Art
Legacy "Building More Stately Mansions," 1944
If poet Langston Hughes created the most memorable literary voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas provided its visual voice. As a member of the circle of writers, musicians and artists who coalesced in New York in the 1920s, Douglas developed an unmistakable graphic language that reached its highest expression in mural projects. His style provided an important strand of aesthetic DNA for African American art that followed. In 1937, this pioneering artist came to Nashville to take a position in the Fisk University Art Department, where he spent the next 30 years making art and training new generations of artists.
The Frist Center’s current show takes an in-depth look at the work of Aaron Douglas, arguably the most historically significant artist to be based in Nashville. The exhibit provides a thorough review of his major works, the components and development of his style, and his place in cultural history. At the same time, Fisk University is showing some of its holdings of Douglas’ art in its gallery on the third floor of the campus’s main library. These two exhibits show the range and depth of Douglas’ interests.
Douglas is known for a style he applied in public works—murals, book and magazine covers, and illustrations for volumes of poetry and prose by his cohorts in the Harlem Renaissance, including Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. The elements include simplified figures presented in silhouette, overlays of geometric forms that create internal motion and guide the eye, and the juxtaposition of multiple events in one scene. The basic style has much in common with Art Deco, but it draws on African and Egyptian art in a pronounced way. Particularly in his murals, he often utilized recurring motifs that serve as succinct symbols of core ideas—the aspirations of African Americans, their escape from bondage and repression, the opportunities in modern life, and the role of self-expression in music, dance, literature and other arts.
This is art with a purpose. A painting of Harriet Tubman shows a woman standing on top of a hill, surrounded by figures representing the transition from bondage to freedom in the modern world. She raises her arms, holding a set of broken shackles. Like most of Douglas’ murals, her eyes are represented by thin slits, and otherwise her face contains no details, just an outline. This is not a portrait, but a symbolic invocation of Tubman’s historical achievements as a liberator and guide.
In general, Douglas’ murals and graphic design sought to communicate clear ideas to a viewer. Art had a job—in fact, work shows up everywhere in his paintings. Factories appear in many works, references to the contribution of black workers to production processes. The painting “Building More Stately Mansions” celebrates modern black workers—from laborers to scientists—as the inheritors of a legacy handed down from ancestors who built the pyramids of Egypt. Several other works here show black figures toiling in fields or at other manual jobs. A key message is that African Americans derive identity and dignity from their historical role as people who work—during slavery against their will, but during the new era for their own advancement. Part of the power of Douglas’ message is that being a maker, a builder, is not new to his people. It’s what they’ve done all along without credit. Douglas claims the credit due them.
If we think of Douglas as a worker himself, in many cases the purpose of his labor was to show the role of the word in bringing forth a new era of black life in America. For one thing, an important part of his output was directly devoted to writing, in the form of illustrations for books, poems or journals, taking inspiration from the literary sources but also helping them reach their audience.
Other works also dramatize the role of the word. “Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction,” one panel from a series of four painted for the Works Progress Administration in 1934, combines three scenes of post-Civil War times—the emancipation of slaves, the emergence of African Americans as political players, and their retreat under assault from the KKK and the forces of reaction. One Douglas device was to superimpose concentric circles over his mural scenes, drawing the eye to one element or the other. This work has two circles—one centered on the piece of paper a military officer holds, from which he reads (presumably) the Emancipation Proclamation, a second one zeroing in on a tract in the hand of a black orator. Two documents, one that held the words that gave blacks their freedom, a second one through which they define themselves as actors in history who claim their freedom for themselves. Douglas does not show the words, just the paper—the words themselves are not as important as the function they played. The Emancipation Proclamation is a perfect example of a performance utterance, in which the words do not describe an action, but the speaking of the words is in itself the action. In this painting, the speaking of words bestows freedom and then takes possession of it.
Douglas’ art makes many points about the identity, character, history and requirements for a people born or reborn in the generations after slavery. One of his points is to recognize the tremendous power of words in forming this new people. To this day, you see the central role of words in African American experience in celebrations of Martin Luther King. King was known for words he spoke and is commemorated through re-creations of those speeches. Aaron Douglas saw the decisive historical role of words for his people and found ways to show it.
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