Aaron Douglas Crisis and Opportunity Painting Aaron Douglas Art

American painter

Aaron Douglas
Portrait by Betsy Graves Reyneau
Born	(1899-05-26)May 26, 1899 Topeka, Kansas
Died	Feb 2, 1979(1979-02-02) (aged 79) Nashville, Tennessee
Nationality	American
Education	University of Nebraska, Teachers College, Columbia Academy
Known for	Painting, illustration, murals
Style	Jazz Age, Modernism, Fine art Deco
Movement	Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas (May 26, 1899 – Feb two, 1979^[1]) was an American painter, illustrator and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.^[2] He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the U.s.a. by utilizing African-centric imagery.^[3] Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter public arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild.^[4] In 1944, he concluded his fine art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk until his retirement in 1966.^[5] Douglas is known as a prominent leader in modernistic African-American art whose piece of work influenced artists for years to come.^[vi]

Early life [edit]

Aaron Douglas was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, on May 26, 1899,^[5] to Aaron Douglas, Sr, a baker from Tennessee, and Elizabeth Douglas, a homemaker and apprentice artist from Alabama. His passion for art derived from admiring his mother'south drawings.^[6] He attended Topeka High School, during which he worked for Skinner's Nursery and Matrimony Pacific material yard, and graduated in 1917.^{[7] [iii]}

After high school, Douglas moved to Detroit, Michigan, and held various jobs, including working as a plasterer and molding sand from motorcar radiators for Cadillac. During this time, he attended complimentary classes at the Detroit Museum of Art earlier attention college at the Academy of Nebraska in 1918.^[5] While attending college, Douglas worked as a busboy to finance his pedagogy.^[half-dozen] When Earth War I commenced, Douglas attempted to join the Educatee Regular army Training Corps (SATC) at the University of Nebraska, but was dismissed. Historians have speculated that this dismissal was correlated with the racially segregated climate of American society and the military.^[5] He then transferred for a short time to the University of Minnesota, where he volunteered for the SATC and attained the rank of corporal. After the signing of the armistice, he returned to the University of Nebraska,^[five] where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1922.^[8]

Later graduating, Douglas worked equally a waiter for the Matrimony Pacific Railroad until 1923, when he secured a task teaching visual arts at Lincoln High School in Kansas Urban center, Missouri, staying in that location until 1925. During his time in Kansas City, he exchanged messages with Alta Sawyer, his future wife, virtually his plans beyond educational activity in a high-schoolhouse setting. He wanted to take his art career to Paris, France, as many of his aspiring artist peers did.^[half-dozen]

Career [edit]

1925–27 [edit]

In 1925, Douglas intended to pass through Harlem, New York, on his way to Paris to advance his art career.^[6] He was convinced to stay in Harlem and develop his art during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, influenced by the writings of Alain Locke nigh the importance of Harlem for aspiring African Americans.^{[ii] [6] [3]} While in Harlem, Douglas studied under Winold Reiss, a German language portraitist who encouraged him to work with African-centric themes to create a sense of unity between African Americans with art.^[ix] Douglas worked with W. Eastward. B. Du Bois, then-editor at The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP,^[2] and became fine art editor himself briefly in 1927.^[10] Douglas as well illustrated for Charles S. Johnson, then-editor at Opportunity, the official publication of the National Urban League.^{[10] [2]} These illustrations focused on articles most lynching and segregation, and theater and jazz.^[10] Douglas' illustrations besides featured in the periodicals Vanity Fair and Theatre Arts Monthly.^[xi] In 1927, Douglas was asked to create the first of his murals at Club Ebony, which highlighted Harlem nightlife.^[12]

1928–31 [edit]

In 1928, Douglas received a one-year Barnes Foundation Fellowship in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Albert C. Barnes, philanthropist and founder of the Barnes Foundation, supported him in studying the collection of Modernist paintings and African art.^[5] During this same year, Douglas participated in the Harmon Foundation's exhibition organized by the College Art Association, entitled "Contemporary Negro Art."^[6] In the summer of 1930, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he worked on a series of murals for Fisk University's Cravath Hall library that he described as a "panorama of the evolution of Black people in this hemisphere, in the new earth."^[13] While in Nashville, he was commissioned by the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, to paint a mural series. In add-on, he was commissioned by Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, to create a landscape with Harriet Tubman as its primary figure.^[vi] He then moved in 1931 for one twelvemonth to Paris, France, where he received training in sculpture and painting at the Académie Scandinave.^[v]

1934–36 [edit]

Douglas returned to Harlem in the mid-1930s to piece of work on his mural painting techniques. In 1934, he was commissioned by New York'south 135th Street YMCA to pigment a mural on their building, as well as by the Public Works Assistants to paint his most acclaimed mural wheel, Aspects of Negro Life, for the Countee Cullen Co-operative of New York Public Library.^[5] He used these murals to inform his audiences of the place of African Americans throughout America's history and its present club.^[vi] In a series consisting of four murals, Douglas takes his audience from an African setting, to slavery and the Reconstruction era in the United states, then through the threats of lynching and segregation in a mail service-Ceremonious War America to a final mural depicting the motility of African Americans north towards the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression.^[12] During the elevation of his commissioned work as a muralist, Douglas served every bit president of the Harlem Artists Society in 1935, an system designed to create a network of young artists in New York City to provide support, inspiration, and to help out immature artists during the Harlem Renaissance.^[4]

1937–66 [edit]

In 1937, the Rosenwald Foundation awarded Douglas a travel fellowship to get to the American South and visit primarily Black universities, including Fisk Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, the Tuskegee Found in Alabama, and Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1938, he again received a travel fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation to go to the Dominican Republic and Republic of haiti to develop a serial of watercolors depicting the life of these Caribbean islands.^{[5] [vi]}

Upon returning to the United States in 1940, he worked at Fisk Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, while attending Columbia University Teacher's College in New York Metropolis. He received his Main of Arts degree in 1944, and moved to Nashville, to found and sit as the chairman of the Art Department at Fisk University.^[5] During his tenure as a professor in the Art Section, he was the founding manager of the Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Arts, which included both White and African-American art in an endeavour to educate students on existence an creative person in a segregated American South.^[1] He used his experiences every bit an artist in the Harlem Renaissance to inspire his students to expand on the movements of African-American fine art. He likewise encouraged his students to study African-American history to fully understand the necessity for African-American art in predominantly White-American society.^[6] Douglas retired from teaching in the Art Department at Fisk University in 1966.^[5]

1967–79 [edit]

Aaron Douglas died at the age of 79 on February 2, 1979.^[5]

Legacy [edit]

Aaron Douglas pioneered the African-American modernist move by combining aesthetic with ancient African traditional art. He set the stage for hereafter African-American artists to utilise elements of African and African-American history aslope racial themes nowadays in gild.^[11]

In 2007, the Spencer Museum of Art organized an exhibition chosen Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist. Information technology was held in Lawrence, Kansas, at the Spencer Museum of Fine art between September eight to December 2, 2007, and traveled to the Frist Heart for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, from January 18 to April xiii, 2008. It was and so on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C,. betwixt May nine and August 3, 2008. Finally, it traveled to the Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Black Culture in New York, New York, from August 30 to November xxx, 2008. An exhaustive catalog of this exhibition was put together through collaboration between Spencer Museum of Art and The Academy of Kansas, and is entitled Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. ^{[fourteen] [8] [15] [1]}

In 2016, with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an archive of artworks created by or having to do with Aaron Douglas became available on their website. Users can access the total references of these pieces of art to make up one's mind the creation engagement, subject area of the art, and its electric current residence.^[16]

Style [edit]

Aaron Douglas developed two art styles during his career: first as a traditional portraitist, then as a muralist and illustrator.^[1] Influenced by having worked with Winold Reiss, Douglas incorporated African themes into his artwork to create a connection betwixt Africans and African Americans. His work is described as existence abstruse, in that he portrayed the universality of the African-American people through song, dance, imagery and poesy.^[9] Through his murals and illustrations for various publications, he addressed social issues connected with race and segregation in the United States, and was one of the kickoff African-American visual artists to utilize African-centered imagery.^{[10] [three]}

His work features silhouettes of men and women, often in blackness and white.^{[ix] [12] [8]} His human being depictions take characteristically apartment shapes that are angular and long, with slits for optics. Often, his female figures are drawn in a crouched position or moving as if they are dancing in a traditional African way.^[9] He adopted elements of W African masks and sculptures into his ain art,^[11] with a technique that utilized cubism to simplify his figures into lines and planes.^[vi] He employed a narrow range of color, tone and value, virtually often using greens, browns, mauves, and blacks, with his human being forms in darker shades of the present colors of the painting. He created emotional bear on with subtle gradations of colour, often using concentric circles to influence the viewer to focus on a specific part of the painting.^[nine]

His artwork is two-dimensional, and his human figures are faceless, allowing their forms to be symbolic and general, so as to create a sense of unity between Africans and African Americans.^[ix] Douglas' paintings include semitransparent silhouettes to portray the struggle of African Americans and their relative successes in various aspects of social life.^[8] His work is described as unique in creating a link between African Americans and their African beginnings through visual elements that are rooted in African art, and thus give the African-American experience a symbolic artful.^[12]

Notable works [edit]

• The February 1926 upshot of The Crunch ^[10]
• The May 1926 issue of The Crisis ^[10]
• Mural at Club Ebony, 1927^[12]
• Illustrations for Paul Morand, Black Magic, 1929^[fourteen]
• Harriet Tubman, mural at Bennett College, 1930^[14]
• Symbolic Negro History, murals at Fisk University, 1930^[5]
• Dance Magic, murals for the Sherman Hotel, Chicago, 1930–31^[3]
• Serial of illustrations created for James Weldon Johnson'due south God'southward Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Poesy ^[17]
  • Let My People Become, circa 1935–39
  • The Judgment 24-hour interval, created in 1939
• Mural series commissioned in 1934 by the Works Progress Administration.^[12] The serial consists of four murals;
  • The Negro in an African Setting, depicts elements of African cultural dances and music to highlight the central heritage of African Americans.
  • Slavery through Reconstruction, depicts the contrast between the promise of emancipation and political shift in power mail-Civil War and the disappointments of Reconstruction in the United states.
  • The Idyll of the Deep S, depicts the perseverance of African-American song and trip the light fantastic against the cruelty of lynching and other threats to African Americans in the United States.
  • Song of the Towers, depicts three events in United States history from an African-American lens, including the movement of African Americans towards the North in the 1910s, the rise of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and the Keen Low in the 1930s.
• Four-office mural bike (including Aspiration) at the Texas Centennial Exposition, 1936^[18]
• Illustrations included in selected editions of Countee Cullen'south Caroling Sunset and Alain Locke's The New Negro.^[xiv]

Collections [edit]

• Let My People Go, Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, New York Metropolis^[17]
• The Judgement Day, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC^[17]
• The Founding of Chicago, Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS^[xix]
• Study for "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction", Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Dr.^[20]

References [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b c d} "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist". Spencer Museum of Art . Retrieved March 15, 2017.
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Lewis, David Levering (2008). Appiah, Kwame Anthony (ed.). "Harlem Renaissance". Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Feel, Second Edition. New York: Oxford African American Studies Center.
3. ^ ^{a b c d east} Hornsby, Alton (2011). Black America: A Land-by-Land Historical Encyclopedia. Greenwood. pp. 289, 291, 298, 812–813. ISBN9780313341120. OCLC 767694486.
4. ^ ^{a b} Hills, Patricia (2009). Painting Harlem Modernistic: The Fine art of Jacob Lawrence. Berkeley: University of California Printing. pp. 9–31. ISBN9780520252417. OCLC 868550146.
5. ^ ^{a b c d e f yard h i j k fifty m} DeLombard, Jeannine (2014). "Aaron Douglas". American National Biography Online.
6. ^ ^{a b c d eastward f thou h i j m l} Kirschke, Amy Helene (1995). Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN0878057757. OCLC 781087713.
7. ^ "Aaron Douglas". Kansapedia. Topeka: Kansas Historical Lodge. 2003. Retrieved March 14, 2017.
8. ^ ^{a b c d} Johnson, Ken (2008-09-eleven). "Trials and Triumphs: 'Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist' at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved March 14, 2017.
9. ^ ^{a b c d due east f} Huggins, Nathan Irvin (2014). Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Printing, U.s.a.. ISBN9780195063363. OCLC 923535268.
10. ^ ^{a b c d due east f} Kirschke, Amy (2004). "Douglas, Aaron". Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Routledge.
11. ^ ^{a b c} Driskell, David C.; Lewis, David 50.; Ryan, Deborah Willis; Campbell, Mary Schmidt (1987). Harlem Renaissance: Art of Blackness America . New York: The Studio Museum. ISBN0810910993. OCLC 70455221.
12. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Myers, Aaron (2008). Appiah, Kwame Anthony (ed.). "Douglas, Aaron". Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Feel, Second Edition. New York: Oxford African American Studies Centre.
13. ^ "Finish-Loss: Restoring the Aaron Douglas Murals at Fisk Academy | Smithsonian American Art Museum". americanart.si.edu . Retrieved 2020-06-twenty .
14. ^ ^{a b c d} Earle, Susan (2007). Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist . New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN978-0300121803. OCLC 778017649.
15. ^ "Aaron Douglas'due south Magisterial Aspects of Negro Life". Treasures of The New York Public Library. Archived from the original on 2019-11-06. Retrieved 2017-03-17 .
16. ^ "NMAAHC Collections Search". Art Inventories Itemize, Smithsonian American Art Museum . Retrieved 2017-03-21 .
17. ^ ^{a b c} "Met Museum And National Gallery Of Art, Washington, Each Acquire Significant Work Past Leading Harlem Renaissance Artist Aaron Douglas". www.nga.gov. National Gallery of Art. 2015. Retrieved 2017-03-14 .
18. ^ Woods, Marianne (Oct 23, 2014). "From Harlem to Texas: African American Art and the Murals of Aaron Douglas". US Studies Online. British Association for American Studies. Retrieved 2020-11-28.
19. ^ "Spencer Museum of Art | Collection – The Founding of Chicago". collection.spencerart.ku.edu . Retrieved 2016-01-25 .
20. ^ "Report for 'Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction'". The Baltimore Museum of Fine art. artbma.org. Retrieved 2020-11-28 .

External links [edit]

• Aaron Douglas: Depression Era Murals from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• Aaron Douglas Collection at the Special Collections and Archives at Fisk Academy.
• Aaron Douglas Papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Culture, New York Public Library.
• Aaron Douglas: Instructor Resource published by the Spencer Museum of Fine art, at the University of Kansas.
• Missouri Remembers: Artists in Missouri through 1951

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Douglas_%28artist%29

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