NEW YORK.- The Metropolitan Museum of until from New York (MET) rescues from ostracism the “Harlem Renaissance” movement born of the great migratory movement of blacks from the rural south to the north of the United States in the first half of the 20th century.
Starting Sunday, through 160 paintings, sculptures, photographs and literature of the Afro-descendant diaspora, the exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” gives an idea of the daily life of the new black neighborhoods such as Harlem in New York and the South Side of Chicago in the years 1920-1940 arising from the Great Migration.
The exhibition is “an opening and an expansion of the history of art and its stories,” the director of the MET, the Austrian Max Hollein, explained to AFP this week at the press presentation.
With works that came from the brushes of great artists of the time, overshadowed by the trends of a century rich in figures of white art, the exhibition highlights “the fundamental role of the movement in shaping the representation of the modern black subject.” and, indeed, of the very fabric of modern art of the early 20th century,” according to Hollein.
The works come mainly from universities where people of African descent traditionally studied and American and European museums, but also from the heirs who preserved this unique collection.
Like Madeline Murphy Rabb, who had a hard time holding back tears when admiring the painting “Girl With Pomegranate” (1940), by her great-aunt Laura Wheeler Waring.
“I have worked for decades so that my great-aunt was recognized as she deserved,” he explains to AFP. “It had always been my goal for a broader audience to see this important work” in the United States, often marked by discrimination and racism, and where “so many whites and some blacks have stereotypes about what black artists paint,” he adds. .
The patron of the exhibition, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was grateful that the descendants of African-American artists “had preserved works whose value they knew at a time when they did not have it.”
Interracial relationships
Featured artists include Charles Alston, Miguel Covarrubias, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring.
Likewise, it exhibits the work of black artists who lived and worked in Europe in juxtaposition with portraits of the international African diaspora made by Europeans such as Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Dogen and Ronald Moody.
Hollein thus hopes to bring out of marginality and highlight the “Harlem Renaissance” movement, which was neither structured in time nor limited to Harlem.
“This exhibition is one of the ways to change it,” he says.
The exhibition tells of social aspects such as queer identity, colorism and class tensions, and interracial relations of this New Negro movement that came to an end at the peak of the civil rights movement of the 1950s.
Beyond New York and the interwar period, the MET pays tribute to the Chicago painter Motley (1891-1981), the poet Langston Hughes (1901-1967), who wrote until his death, and the painter Jacob Lawrence, recognized in abroad and who worked until his death in 2000.
The “Harlem Renaissance” is also associated with African American thinkers, writers and sociologists such as William Edward Burghardt “WEB” Du Bois (1868-1963) and Alain Locke (1885-1954).
In his book “The New Negro” (1925), Locke was interested in the potential of the “younger generation” of blacks to lead society toward “something approaching spiritual emancipation,” rather than toward classical political issues.
The essayist urged African-American painters to open themselves to African visual arts and European modern art,” recalls museum curator Denise Murrell.
William H. Johnson (1901-1970), for example, emigrated from his native South Carolina to New York before living in Tunisia, France, and Denmark.
The Great Migration was the largest movement of African Americans fleeing the rural and segregated South in search of freedom in cities of the liberal and open North.
FUENTE: AFP
