was fundamentally present.

Evidence of the Harlem Renaissance’s universality saturates The Met’s Gallery 999 using nods to Egyptian funerary masks in Ronald Moody’s sculpture, L’Homme (1937), and scatterings of Edvard Munch and Henri Matisse, each situated to fabricate a cycle of artistic influence. The Met prints the debatably unfair demand with which many 20th-century Black American or European artists were burdened—that was to adhere stylistically to either African or Western aesthetics. Writer and ‘philosopher architect’ of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke, whose best-known work was the anthology The New Negro, wrote in favor imitating and therefore revitalizing African and Egyptian aesthetics. Others, however, preferred W.E.B. Du Bois’ interest in academic and contemporary techniques. The Met presents both perspectives in equal measure. 

The exhibition is organized into various sections that showcase the facets of Black artistic genius from different angles. The first section, “The Thinkers,” offers portraits of Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes with early editions of their great works, The New Negro, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and One-Way Ticket, respectively. Later sections such as “Everyday Life in the New Black Cities” and “Portraiture and the Modern Black Subject” offer works that give snapshots of quotidian society, with dances, meals, and ordinary activities. “Still Life,” “Landscapes,” and “European Modernism and the Transatlantic Diaspora” axiomatically nod toward European influences over American art, deeming the Harlem Renaissance the latest installment in dominant artistic legacies. 

The Harlem Renaissance also touts a staggering variety of media, ranging from oil on canvas and watercolor on graphite paper to photography by James Van Der Zee and films by Oscar Micheaux. The show’s determined multi-modal display reflects the rich output of Black talents, which are so often overshadowed by narratives of slavery and violence in the contemporary collective conscience. The variety and sheer volume of art demonstrate the skill and play of the Harlem Renaissance.

The section entitled “Cultural Philosophy and History Painting” devotes a display to the works of Aaron Douglas, the period’s most celebrated history painter. Douglas created large-scale works that served as illustrations for James Weldon Johnson’s book God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). The paintings Creation (1935), Noah Built the Ark (1935), Let My People Go (1935-39), and Judgement Day (1939) blend Black identity and modernity with antediluvian and traditionally White doctrines, while Douglas’ Still Life perpetuates the Dutch tradition. 

These European values are reiterated in “Motley in Paris: The New Negro Artist Abroad,” the section of Archibald Motley’s paintings—such as Dans la rue, Paris (1929) and Blues (1929)—that reflected the artist’s enjoyment of Parisian lifestyles, as many Black American artists did when they visited France. Largely unencumbered by images of slavery or violence, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism reconfigures a viewer’s concept of Black art by detaching tragedy from activism.

The playfulness of this exhibition is what makes it such a joy to experience; the Harlem Renaissance successfully rewrites The Met’s critically-derided first attempt at an exhibition on African-American art, the 1969 Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900—1968, which caused a scandal for not including artwork by African American artists. Where that exhibition was utterly barren of artwork and resisted dialoguing with the Civil Rights movement, The Harlem Renaissance surveys how a great movement endures across geographical and cultural strata. Explosive, pluralistic, and above all, current, The Harlem Renaissance is a refreshing celebration.

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 28, 2024.