Aaron Douglas

Topeka to Harlem, with Paris at the end of the plan

Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1899, and paid his way through an ordinary American series of jobs — a nursery, a railroad materials yard, a spell at the Cadillac car plant in Detroit after he left Topeka High School in 1917, waiting tables as a student. He took a bachelor of fine arts at the University of Nebraska in 1922, spent the following year at the University of Kansas, and then taught art for two years at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri.

In June 1925 he moved to Harlem — intending, the Kansas Historical Society's account says, to pursue an art career ultimately in Paris. He arrived at the exact moment the neighbourhood became the centre of Black American culture, and the Paris plan was put aside for six years. He won a two-year scholarship to study under Winold Reiss, a German-born illustrator working in New York, who told him to stop looking at Europe and look instead at Africa — advice that produced the style everyone now recognises.

What the silhouettes actually are

Douglas's method is easy to describe and was extremely hard to invent. He drew figures as flat silhouettes, seen from the side, with the eye left as a blank almond — a way of drawing the human body borrowed from ancient Egyptian relief carving and West African sculpture rather than from European life drawing. He then laid over them a system of hard-edged geometric shapes and concentric circles, so that light seems to spread across the picture in rings, like sound. The Smithsonian American Art Museum sums up the combination as angular cubist rhythms — Cubism being the early twentieth-century style that broke objects into flat angular planes — art deco styling, the sleek geometric fashion of the 1920s and 1930s, and traditional African and African American imagery. The palette is usually narrow: violets, greys, ochres, a single hot accent.

The style went out into the world on paper first. Douglas drew for The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the country's leading civil rights organisation, and for Opportunity, the journal of the National Urban League, which worked on jobs and housing for Black families arriving in northern cities, and then for the general-interest magazines Harper's and Vanity Fair. He illustrated the books that defined the decade: the poet James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones (1927), a cycle of Black folk sermons in verse; the 1927 reissue of Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; and the poet Langston Hughes's second collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), whose title — argued about then and since — comes from a line in one of the poems about pawning clothes when the money runs out. That is why the Harlem Renaissance has a look at all: a reader in Ohio met the movement as a Douglas drawing on a book jacket.

A year inside Albert Barnes's collection

In 1927 the Philadelphia chemist Albert C. Barnes — who had made a fortune from an antiseptic and spent it on one of the great private collections of modern painting — set up a scholarship programme for young Black artists, writers and musicians. Barnes was already deep in the movement, working with the philosopher Alain Locke, the Howard University professor whose 1925 anthology The New Negro announced the Harlem Renaissance to the country, to argue that African sculpture was major art rather than ethnographic curiosity. Douglas was among the people he funded.

What the Barnes fellowship bought was a year at the foundation's galleries in Merion, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, awarded by Barnes personally: a year looking at modern European and American paintings hung deliberately alongside African carvings, which is to say a year being shown the argument Douglas's own pictures were already making. It was not, despite the shorthand that sometimes attaches to it, a travel grant to France. Paris came later, and how it was paid for is not something the surviving institutional record says.

Paris, 1931

He made it in 1931, and stayed about a year — studying, in the Kansas Historical Society's phrase, classical art. The school was the Académie Scandinave, the Scandinavian Academy: one of the private Paris art academies that took foreign students straight into a studio, as opposed to the École des Beaux-Arts, the French state art school with its competitive entrance examination. The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, which keeps an artist file on him, is the archive that records the enrolment.

He was not alone, and the company matters. Three other African American painters were working in and out of Paris in those years: Palmer C. Hayden, who painted Black working life in New York; Hale Woodruff, later the muralist of the Amistad panels at Talladega College; and Archibald J. Motley Jr., the portraitist of Black Chicago. In May 2024 the Institut Giacometti in Paris — the museum and research centre devoted to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti — devoted a lecture by the Duke University art historian Richard J. Powell to exactly this group of four, under the title La Renaissance de Harlem et Paris, the Harlem Renaissance and Paris: on the city as a central place and a source of inspiration for all of them, and on what the encounter between a European capital and these American painters produced. Douglas came home to New York after about a year.

It is worth being honest about the size of it. A year is a short stay, next to the decades that the American dancer and singer Josephine Baker or the painter Beauford Delaney spent in the city. Douglas did not settle, did not join any recorded circle in Montparnasse — the Left Bank district where the city's foreign artists gathered — and did not come back a French painter. What the year gave him, on the evidence of the work, was scale and confidence: he had gone over as an illustrator of books and came back and painted walls.

Aspects of Negro Life, 1934

The 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library had opened in 1905 and, since May 1925, had housed the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints — the collection that grew into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 1934, paid by one of the New Deal art programmes with which the federal government kept artists in work through the Depression, the economic collapse that put a quarter of American workers out of a job, Douglas painted four murals for it.

Aspects of Negro Life runs the whole history in four panels: The Negro in an African Setting, drummers and dancers ringed with light; An Idyll of the Deep South; From Slavery Through Reconstruction, Reconstruction being the years after the Civil War when the freed population briefly held political power in the South; and Song of the Towers, in which a saxophone rises against the skyline of the industrial North that the Great Migration — the movement of millions of Black Americans out of the rural South to northern cities from about 1916 — was carrying people toward. They are still in the building, the centrepiece of the room in the Schomburg Center that carries Douglas's name.

He became the first president of the Harlem Artists Guild and pressed the Works Progress Administration — the federal agency that employed artists on public commissions — to recognise African American artists as it recognised white ones. In 1936 he painted a four-panel mural for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, the fair marking a hundred years of Texan independence. And in 1937 and 1938 he applied to the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Chicago philanthropy that financed Black education and Black artists, with references from James Weldon Johnson and Winold Reiss and a proposal in his own words: to create a contemporary portrait of the American Negro, consisting of portraits, character studies, and scenes of Negro environments. When the fund renewed the fellowship, he used it to go and paint in Haiti.

Fisk: twenty-seven years of teaching

In 1939 the sociologist Charles S. Johnson — an old Harlem mentor of Douglas's, and the first African American president of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the historically Black universities founded to educate Black Americans at a time when most American colleges would not admit them — invited him to build Fisk an art department. Douglas took the job while still finishing a master's degree at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York, which he received in 1944, and stayed until he retired in 1966. He founded the department, chaired it, and established the university's Carl Van Vechten Gallery, named for the white writer and photographer who documented the Harlem Renaissance and helped bring its collection to Fisk; his murals of African American history, from the Middle Passage — the sea crossing that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas — onward, are in Fisk's Cravath Hall.

He died in Nashville on 2 February 1979. Nearly thirty years later the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas organised the first retrospective to tour the country — more than eighty works, shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington in 2008 under the title Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. The museum's own summary of him is the short version of this page: one of the most influential visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance.