How The Harlem Renaissance Transformed Art and Society

From the end of World War I to the lead up to World War II, the African American community in Harlem, New York City brought about a transformative artistic and cultural change through a wide range of art.

It asserted a pioneering black pride in the segregated United States that not only influenced future generations of artists, but also laid the foundations of the Civil Rights Movement and influenced wider change in a shifting society by using art as a vehicle to improve the lives of the African Americans. 

It was a hugely significant moment in the arts at the start of the 20th century, as The Harlem Renaissance brought with it a revolution of ideas on politics, art, and society that promoted black art into the US mainstream. It was an exciting time of change and empowerment that would form the roots of the Civil Rights Movement, while art during the Harlem Renaissance formed part of a rich cultural development that embraced poetry, painting, sculpture, literature, performing arts, and music.

Lasting from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, it was a period of intense creativity across all art forms within the African American community, as black pride and identity was asserted through the arts at a time of great social change. This was stimulated by the Great Migration (1910–1920), as the largest resettlement of Americans in history from the rural south to the industrial north allowed many artists to experience a new found artistic freedom of expression. The influential African American rights activist, W.E.B. Du Bois, was among them.

The path to national success wasn’t easy though. Segregation was the norm and wouldn’t be outlawed until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In fact, many early Harlem Renaissance artists worked abroad, with many spending time in Paris, before returning to Harlem to draw attention to the burgeoning movement. The sculptor Edmonia Lewis was one such pioneer, whose international fame and success was blighted by racial discrimination that meant her career was severely limited in America. Her portrait bust of Union Colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, a noted abolitionist who led the first all-black regiment in the Civil War, exemplified Lewis’s focus on themes of emancipation, who was a pioneering role model for African American Harlem Renaissance artists. Despite the acclaim, she continued to face discrimination and moved to Rome in 1866. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” she later explained.

The Great Depression created yet another barrier this burgeoning renaissance, but like so many African American artists before them, many found a way to overcome this hurdle, this time with the help of the Works Progress Administration program. This left a lasting legacy through public murals at the Harlem Hospital and the New York Public Library. It was an eclectic movement of black avant-garde as artists found different ways to celebrate African American culture and identity. This meant there was no one individual style, but it was a golden age in African American culture that produced a broad range of famous art pieces from the Harlem Renaissance.

Renaissance Words

One of the most powerful art forms to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance was poetry and this was in part thanks to the activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who helped poets publish their work. The early 1920s was a boom time for black poetry with Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, and Jean Toomer’s Cane both providing of picture of life for African Americans in the US that remains as powerful today, as they were over a century ago.

That picture of life for African Americans was given a voice by poetry, as racial tensions escalated into violence in 1919. Across the country in more than three-dozen American cities white mobs cities instigated riots, attacking and lynching African Americans, destroying neighborhoods and businesses in reaction to the migration African Americans. It would be dubbed The Red Summer and would strengthen the development of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the resolve to tackle racial inequality. One reaction was through the words of Claude McKay, whose searing and powerful poem If We Must Die (1919) captured the passion of the Harlem Renaissance: “If we must die, O let us nobly die…/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”

However, Langston Hughes was perhaps the leading poet of the movement, whose pioneering improvisatory style was based on the rhythms of jazz and focused on working class African American. His poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921) and The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) spoke of racial pride, unity, and identity and would become widely influential among Harlem Renaissance artists and the wider public. One modern artist who was heavily influenced by Hughes’s use of humor, rhythm and wordplay to highlight the reality of the black experience in America was Gil Scott-Heron, whose album Winter in America showcases its influence, while examining colonialism and racism within the United States.

Fiction also carried the voice of African Americans into the public arena. One book to explore Black African Americans’ new cultural identity in a white-dominated city was Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel There Is Confusion, while James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan: Account of the Development of Harlem highlights the creativity of the black Harlem community at the time.

Renaissance Painting

Widely acknowledged as the ‘Father of African American Art’, Aaron Douglas not only painted black Americans in a new light, but also brought them to mainstream public attention in white America. Helping to cultivate the ‘New Negro’ concept, Douglas developed a distinctive style that combined influences from African American folk art and African art with Art Deco stylization. He was noted particularly for painting murals, including one on the New York Public Library in Harlem that showed the black experience of enslavement to liberation and the creation of a new life in New York.

One of his most famous paintings, Let My People Go (1935-39) depicts Moses as he kneels at the pyramids of Giza. Known for his modernist portrayals linking Christianity and black subject matter to convey racial pride and spiritual longing, Douglas’s use of silhouettes would influence a second-generation of Harlem Renaissance artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, as well as contemporary artists Kara Walker and Lorna Simpson.

Similarly, the prolific Lois Mailou Jones produced a number of famous art pieces from the Harlem Renaissance, despite being barred from competitions due to her race and having to enter through white conduits, who handed in submissions on her behalf. Her seminal The Ascent of Ethiopia earned critical acclaim and featured in Ebony magazine, while one was even bought by the Clintons when they occupied the White House. It is currently on display in the Milwaukee Art Museum.

It’s perhaps Jacob Lawrence though who first established himself as a mainstream Harlem Renaissance artist when he produced his 60-panel Migration Series. Painted in the self-dubbed style of Dynamic Cubism, it portrayed stories of African American migration from southern to northern United States and documented the struggles of the black American population.

Renaissance Music

Like so much of the art from the Harlem Renaissance, the music that soundtracked the period remains a feature of popular culture today and has influenced generations of artists, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin. Jazz and blues was the sound of Harlem’s underground nightclubs and it attracted locals, as well as white audiences to enjoy the new sound that broke down racial barriers.

Many of the musicians are still household names, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Josephine Baker. Baker was the first African American woman to star in a film and would become a figure in the Civil Rights Movement. When the Savoy Ballroom opened in 1927 in Harlem it provided a home for these artists, with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson a frequent guest.

It’s The Cotton Club that enjoys an enduring legacy though thanks to regular performances from Ellington and Calloway, as well as readily available bootleg liquor to add to the thrill of experiencing this new music first hand. Ellington was a particularly key figure after his orchestra became the house band at the racially segregated Cotton Club in 1927. A black man leading an orchestra was pioneering in itself, but he also challenged musical convention with his Concerto for Cootie, which was the first jazz composition in the form of a concerto and found favour with white and black audiences alike. “The music of my race is something more than the American idiom,” Ellington said in an article for British magazine, Rhythm. “It is the result of our transplantation to American soil, and was our reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny we endured. What we could not say openly, we expressed in music.”

Renaissance Sculpture

Sculpture was one of The Harlem Renaissance’s earliest forms of expression and Richmond Barthé’s sculpture was truly pioneering, as it portrayed black Americans in a nuanced and sympathetic light. After initially being rejected from New Orleans Art School because of his race, Barthé switched from painting to sculpture at the suggestion of a teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago and his sculptures earned him success in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to his expressive intensity and sensuality.

One of the earliest pioneers in both the African American subjects and Egyptian-inspired style that dominated the early years of the Harlem Renaissance was the sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Like so many artists of the era, Fuller studied in the more welcoming environment of Paris where she met W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Auguste Rodin. Du Bois encouraged her African and African American subjects, while Rodin helped develop her approach to Realism. Fuller’s work helped people imagine an African history that was unheard in Western society that can be seen in Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence (1919) and Ethiopia Awakening (1921), which offer powerful and compelling visions of black heritage.

And while Fuller’s style proved influential, the success of Edmonia Lewis among the marginalized African-American community also proved to be a powerfully symbol of aspiration, even if her classical style wasn’t directly influential to the Harlem Renaissance. Her most celebrated sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra (1876) was exhibited in the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia to great acclaim and portrayed the Egyptian queen as a powerful and idealized figure, even in death, which embodied the inspirational model of African-American women artists achieving success.

Art and politics were often intertwined for Harlem Renaissance artists and this was certainly true of Augusta Savage. As well as an established sculptor, she was also a civil rights activist and teacher who rose to prominence with busts from the black community, like W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey. Her best known work is Gamin, which depicts her nephew. Its importance today is measured by the fact it’s on permanent display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Renaissance Pride

Often the word ‘pioneering’ is thrown around in retrospective features. On occasion it might be a slight embellishment, or a rose tinted view. However, there’s no doubting the pioneering nature of the Harlem Renaissance, as there simply was no popular black American expression in the visual arts prior to their arrival. This loose collective didn’t just focus on one discipline either, as for the first time, white Americans were brought into the African American community, and through a wide variety of expressions.

The Harlem Renaissance was a rich cultural and social development that not only transformed the art world, but society too. It was a golden age in African American culture, as the minority black population were instilled with a pride, social consciousness, and self-determination over the black experience and paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Creating a new era for previously ignored black artists at a time of racial segregation and deep prejudice, the Harlem Renaissance was more than an art movement. Much more. It helped to turn attitudes in society and is one of the most influential movements of the 20th century. It gave the marginalised black community a voice and sense of expression, while also validating the beliefs of Alain Locke and Langston Hughes that art could be a vehicle to improve the lives of the African Americans.

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Sources: nga.gov | New Yorker | The Collector | History.com | Biography.com | TheCultureTrip.com | TheArtStory.org | National Museum of African American History & Culture | Library of Congress | Poetry Foundation | PBS | ArtsEdge