ARTS | ART REVIEW

ART REVIEW; What Modernism

Meant In Black Artists' World
By GRACE GLUECK
New York Times
FEB. 7, 2003

Conceived to show how the impact of Modernism on the art of

African-Americans differed from its perception and use by white
practitioners, ''Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists
1925-1945'' at the Studio Museum in Harlem is one of the most
ambitious shows this museum has produced.

It is also one of the more stimulating, although it has its weak points,
among them a too-inclusive selection of works. Some second-rate
offerings have been allowed in that may contribute to the show's
thesis but do not serve it well as artistic examples.

Many of the artists represented here -- among them Romare Bearden,

Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Wifredo Lam, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois
Mailou Jones, Hale Woodruff and James VanDerZee -- are familiar
names whose works have been seen before, some, to be sure, in the
Studio Museum's own ''Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America'' in
1987 and in similar shows at other institutions.

What's different about this one is its approach: the drawing together
of disparate elements that played a role in the shaping of 20th-
century aesthetics in the African-American visual, literary and
performing arts at the same time that Modernism was establishing
itself in white American culture. Modernism for African-American
artists, still outsiders in the white milieu, was something else: a
''multifaceted phenomenon,'' Lowery Stokes Sims, executive director
of the Studio Museum and organizer of the show, writes in the
catalog.

Among the elements involved in this phenomenon were the belated

engagement with African art (long after European whites had pre-
empted it); the image of the ''New Negro,'' whose militant behavior
broke from traditional conformity to white expectations;
performance, sexuality and the black body, as exemplified by idols
like Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker and Joe Louis; and the revised
black self-imagery that was an important result of the great migration
of blacks from the rural South to the urban North between 1913 and
1946.
The show makes its points by displaying its more than 150 works --
paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs -- in four sections. They
deal with the black church and its influence; the question of
primitivism, that is, mining African roots versus the desire for
assimilation into the American artistic mainstream; the cult of the
body as a central focus of black culture; and the results of the
northern migration. A nice bonus is a section devoted to the rarely
exhibited work of black architects. And there are samples of textile,
magazine and book design as well.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibition of African-

American prints, drawings and paintings covering the same era is
taken entirely from the Met's own collection and set out with a less
focused agenda. Many of the same artists are in the two shows -- no
surprise, since Ms. Sims was on the Met's staff for 30 years, most
recently as curator of modern art. The Met's show stands on its own
but resonates with the one at the Studio Museum.

Harlem, cited in the 1920's by Alain Locke, the influential black

philosopher, writer and critic, as ''the greatest Negro community the
world has ever known,'' was by then the locus of African-American
intellectual and cultural activity. But although Modernist genres like
abstraction were grounded in African art, and black dance and music
had ushered in a modern sound and sense of the body, Ms. Sims
argues in the catalog, its artists were classified as followers of white
artists recognized as Modernist pioneers. Many of them struggled
with the burning issue of how to fulfill the expectations of the larger
white society and at the same time the black community's yearnings
for recognition and identity.

The show's first section, and perhaps its most problematic, reflects
the tension between art that more or less realistically depicted
African-American lifestyles and art that took to the abstracting
tendencies of Modernism. On view are responses from artists as
dissimilar as Palmer Hayden, whose ''Midsummer Night in Harlem''
(1936) depicting the packed streets and tenements of the area was
seen by some as approaching caricature, and Norman Lewis, a
painter by then very much in tune with Abstract Expressionism. His
''Metropolitan Crowd'' (1946) is a dense, overall abstraction of lines
and colors that succeeds wonderfully in evoking the jazzy beat of the
metropolis.

More than worthy of note in this area, too, are a pair of lively African-
themed abstract drawings by the Afro-Chinese-Cuban artist Wifredo
Lam, and Lois Mailou Jones's Art Decoesque ''Ascent of Ethiopia''
(1932), an idyll of figures struggling upward to a sort of moonstruck
urban Nirvana, benignly attended by the stylized profile of an
Egyptified African goddess.

The most provocative section is devoted to the black body as a

''transgressive, erotic and performative vehicle'' (translation: the
 exaltation of African-Americans as dancers, athletes, performers,
musicians and evokers of erotic desire). Katherine Dunham, Paul
Robeson, the boxers Joe Louis and Jack Johnson, and more
anonymous personalities are celebrated here in paintings, posters
and sculptures.

The liveliest works in the ''bodies'' group, however, are two paintings
of jitterbugs and a folksy reclining black nude by William H. Johnson,
a painter who had studied in Europe and found models in avant-
garde art there as well as African sculpture. His ebullient jitterbug
paintings of 1941, one almost an abstraction, take their exaggerated
physical attributes from African art and are so animated they could
set a viewer to on-the-spot emulation.

Among the more or less conventional works that deal with the church
and its power -- positive and negative -- to affect black thought and
action, one standout is Beauford Delaney's ''Burning Bush'' (1941), a
Fauvish evocation of an inferno in the desert. But the naughty
sensation is a set of titillating images of biblical women in the nude --
''Ruth and Naomi,'' ''Hagar,'' ''Mrs. Lot'' and so forth -- by Richard
Bruce Nugent, a Harlem Renaissance figure little known today who
was a writer, painter, illustrator and the only African-American artist
willing to proclaim his homosexuality publicly. In his art, he took cues
from Aubrey Beardsley and Gustave Moreau. Other of his drawings
here boldly suggest gay relationships between David and Goliath and
Jesus and Judas.

Nothing as saucy as this is in the Metropolitan show, which is based

in part on a 1999 gift of 204 prints by African-Americans from the
collectors Reba and Dave Williams. As with the Studio Museum
exhibition, the more than 80 works here are divided among artists
who subscribed to the notions of European Modernism and those
who dealt with issues of cultural heritage and racial identity
(including the now famous folk artist Bill Traylor).

Grouped in categories like ''Faces,'' ''The South,'' ''The North,''

''Labor,'' ''Religion,'' ''Recreation'' and ''War,'' it is a nice if rather
bland introduction to the work of African-American artists of the era,
but it cries out to be seen in conjunction with the quirkier, more
intellectually grounded show at the Studio Museum.

''Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists 1925-1945''

remains at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street,
(212) 864-4500, through March 30. ''African-American Artists, 1929-
1945: Prints, Drawings and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art'' remains at the Metropolitan Museum, Fifth Avenue at 82nd
Street, (212) 535-7710, through May 4.