Tennessee State University Digital Scholarship @ Tennessee State University
Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture Tennessee African-American History
1998
Aaron Douglas (1899 -1979)
Reavis L. Mitchell, Jr.
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Recommended Citation Mitchell, Jr., Reavis L., "Aaron Douglas (1899 -1979)" (1998). Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture. 2. https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/conference-on-african-american-history-and-culture/2
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Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)
Aaron Douglas was a "pioneering Alain Locke's survey of the Harlem Renaissance, Africanist" artist who led the way in using African The New Negro. Locke called Douglas a -oriented imagery in visual art during the Harlem "pioneering Africanist," and that stamp of praise Renaissance of 1919-1929. His work has been and approval for the artist influenced future credited as the catalyst for the art genre historians to describe Douglas as "the father of "incorporating themes in form and style which Black American art." His fame quickly spread affirm the validity of the black consciousness and beyond Harlem, and he began to mount painting experience in America." exhibitions in Chicago and Nashville, among Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, on numerous other cities, and to point murals and May 26, 1899, to Aaron and Elizabeth Douglas. historical narratives interpreting black history and He attended the University of Nebraska School of racial pride. Fine Arts and was graduated from there in 1922. During the mid-1920s, Douglas was an This Midwestern background seemed an unlikely important illustrator for Crisis, Vanity Fair, indicator for this man who would rise to meet W. Opportunity, Theatre Arts Monthly, Fire!!, and E. B. DuBois's 1921 Crisis challenge, calling for Harlem. At the same time, he married the love of "the transforming hand and seeing eye of the his life, Alta Sawyer, on June 18, 1926. The artist, white or black,'' to lead the way in the following year, Douglas illustrated two important search for African-American identity. After works of poetry, Caroling Dusk (an anthology by teaching art in Kansas City, Missouri, Douglas black poets), and James Weldon Johnson's book moved to New York City's Harlem neighborhood of poems, God's Trombones: Seven Negro in 1924, and began studying under German artist Sermons in Verse. Douglas's images for the book Winold Reiss. His mentor discouraged the were inspired by Negro spirituals, customs of budding artist's penchant for traditional realist Africans and African Americans, biblical stories, painting and encouraged him to explore African and contemporary black history. The series, soon art "for design elements that would express racial to become among the celebrated of Douglas's commitment in his art." The young painter work, "defined figures with the language of embraced the teachings of Reiss to develop a Synthetic Cubism and borrowed heavily from the unique style incorporating African aesthetics and lyrical style of Reiss and the fonns of African black American subject matter, and he soon sculpture." Through his Precisionist-style captured the attention of leading black scholars drawings for the series, Douglas "came close to and activists. inventing his own painting style by this eclectic In early 1925, one of Douglas's combination of elements in his work." At the illustrations appeared on the cover of Opportunity height of his popularity, Douglas left for Europe magazine, which awarded Douglas its first prize in 1931 to spend a year studying at L' Academie for excellence in art. A few months later, his Scandinave in Paris. He returned to New York in illustration for the NAACP Crisis magazine won 1932, and studied at Columbia University, where the publication's first prize for drawing. Also in he later received his Master of Arts degree in 1925, Douglas's illustrations were published in 1944.
This publication is a project of the 2013 Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture. Revised and expanded from the 1998 Conference, the author compiled the information. Image courtesy Franklin Library at Fisk University. The Metropolitan Hi storical Commission edited and designed the materials. Douglas received a New Deal Art of Black America (1987), published by The commission from the Public Works of Art Project Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and in 1934 for a series of murals for the New York Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), co Public Library' s 135th street branch, now the edited by C.R. Wilson and William Ferris. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A major traveling retrospective These murals, titled Aspects of Negro Life depict exhibition, Aaron Douglas: African American "the entire African-American experience from Modernist, was organized by the Spencer African heritage, the Emancipation, life in the Museum of Art, University of Kansas, in 2007. It rural South, and the contemporary urban presented Douglas not only as an important figure dilemma." Three years later, after being recruited in the New Negro Arts Movement but also as a by his friend Charles S. Johnson, Douglas joined seminal figure in the development of twentieth the staff of Fisk University in Nashville. Douglas century art. Based on archival research at Fisk and a fellow black artist, Edwin Harleston of University and the Schomburg Center for Charleston, South Carolina, completed a series of Research in Black Culture in New York City, the highly significant murals depicting "the course of exhibition was shown at the Frist Center for the Negro history" for the Erastus Milo Cravath Visual Arts in Nashville in 2008. Exhibition Library at Fisk University. Douglas taught curator Susan Earle edited the accompanying painting and was chair of the art department at book, which includes essays by art historians Fisk from 193 7 until his retirement in 1966. Renee Ater, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, David Prior to Douglas' s death in Nashville on C. Driskell, Susan Earle, Amy Helene Kirschke, February 3, 1979, his work had been exhibited Richard J. Powell, and Cheryl R. Ragar, with a throughout the country and featured in Foreward by Robert Hemenway and an illustrated companion volumes, including Retrospective narrative chronology by Stephanie Fox Knappe. Exhibition: Paintings by Aaron Douglas ( 1971) by David Driskell, Gregory Ridley, and D. L. Graham, and Two Centuries of Black American Dr. Reavis L. Mitchell, Jr. Art (1976) by David Driskell. In the decade Fisk University following his death, the innovative art of the " pioneering Africanist" Aaron Douglas was Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are taken from featured in numerous exhibitions and critical Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America by Mary publications such as Flash of the Spirit: African Schmidt Campbell, David Driskell, David Levering Lewis, and published by The Studio Museum in and Afro-American Art and Philosophy ( 1983) by Harlem (I 987). Robert Farris Thompson; Harlem Renaissance: