Legacy of the Harmon Foundation in Art

Funding for this program was made possible by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Once again the spotlight shines on the promising young artists of Harlem as the William E Harmon Foundation annual awards for Negroes are announced. Here at the Midtown Art Center in Manhattan, the arts smart of Uptown and Downtown converge to see the prize-winning art and congratulations. the winners. Helen Griffiths Harmon, the founder's daughter, bestows the honors. It's a gold medal in painting for Palmer Hayden, the former janitor who traded in his mop and pail for a brush and palette. Congratulations, Palmer. And if you missed the big opening in the Big Apple, don't worry. Soon these artworks will hit the road as the Harmon shows do every year, traveling to all... 48 states. It's a dream come true for these talented colored artists and hats off to the Harmon Foundation for helping deserving Negroes to help themselves. African-American artists trying to make a name for themselves during the 1920s and 30s was struggling against considerable odds. America was a segregated society. Blacks were expected to scrub floors and open doors, not paint and sculpt. Universities and art schools were reluctant to accept African Americans and if they did get in, when they got out there was no place to go. blacks were almost totally excluded from the world of museums and galleries where they might be able to show and sell their work. That's where the William E. Harmon Foundation came in. For more than a decade, the Harmon Foundation's program of exhibitions, prizes, and scholarships for Negroes provided an opportunity, just about the only opportunity, for black artists to have their work seen. The people at the Harmon Foundation never claimed to be art experts, but very few people at the time were paying much attention to black artists. So the Harmon Foundation became a kind of cottage industry. By default, the reigning authority on African American art. The foundation was dissolved in 1967. Many of the artists it had discovered and nurtured were forgotten, along with their work. Until the Newark Museum brought together for the first time in half a century more than 130 paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by Harmon Foundation artists. One of the exciting things about this project was the detective research. that was necessary to find work by artists that we simply had exhibition catalogs of and titles of paintings or sculpture but had never really seen the work and had no idea what had happened to it. We called one artist's family and talked about it and they said, well, we just, you know, there was some stuff in the attic but the house was sold and we think it was all just thrown away. And so we look at this as a point in art history that hasn't gotten very much investigation or serious scholarship. The research and the scholarship we did for this exhibition. is all that's been done on them in a long time. The glory of this show is that it demonstrates through these extraordinary pieces that blacks had a lot of things on their minds as artists in the 1920s and 30s, at a time in which the country was, for the most part, prepared to only hear a very constrained or simplified or one-dimensional voice from blacks. They were able to approximate what the European masters were doing. They were able to speak in a new language that hearkened back to Africa. They were able to create works that had to do with black folk culture, had to do with cosmopolitan black life, had to do with the whole question of miscegenation. In other words, these artists suggested that blacks were able to speak in several. tongues in a society that historically had encouraged him to speak in one voice, and that is the voice of the American Negro, either a victimized voice or a voice which was so contented that it had no... depth or elevation. The images of the American Negro that were created by Negro artists were complex, subtle, and human. A radical departure from the way blacks were usually portrayed as bug-eyed minstrels, shuffling darkies, sly mammies, and watermelon-loving piccaninnies. Stereotypes that were firmly fixed in the national consciousness. Moving pictures were even more powerful image makers. The birth of a nation, D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic celebration of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, effectively rewrote the history of the Reconstruction period. In Griffith's version, blacks were the villains. And for most Americans, those flickering images became the reality. I think that if you look at the impact of the birth of a nation which already swept the country and was regarded not only as a cinematic masterpiece but also as a in a sense a sort of ideological masterpiece proclaiming superiority of the white race and the imminent threat of the black race to the white race. This was not an idle sport. This was not some accident, some lunatic theory on the part of a... of a Hollywood producer and director, but in fact it reflected the mainstream of scientific thought of the time about the relative position of the two major races in the United States. So-called science was essentially highly racist almost by definition at the turn of the century and down into the 20s. Book after book from highly regarded authorities and exceptionally well-received proclaimed the division of... of races, attributed characteristics to different races, and almost inevitably put blacks at the bottom of the racial heap. Blacks were depicted virtually everywhere, and certainly that was part and parcel of the official thinking as posing a tremendous threat to the integrity, to the moral health, and educational well-being of the nation. And the conflict between the two races was seen as worsening and inevitable, and generally there was a sense that blacks were the ones who were blacks had to be subjugated soon or else the country would come to a terrible end. One would think that blacks were already sufficiently subjugated, especially in the South, where the post-Reconstruction backlash was in full swing. Lynching parties terrorized the countryside and worked their way northward, as legal protections were steadily rolled back. With career options limited to menial labor or sharecropping, Grinding poverty became a way of life. The best hope was escape. And between 1900 and 1918, over a million southern blacks packed up and went north, more than doubling the African American population in the north and the midwest. It was known as the Great Migration. This was a period in which this country received hundreds of thousands of European immigrants, Jews and Italians and Poles. and Lithuanians and Greeks and Irish and Germans, and these people came to this country, and within the same moment of history, the blacks were sliding, if you will, backward, they are moving forward, creating the impression that blacks were not up to snuff as a people. But when World War I broke out, blacks had a chance to move forward. Northern factories recruited blacks to the country. African-Americans to fill the well-paying jobs left open by whites who had gone overseas as soldiers. Eventually blacks were allowed to join up too. In segregated companies, 200,000 African-American soldiers were given an equal opportunity to serve as soldiers. to die for their country. The war that promised to make the world safe a democracy did not create full democracy for black doughboys when they returned. Nevertheless, they proved themselves to be disciplined, valiant servants. servicemen. They came home war heroes. And the triumphant homecoming parade up Fifth Avenue to Harlem in 1919 marked a psychological victory as well. After they've seen Paris How you gonna keep them away from the short ways Dazzling around and pain in the town How you gonna keep them away from harm That's the mystery They'll never want to be a race of clowns And who's a duke and poly through a town How you gonna keep them down on the farm How you gonna keep them away from the short ways African Americans who had successfully fought tyranny in Europe were a lot less willing to tolerate racial oppression at home. In the summer of 1919, whites instigated race riots in Washington, St. Louis, Houston, and Chicago. And this time, blacks fought back. And they got organized politically through the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, headed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois and his... colleagues decided their most urgent task was to improve the image of the American Negro and they needed artists to fight on the front lines. In the early 1920s a sweeping public relations campaign was launched to paint a new picture of the African American. It was called the New Negro Movement and the New Negro was first and foremost an artistic creation composed out of stories, poems, songs, and pictures that emphasize the virtues of the race. Civil rights leaders believed that art could nudge open the doors to economic opportunity and social acceptance. It was expected that music, literature, and all forms of black artistic expression would function as a subtle kind of propaganda. The result was the decade-long arts celebration known as the Harlem Renaissance. I suppose what's extraordinary about the Harlem Renaissance enterprise is its, in a sense, artificiality. that you are really creating an arts movement out of whole cloth. You're taking people who, in the normal course of their professional lives, would have become lawyers, businessmen, morticians, teachers, and you're saying to them, look, we perceive that you've got something that could be parlayed into an artistic expression. You can paint, you have a voice, indeed, you've got clear... the instincts of a writer. And the fact that a small group of civil rights notables, people around the NAACP and the Urban League, programmatically set out to divert many people from their professional tracks into the arts is what is fascinating. Straight away, Charles Johnson, the editor of Opportunity Magazine, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, reached out for Aaron Douglas, who was then a teacher at the University of Michigan. teacher of art in Kansas City and inveigled him into coming to Harlan simply because Johnson knew there had to be a plastic artist. Aaron Douglas's murals at the New York Public Library's Harlan branch set the tone for a neighborhood that had become both a coveted address and a state of mind. Negro culture was all the rage and Harlan was the Negro capital of America. Its library became a star-studded literary. salon where the uptown intelligentsia would meet regularly to hear County Cullen recite a new sonnet or debate an essay from the latest issue of Crisis Magazine. A few doors down at the 135th Street YMCA, Paul Robeson might be performing Shakespeare. In swanky parlors on Stryver's Row and Sugar Hill, society matrons hosted private music houses and poetry readings. And for the less strenuously high-minded, There was the nightlife. White and black, rich and poor alike, got on board Duke Ellington's A train, lured in by what Blue Noses referred to as jungle music. Harlem locals could choose from an abundance of cabarets, dance halls, and rent parties. But the most famous and lucrative nightclubs catered to white audiences, with blacks providing the exotic entertainment. In fact, white money and white audiences were essential ingredients to the Renaissance. Harlem Harlem had become a huge mani- a factor of art and the care and feeding of its artistic production line was more than the black community could handle alone. So black leaders were eager to form alliances with progressive wealthy whites who were sympathetic to their cause. White patrons came from all walks of life, but they all came with an agenda. They supplied cash and demanded art in a kind of benevolent censorship. The writer Zora Neale Hurston called them negrotarians. That pungent, handy phrase characterized a motley crew of well-endowed whites, and they ranged from those who were simply curious and wanted to pleasure themselves in Harlem. attend an occasional cocktail party and that was as far as it went with them. And then it deepens to people who felt, for reasons of politics and or aesthetics, that the African American could save a society that was increasingly commercialized and dead and that indeed the kind of art that was coming out of the African American community would, there would be a confluence of it with socialist energies in the society. New York and in 1900 alone bought more than four million dollars worth of property in Brooklyn. In 1922 he established his philanthropic foundation which built playgrounds, trained nurses and handed out awards for constructive achievement among Negroes. Harmon thought that encouraging blacks to be financially self-sufficient would help the country in general by getting them into the economic system at however low a level. His annual achievement awards for Negroes were divided into eight categories. categories, business and industry, science and invention, music, education, religious service, race relations, and fine arts. Each winner received a gold medal and $400. The social philosopher George Haynes, who headed the Commission on Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches, was recruited to administer the foundation's prizes for Negroes. The Harmon Foundation, William Harmon in particular, and I think many of those who were involved in the foundation, black and whites. were driven by a quintessentially American form of racism. And we need to study this. How has it been possible for America to remain racist and at the same time allow very small steps of black progress? Harmon was paternalistic toward blacks. He suspected that blacks were inferior, but thought that blacks would become a better group of people. if given help by people or individuals of his stature. He was also shaped by the notion of civility, that black people should be treated in a civil way by whites of goodwill. Now, what all of that means is that despite his subtle racial antipathies, he was prepared to help blacks. The key issue is that the blacks who were the recipients of his benevolence understood the arrangement. They understood his paternalism. And despite, or in face of it, you know, against the odds of that kind of racism, these women and men were in control of what was important to them aesthetically. Only 12 artists applied to the Harmon Foundation's first competition in 1926. The gold medal went to Palmer Hayden, who had been supporting himself as a janitor. The press latched onto that juicy tidbit, and when Hayden decided to take his... his prize money and go study in France, the headlines trumpeted, House Cleaner quits scrub bucket to paint abroad. Hayden came back to the States in 1933 and eventually became a kind of spokesman for the foundation, making public appearances and starring in the promotional films. Hale Woodruff won honorable mention in the first Harmon competition. Woodruff went on to establish his own art department at Atlanta University, where he started a series of African-American art exhibits much like the Harmon Foundations. Before that, he lived and studied in the United States. studied in Paris where he painted many of the watercolors that were in subsequent Harmon shows. Woodruff's and Hayden's prize-winning paintings were displayed in the foundation's Wall Street headquarters for four days for a few hundred invited guests. But the next year, 41 artists applied for the Fine Arts Award, enough for a real exhibition. Eighty-seven works were selected for a show at the International House on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Close to Harlan, but not close enough to scare away any potential white visitors. By 1928, the year William Harmon died, the Foundation's Negro art exhibits were part of its public identity. There were national tours, and similar exhibits sprang up in other cities. They weren't interested in promoting one particular style or a particular kind of art. Basically what the foundation said to artists was, we want to help show your work, we want to help sell your work so you can improve your lot in life. And that was really basically what it was all about. It wasn't about aesthetics. If the Harmon Foundation lacked an aesthetic vision, it certainly knew how to draw a crowd. 150,000 people saw the 1931 show, which had to be moved to larger galleries in Midtown. The opening ceremonies were filmed, and an elaborate catalog was printed, with an essay entitled, The African Legacy and the Negro Artist, by Elton John. Elaine Locke. Locke's influence over the Harlem Renaissance was second only to that of W.E.B. Du Bois. Locke was from the black aristocracy, five generations of old Philadelphia athletes, educated in an integrated high school. Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and then on to Oxford, where he was the first African-American Rhodes Scholar. I think Locke was different among the leaders in that he went furthest, I think, in the direction of championing the idea of freedom of the artist. He went much further, I think, than Du Bois, who insisted basically on a literature of racial uplift, believing very strongly that a novel should advance... the cause of the race in some by by by portraying blacks in a very positive light and by structuring a drama where say the young black reader would be led to believe in the race and to take steps towards improving himself and improving the race i think lock's attitude was a lot more flexible and a lot more art oriented but still at its very core he too saw art the practice of art as being somehow tied intimately into the political and cultural future of the race. He believed that blacks, by their paintings, by their poems, the novels, and so on, could express whatever it was, that central gift, that geist, that spirit that was at the core of the national being, by national I mean the black national being, and that in that way the race would identify itself and then build on that self-identification to mature as a race. I mean, I know that we, to think of the... the races needing to mature is debatable, but I think that that really does represent what Locke believed. Locke thought that art by African Americans should look different from art by white people. Black artists should look to Africa for inspiration, he proclaimed, like the sculptor Richmond Barthe. Barthe was one of the few African American artists to cross the color line and show in commercial galleries and in major museums such as the Whitney and the Metropolitan. holiday. Sergeant Claude Johnson was another of Locke's favorite sons. Johnson had been orphaned as a young boy and was reared by his aunt, the sculptor May Howard Jackson. Critics always mentioned Johnson's dignified portrayal of blacks and compared his clean, round forms to pre-Columbian artifacts. Locke also liked the paintings of Malvin Gray Johnson. Johnson was scraping by as a menial laborer when he was discovered by the Harmon Foundation and quickly became an art world sensation. He died young, though, in 1935, in the midst of preparing his first one-man show. The Harmon Foundation mounted the exhibit anyway, and the reviews were enviable. Alain Locke and his disciples believed the African connection held the key to creating a new kind of visual art in this country. European modernists like Picasso and Matisse had already discovered Africa and were using primitive motifs and tribal forms in their work. If Picasso and Matisse thought African art was worth imitating, it had to be taken seriously by the white establishment, and Locke reasoned, no one had a more legitimate claim to the African heritage. heritage than the African-American. Well, maybe another contemporary artist said it maybe best, Mel Edwards, who's a contemporary sculptor, and it says he doesn't know why people go on and on and on about the fact that, or looking for things that are black in his work or... African in his work because he is African and so it the same way that you would find things that are European in a Euro-American's work you will find things that are African and an African-American's work because it's simply part of the sensibility that's just who you are but not all black artists found their inspiration in an African past many of them had lived and studied in Europe and were comfortable with that aesthetic what's more in Europe blacks didn't have to limit themselves to Negro art exhibits and eat in color only cafes. And some black artists simply didn't feel connected to Africa. Du Bois of course had talked about this in the Souls of Black Folk. He talks about the divided souls of the average black American. On one hand you have African soul and on the other you have the American or we might say even the European soul and how they're contending for this body and tearing the body apart except for some superhuman effort on the part of the individual. to pull the two sides, his or her two sides together, Africa and Europe, or Africa and white America, if you like. That was, of course, the central problem psychologically and artistically, culturally, for blacks who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. William Edward Scott, whose soul was decidedly more European, was a master of the kind of artwork that new negro philosophers like Alain Locke were eager to leave behind. Scott was older than most of the Harmon Foundation artists and had built a respectable career for himself in France, showing regularly at Paris exhibitions and getting good reviews from the French critics. Nevertheless, Elaine Locke dismissed him as a traditionalist. That label also applied to Laura Wheeler Waring, best known for her serene, delicate portraits of women. After she won the Harmon Gold Medal in 1927, Waring was invited to help judge the annual competitions, and over the years she became part of the Foundation's inner circle. Alan Freelon was another unrepentant traditionalist. He was more interested in solving technical problems of light and color than in changing the world. Nearly all of Freelon's paintings were thought to be lost until the Newark Museum tracked down Freelon's son in the phone book. It was the first time anyone had seen the work or even asked about it since his father died. Freeland was strongly committed to the New Negro Movement, but he disagreed just as strongly with Elaine Locke about mining the African past. He wrote that, quote, the American Negro has no more actual knowledge of his tribal background and jungle ways than has the Anglo-American of ancient druidic rights. Freeland was afraid that art by African Americans would be ghettoized into its own separate but unequal category, and he wanted to be judged as an individual. The Negro artists wondered if we should have been following the dates of our heritage, or the Negro, that is, should we have devoted ourselves to Keening? Sculptors? Sculptors. Without thinking of race. Race. So there was a little confusion of not bickering there. James Lisanne Wells won Harmon Foundation medals in 1930 and 1933. He had some success with commercial galleries in the early 20s, despite the unspoken whites-only policy. But he quickly learned that while it was possible to make a reputation as a printmaker, he would have to make a living as a teacher. The year before the stock market crashed, he accepted an offer to join the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he remained. remained for more than 40 years. I did follow African sculpture in my early work, and later in teaching, I tried to encourage my students to look carefully. African art and African sculpture. But becoming interested in other things that were taking place, I somewhat changed aesthetically. I'm a storyteller, and I did develop a certain theme, that is, I did hear a lot about the Negro question, and things like that, and so I... I thought in my naive way that while you hear so much about the question, the social question, that the individual gets lost in the midst of the discussion. So I thought I'd just go make documentaries of people, black people, since I lived amongst them. I showed myself. with ordinary people. Alan Kreit grew up in Boston and studied at the Boston Museum School of the Fine Arts. His specialty was the genre painting, scenes of everyday life. Kreit has won lots of awards over the years, but very few of his works were ever sold. He supported himself as a furniture designer and draftsman, and eventually donated his entire collection to the Boston Athenaeum. Lois Mailou Jones, another Bostonian, also attended the Boston Museum School. and later joined her colleague James Wells in the Howard University Art Department. She was working as a textile designer when she entered her first Harmon Foundation show. The textiles had names, Grograt and Thisbe and had beautiful names, but you never saw Lois Maylor Jones. And I had made up my mind that I wanted to go down in history and in art, and to do that I'd have to paint. Having gone to the Boston Museum, school and had the exposure of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where I would go and look at the works of Sargent and Winslow Homer and aspire more or less in that direction. I wasn't thinking at that time of any particular racial boundary, you know, limit, so that it really was sort of wide open. But I must say the Harmon exhibits did sort of change you into working in the direction of black art because to interest the people in Harlem, for example, the black subject would be popular. Popular, but not required. Pragmatic to the end, the Harmon Foundation was not governed by any kind of artistic philosophy. They relied on outside experts, hired guns, to choose the art in their annual exhibits. The Harmon juries were usually made up of a handful of established white painters and at least one black, resulting in a mishmash of different styles and levels of quality. Some thought the diversity was exhilarating. Others complained that diversity was a euphemism for anything goes. Even Aaron Douglas, who was one of the foundation's favorites, criticized what he called the vacuum cleaner approach. to art. He wrote, neither streets, houses, nor public institutions escaped. When unsuspecting Negroes were found with a brush in their hands, they were immediately hauled away and held up for interpretation. They were given places of honor and bowed to with ceremony. Every effort to protest their innocence was drowned out with big-mouthed praise. A number escaped and returned to a more reasonable existence. Many fell in with the game and went along making hollow and meaningless gestures with brush and palette, but the Negro artists have emerged. The emergence of the Negro artists provided fresh meat for the critics, but gave scholars a brand new story. subject to study. Almost immediately, two books about African-American art were published, both of them by African-Americans. The one by James Porter, a painter as well as a scholar, is still considered definitive. Porter went on to be become a professor at Howard University, but he continued to paint and win awards during his long career. Critics liked his work, but they always referred to him as a Negro artist who showed in all black shows. In fact, most critics, both black and white, had difficulty seeing beyond the color of the artist. Whites especially tended to describe art by African Americans in well-intentioned racial cliches. In the 1920s and 30s, ethnic identity or religious or racial identity was very important. But the African American artists, I think, had more trouble with that. They were just considered too exotic and too other. And in the art world, African American artists were associated with color, with excitement, with that kind of joy, and you were expected to paint that way rather than in any abstract way or cerebral way or geometric way that would belong, say, to the School of Paris, to which you really didn't belong because that was just not your heritage. And in the 1920s, when so many of the hyphenated Americans were rediscovering their roots or not wanting to lose their roots, critics enjoyed very much wanting artists to paint from their roots. And in reviews of exhibitions of African-American artists, the critics asked for for more African-American experiences, that somehow this would be a contribution to the larger whole of American art, that the African-American artists should not imitate American artists. But they didn't quite know what to say about these artists, and so they fell back on the stereotypes that they knew, that African artists had rhythm. And in the painting, you don't necessarily find an African rhythm or an African-American rhythm. Well, they would speak about the joy of life that they found. found in African-American paintings, but this was a stereotype of the minstrel idea. And so they looked at these paintings, welcomed them. I don't think they understood them at all. There was this assumption that one would buy a Hart Schaffner and Marx suit and then jump on the back of a crocodile and go off into the jungle, and that one simply had to be patient with that kind of condescension. But it was hoped that given the interest of the Harmon Foundation, given the... prizes annually awarded and the rest of it, those opportunities would in fact finally transcend what was a kind of hostaging of creativity to stereotypes. But the difference between a stereotype and an archetype is often in the eye of the beholder. Honest, unsanitized depictions of African-American life made some black leaders nervous. They wanted positive images, upstanding role models, or at least sympathetic. characterizations, like Archibald Motley's popular painting, Mending Socks. When Motley's work became less sentimental and more stylized, the anxiety level at the NAACP rose a notch or two, even though Motley's later work is his best. Archibald Motley was simply doing what all real artists do. do, finding his own voice. Just as the real writers of the Harlem Renaissance were doing, Langston Hughes was one of the first to declare his artistic independence from his readers and from his patrons. Oh, be respectful. Write about nice people. Show how good we are, say the Negroes. Be stereotyped. Don't go too far. Don't shatter our illusions about you. Don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you, say the whites. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful and... ugly, too. The Tom-Tom cries, and the Tom-Tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. Some blacks were acting out the role of the so-called happy darkie because this was part of the expectation of the audience, I mean what the white audience expected of blacks. Other blacks did something that in some respects was equally dangerous, which is they became so prim, so proper, so righteous and self-righteous. That they were acting out, they were playing another role that was equally false in a way. People like Hughes and Hurston, I think, both tried to find the middle ground, which was to recognize that as far as they were concerned, there was a kind of exuberance to black life that could not, should not be lost. And yet still, blacks had a certain kind of responsibility to the race, to the nation as a whole. and therefore had to be also sober. The struggle was to find the middle ground, and it was always, I think it was perilous for almost everyone concerned. The struggle for that middle ground was in many respects a class struggle within the black community. For most African Americans, higher education meant trade school. Those lucky enough to go to college were rarely encouraged to study something as impractical as art. Music, oral culture, and writing had much longer traditions in black life than did painting and sculpture. Moreover, by the 1920s and 30s, painting and sculpture had become dominated by major institutions connected to white wealth. That is to say, it was several classes removed from... from black people and spiritually and emotionally speaking also removed. So it may be that black visual artists and white visual artists who documented black life empathetically were not as well understood as jazz musicians or writers or choreographers or dancers who were just, if you will, a step, if you get the metaphoric thing. A step separated from what black people could do if they wanted to. Most African Americans in the 1920s and 30s were more concerned about supporting their families than supporting the arts. But there was a substantial and influential black bourgeoisie who shared the same values, aspirations, and even affectations of the white middle class. They did care about art and literature and being a credit to the race. W.E.B. Du Bois called them the talented tenth, the primary gene pool of the Harlem Renaissance. It was elitist, and the notion was a trickle-down notion, which mirrored the notion in America of social progress. It's trickle-down. The wealthy make things better for us if we don't tax them out of existence. And it wasn't hypocrisy. It was a firm, innocent belief that if we are good, if we show merit, if we exemplify those qualities that should be admired. Then in fact that will change and transform social attitudes, improve our lot, and by improving our lot we can bring along the mass of migrating peasants and Pullman porters and sharecroppers. I graduated in 27. I hadn't gone that far, really, in painting, so that it was a matter of doing the textile designs and then thinking of a position. And I went back to the Boston Museum School and talked to the director, Henry Hunt Clark, about perhaps having an assistantship or some such thing. And he said, Lois, we don't have any opening here, but have you ever thought of going south to help your people? And that was really a shock because there I was, this young woman in Boston. with friends at Radcliffe and Simmons College and Harvard and all, and telling me to go down south. All I knew about the south was Tuskegee and Fisk, and sort of looked down a little bit on sending me down there. But Lois did go south, to Sedalia, North Carolina, to teach at Palmer Memorial Institute. I had been willed a thousand dollars by an elderly couple in Rhode Island, a black couple who realized that I had talent and I told my mother that I thought it would be wonderful to drive down to North Carolina. And so I went and got this very snappy little gray cartridge with jade green and I bought it and thinking of going way down south that it should have a big headlight and that was It's a funny thing of having a big stem and a great big headlight put on the car and then there was one of those horns on the side, you know, that was to be put on for this long trip down south. And it was quite a thrill to go out and paint in the back. woods all around there. I had never seen Negro cabins. And some of the first paintings that were exhibited finally in the Harmon exhibits were of those cabins. The Harmon Foundation was delighted to show Lois Melu Jones's southern cabins, but nobody was particularly eager to buy them. The watercolor remains in the artist's own collection, as does much of her work. In fact, very few of the Harmon Foundation artists were ever able to make a living by their art alone. Many turned to teaching to supplement their income. But not everyone was as fortunate as Lois Jones. Augusta Savage started her own school for aspiring young artists in Harlem. Through it, she became one of the most influential forces in the New Negro movement. Civil rights activists made her a cause celebre when the Fountain Blue School of Fine Arts accepted and then denied her admission because she was black. Savage always got good notices for her work and good press for her school, but it was bankrupted by the Depression and afterwards she was never quite able to sustain herself. She went into seclusion in upstate New York where one day she took a pickaxe and destroyed all the unsold pieces in her studio. John Wesley Hardrick won a Harmon Medal in 1927. That one prize, unfortunately, proved to be the highlight of his career. He kept at it, though, turning out landscapes and portraits and even a few murals for churches and high schools in his hometown of Indianapolis. But for the most part, he lived in artistic obscurity, eking out a living as a manual laborer. Elizabeth Prophet also spent her last years in poverty. She was one of the most famous visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, having been discovered by W.E.B. Du Bois in Paris, where she moved in 1922 to attend the École des Beaux-Arts. The French critics adored her elegant austerity, and she was regularly included in the big Paris exhibitions. She returned to the States in 1930 to collect the Harmon Foundation's award in sculpture, marking the beginning of a decade-long prize-winning streak. She joined the faculty at Spelman College, but gradually dropped out of sight and disappeared altogether after her last show in 1945. When she died, friends had to take up a collection to keep her from going to a pauper's grave. Those were the kind of tragedies the Harmon Foundation tried desperately to prevent. Their primary goal was to help black artists become financially self-sufficient, and that meant making sales. Racial expression was fine, as long as it didn't get in the way of moving the merchandise. And over time, the annual awards exhibitions came to resemble high-pressure sales showrooms. The Foundation tried to actually help encourage people to buy works out of these exhibitions. They always emphasized that all the works were for sale and they wanted to help bring artists into the marketplace for American art, black American artists. them into the marketplace. They had been almost completely, over the years, excluded from the marketplace. They tried to help artists get gallery exhibitions and they always emphasized that these works could be bought and collected. And because of that they had to realize that the bulk of patrons for art in this country were still white and that if they were painting works that had a very strong racial overtones that most whites were not going to be interested in buying them. So there was a lot of tempering. I mean the foundation and even other social philosophers like Dr. George Haynes who helped run this program for the Harmon Foundation through the Federal Council of Churches who was a very influential philosopher about social change in this country said that he really felt that black artists should not necessarily look to African roots or racial expression in their work because they felt that if they do that, if they did that at this time, they would never be able to enter the larger mainstream of American culture. But it didn't seem to matter whether black artists made primitive sculptures or impressionist watercolors. Nothing sold. William Henry Johnson was one of the Foundation's stars. As a young man, he landed a one-man show in Paris, picked up a Harmon Gold Medal in 1929, and returned to Europe for an eight-year sojourn in Denmark, where he married a Danish woman. Johnson continued to send his paintings back to America, and the Harmon Foundation showed them all. When Johnson finally returned to the States, he was hired by the WPA. but he was never able to lift himself out of poverty. And after his wife died in 1943, Johnson cracked. He was institutionalized after strangers found him wandering in a daze through Denmark. The Harmon Foundation was left with more than a thousand of his unsold works, which were eventually donated to the National Museum of Art in Washington. Had the Harmon Foundation not stepped in, there might be nothing left at all of Johnson's work. I think that it's extremely short-sighted, in my opinion, to come down too hard on the patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. Artists have always needed patrons. We continue to need patrons, artists and academics and anyone. who wants to do something a little bit different, something that requires an infusion of money from some basically non-official source, that's an inescapable part of the production of art. In some instances, it backfired because certainly patronage has its dangers. But by and large, if you look at the patronage extended by the Harmon Foundation, then I think you have to say that it was of enormous service to the Renaissance. I don't think the Harmon Foundation was as blameworthy as its critics have said. The commercializing of the art was inevitable. And that's a rather standard sort of phenomenon, isn't it? You know, the thing gets going. and the people who really have the talent will somehow survive the institutionalization of it, it will be seen that they really are good. And the best ones continue to have a career long after the Harmon Foundation was simply of interest to historians. The Harmon Foundation mounted its last juried show in 1933, but it continued to support black artists through modest educational programs and occasional small exhibitions. The Foundation's director, the formidable Miss Mary Beattie Brady, adopted a strictly no-nonsense approach to the business of getting her art in front of the public, and many black colleges owe their permanent art collections to the Harmon Foundation's arm-twisting. But any Renaissance, by definition, has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning of the end of the Harlem Renaissance came with the Wall Street crash of 1929, although its effects were not immediately felt up in Harlem. But by the mid-30s, the robust fortunes that that had financed the movement were starting to wither in the grip of the Great Depression and Harlem began to deteriorate as a community. The riot of 1935 brought the era to a dispirited end. By 1935 when you have that riot taking place you understand that something has happened. A dream has died, the dream that brought the people from the South to the great city and with expectations of a new life of prosperity. settled prosperity, that that has died, and with it died the Harlem Renaissance. But the great thing about a renaissance is that it leaves behind works of art that continue to work. And that's exactly what happened. The renaissance lived on in its power. The difference between the era of the Harmon Foundation artists and our own is striking. Before the modern civil rights movement, before World War II, people had a narrow view of... of human potential. We simply did not see those links within the human family. So these women and men are struggling against the stereotypical notion that only certain groups are capable of extraordinary genius. The fact that they managed to mete out their genius, um, you know, we're all blessed. You don't have to be black to be blessed by black creativity. All Americans are blessed that this society, despite itself, was able to produce these artists. Oh, when you're smiling When you're smiling The whole world Smiles with you Oh, when you're laughing, babe, when you're laughing, the sun comes shining through. But when you're crying You bring on the rain So stop your sighing Be happy again And keep on smiling Keep on smiling And the whole world smiles Funding for this program was made possible by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

the winners. Helen Griffiths Harmon, the founder's daughter, bestows the honors. It's a gold medal in painting for Palmer Hayden, the former janitor who traded in his mop and pail for a brush and palette.

Congratulations, Palmer. And if you missed the big opening in the Big Apple, don't worry. Soon these artworks will hit the road as the Harmon shows do every year, traveling to all...

48 states. It's a dream come true for these talented colored artists and hats off to the Harmon Foundation for helping deserving Negroes to help themselves. African-American artists trying to make a name for themselves during the 1920s and 30s was struggling against considerable odds. America was a segregated society. Blacks were expected to scrub floors and open doors, not paint and sculpt.

Universities and art schools were reluctant to accept African Americans and if they did get in, when they got out there was no place to go. blacks were almost totally excluded from the world of museums and galleries where they might be able to show and sell their work. That's where the William E. Harmon Foundation came in.

For more than a decade, the Harmon Foundation's program of exhibitions, prizes, and scholarships for Negroes provided an opportunity, just about the only opportunity, for black artists to have their work seen. The people at the Harmon Foundation never claimed to be art experts, but very few people at the time were paying much attention to black artists. So the Harmon Foundation became a kind of cottage industry. By default, the reigning authority on African American art. The foundation was dissolved in 1967. Many of the artists it had discovered and nurtured were forgotten, along with their work.

Until the Newark Museum brought together for the first time in half a century more than 130 paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by Harmon Foundation artists. One of the exciting things about this project was the detective research. that was necessary to find work by artists that we simply had exhibition catalogs of and titles of paintings or sculpture but had never really seen the work and had no idea what had happened to it. We called one artist's family and talked about it and they said, well, we just, you know, there was some stuff in the attic but the house was sold and we think it was all just thrown away. And so we look at this as a point in art history that hasn't gotten very much investigation or serious scholarship.

The research and the scholarship we did for this exhibition. is all that's been done on them in a long time. The glory of this show is that it demonstrates through these extraordinary pieces that blacks had a lot of things on their minds as artists in the 1920s and 30s, at a time in which the country was, for the most part, prepared to only hear a very constrained or simplified or one-dimensional voice from blacks.

They were able to approximate what the European masters were doing. They were able to speak in a new language that hearkened back to Africa. They were able to create works that had to do with black folk culture, had to do with cosmopolitan black life, had to do with the whole question of miscegenation.

In other words, these artists suggested that blacks were able to speak in several. tongues in a society that historically had encouraged him to speak in one voice, and that is the voice of the American Negro, either a victimized voice or a voice which was so contented that it had no... depth or elevation. The images of the American Negro that were created by Negro artists were complex, subtle, and human. A radical departure from the way blacks were usually portrayed as bug-eyed minstrels, shuffling darkies, sly mammies, and watermelon-loving piccaninnies.

Stereotypes that were firmly fixed in the national consciousness. Moving pictures were even more powerful image makers. The birth of a nation, D.W.

Griffith's 1915 epic celebration of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, effectively rewrote the history of the Reconstruction period. In Griffith's version, blacks were the villains. And for most Americans, those flickering images became the reality.

I think that if you look at the impact of the birth of a nation which already swept the country and was regarded not only as a cinematic masterpiece but also as a in a sense a sort of ideological masterpiece proclaiming superiority of the white race and the imminent threat of the black race to the white race. This was not an idle sport. This was not some accident, some lunatic theory on the part of a... of a Hollywood producer and director, but in fact it reflected the mainstream of scientific thought of the time about the relative position of the two major races in the United States.

So-called science was essentially highly racist almost by definition at the turn of the century and down into the 20s. Book after book from highly regarded authorities and exceptionally well-received proclaimed the division of... of races, attributed characteristics to different races, and almost inevitably put blacks at the bottom of the racial heap. Blacks were depicted virtually everywhere, and certainly that was part and parcel of the official thinking as posing a tremendous threat to the integrity, to the moral health, and educational well-being of the nation. And the conflict between the two races was seen as worsening and inevitable, and generally there was a sense that blacks were the ones who were blacks had to be subjugated soon or else the country would come to a terrible end.

One would think that blacks were already sufficiently subjugated, especially in the South, where the post-Reconstruction backlash was in full swing. Lynching parties terrorized the countryside and worked their way northward, as legal protections were steadily rolled back. With career options limited to menial labor or sharecropping, Grinding poverty became a way of life.

The best hope was escape. And between 1900 and 1918, over a million southern blacks packed up and went north, more than doubling the African American population in the north and the midwest. It was known as the Great Migration. This was a period in which this country received hundreds of thousands of European immigrants, Jews and Italians and Poles.

and Lithuanians and Greeks and Irish and Germans, and these people came to this country, and within the same moment of history, the blacks were sliding, if you will, backward, they are moving forward, creating the impression that blacks were not up to snuff as a people. But when World War I broke out, blacks had a chance to move forward. Northern factories recruited blacks to the country. African-Americans to fill the well-paying jobs left open by whites who had gone overseas as soldiers. Eventually blacks were allowed to join up too.

In segregated companies, 200,000 African-American soldiers were given an equal opportunity to serve as soldiers. to die for their country. The war that promised to make the world safe a democracy did not create full democracy for black doughboys when they returned.

Nevertheless, they proved themselves to be disciplined, valiant servants. servicemen. They came home war heroes.

And the triumphant homecoming parade up Fifth Avenue to Harlem in 1919 marked a psychological victory as well. After they've seen Paris How you gonna keep them away from the short ways Dazzling around and pain in the town How you gonna keep them away from harm That's the mystery They'll never want to be a race of clowns And who's a duke and poly through a town How you gonna keep them down on the farm How you gonna keep them away from the short ways African Americans who had successfully fought tyranny in Europe were a lot less willing to tolerate racial oppression at home. In the summer of 1919, whites instigated race riots in Washington, St. Louis, Houston, and Chicago.

And this time, blacks fought back. And they got organized politically through the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, headed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois and his...

colleagues decided their most urgent task was to improve the image of the American Negro and they needed artists to fight on the front lines. In the early 1920s a sweeping public relations campaign was launched to paint a new picture of the African American. It was called the New Negro Movement and the New Negro was first and foremost an artistic creation composed out of stories, poems, songs, and pictures that emphasize the virtues of the race. Civil rights leaders believed that art could nudge open the doors to economic opportunity and social acceptance. It was expected that music, literature, and all forms of black artistic expression would function as a subtle kind of propaganda.

The result was the decade-long arts celebration known as the Harlem Renaissance. I suppose what's extraordinary about the Harlem Renaissance enterprise is its, in a sense, artificiality. that you are really creating an arts movement out of whole cloth.

You're taking people who, in the normal course of their professional lives, would have become lawyers, businessmen, morticians, teachers, and you're saying to them, look, we perceive that you've got something that could be parlayed into an artistic expression. You can paint, you have a voice, indeed, you've got clear... the instincts of a writer.

And the fact that a small group of civil rights notables, people around the NAACP and the Urban League, programmatically set out to divert many people from their professional tracks into the arts is what is fascinating. Straight away, Charles Johnson, the editor of Opportunity Magazine, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, reached out for Aaron Douglas, who was then a teacher at the University of Michigan. teacher of art in Kansas City and inveigled him into coming to Harlan simply because Johnson knew there had to be a plastic artist.

Aaron Douglas's murals at the New York Public Library's Harlan branch set the tone for a neighborhood that had become both a coveted address and a state of mind. Negro culture was all the rage and Harlan was the Negro capital of America. Its library became a star-studded literary. salon where the uptown intelligentsia would meet regularly to hear County Cullen recite a new sonnet or debate an essay from the latest issue of Crisis Magazine. A few doors down at the 135th Street YMCA, Paul Robeson might be performing Shakespeare.

In swanky parlors on Stryver's Row and Sugar Hill, society matrons hosted private music houses and poetry readings. And for the less strenuously high-minded, There was the nightlife. White and black, rich and poor alike, got on board Duke Ellington's A train, lured in by what Blue Noses referred to as jungle music.

Harlem locals could choose from an abundance of cabarets, dance halls, and rent parties. But the most famous and lucrative nightclubs catered to white audiences, with blacks providing the exotic entertainment. In fact, white money and white audiences were essential ingredients to the Renaissance. Harlem Harlem had become a huge mani- a factor of art and the care and feeding of its artistic production line was more than the black community could handle alone. So black leaders were eager to form alliances with progressive wealthy whites who were sympathetic to their cause.

White patrons came from all walks of life, but they all came with an agenda. They supplied cash and demanded art in a kind of benevolent censorship. The writer Zora Neale Hurston called them negrotarians. That pungent, handy phrase characterized a motley crew of well-endowed whites, and they ranged from those who were simply curious and wanted to pleasure themselves in Harlem. attend an occasional cocktail party and that was as far as it went with them.

And then it deepens to people who felt, for reasons of politics and or aesthetics, that the African American could save a society that was increasingly commercialized and dead and that indeed the kind of art that was coming out of the African American community would, there would be a confluence of it with socialist energies in the society. New York and in 1900 alone bought more than four million dollars worth of property in Brooklyn. In 1922 he established his philanthropic foundation which built playgrounds, trained nurses and handed out awards for constructive achievement among Negroes.

Harmon thought that encouraging blacks to be financially self-sufficient would help the country in general by getting them into the economic system at however low a level. His annual achievement awards for Negroes were divided into eight categories. categories, business and industry, science and invention, music, education, religious service, race relations, and fine arts.

Each winner received a gold medal and $400. The social philosopher George Haynes, who headed the Commission on Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches, was recruited to administer the foundation's prizes for Negroes. The Harmon Foundation, William Harmon in particular, and I think many of those who were involved in the foundation, black and whites. were driven by a quintessentially American form of racism.

And we need to study this. How has it been possible for America to remain racist and at the same time allow very small steps of black progress? Harmon was paternalistic toward blacks. He suspected that blacks were inferior, but thought that blacks would become a better group of people. if given help by people or individuals of his stature.

He was also shaped by the notion of civility, that black people should be treated in a civil way by whites of goodwill. Now, what all of that means is that despite his subtle racial antipathies, he was prepared to help blacks. The key issue is that the blacks who were the recipients of his benevolence understood the arrangement. They understood his paternalism. And despite, or in face of it, you know, against the odds of that kind of racism, these women and men were in control of what was important to them aesthetically.

Only 12 artists applied to the Harmon Foundation's first competition in 1926. The gold medal went to Palmer Hayden, who had been supporting himself as a janitor. The press latched onto that juicy tidbit, and when Hayden decided to take his... his prize money and go study in France, the headlines trumpeted, House Cleaner quits scrub bucket to paint abroad.

Hayden came back to the States in 1933 and eventually became a kind of spokesman for the foundation, making public appearances and starring in the promotional films. Hale Woodruff won honorable mention in the first Harmon competition. Woodruff went on to establish his own art department at Atlanta University, where he started a series of African-American art exhibits much like the Harmon Foundations. Before that, he lived and studied in the United States.

studied in Paris where he painted many of the watercolors that were in subsequent Harmon shows. Woodruff's and Hayden's prize-winning paintings were displayed in the foundation's Wall Street headquarters for four days for a few hundred invited guests. But the next year, 41 artists applied for the Fine Arts Award, enough for a real exhibition. Eighty-seven works were selected for a show at the International House on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Close to Harlan, but not close enough to scare away any potential white visitors. By 1928, the year William Harmon died, the Foundation's Negro art exhibits were part of its public identity. There were national tours, and similar exhibits sprang up in other cities. They weren't interested in promoting one particular style or a particular kind of art.

Basically what the foundation said to artists was, we want to help show your work, we want to help sell your work so you can improve your lot in life. And that was really basically what it was all about. It wasn't about aesthetics. If the Harmon Foundation lacked an aesthetic vision, it certainly knew how to draw a crowd.

150,000 people saw the 1931 show, which had to be moved to larger galleries in Midtown. The opening ceremonies were filmed, and an elaborate catalog was printed, with an essay entitled, The African Legacy and the Negro Artist, by Elton John. Elaine Locke. Locke's influence over the Harlem Renaissance was second only to that of W.E.B. Du Bois. Locke was from the black aristocracy, five generations of old Philadelphia athletes, educated in an integrated high school.

Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and then on to Oxford, where he was the first African-American Rhodes Scholar. I think Locke was different among the leaders in that he went furthest, I think, in the direction of championing the idea of freedom of the artist. He went much further, I think, than Du Bois, who insisted basically on a literature of racial uplift, believing very strongly that a novel should advance... the cause of the race in some by by by portraying blacks in a very positive light and by structuring a drama where say the young black reader would be led to believe in the race and to take steps towards improving himself and improving the race i think lock's attitude was a lot more flexible and a lot more art oriented but still at its very core he too saw art the practice of art as being somehow tied intimately into the political and cultural future of the race.

He believed that blacks, by their paintings, by their poems, the novels, and so on, could express whatever it was, that central gift, that geist, that spirit that was at the core of the national being, by national I mean the black national being, and that in that way the race would identify itself and then build on that self-identification to mature as a race. I mean, I know that we, to think of the... the races needing to mature is debatable, but I think that that really does represent what Locke believed. Locke thought that art by African Americans should look different from art by white people. Black artists should look to Africa for inspiration, he proclaimed, like the sculptor Richmond Barthe.

Barthe was one of the few African American artists to cross the color line and show in commercial galleries and in major museums such as the Whitney and the Metropolitan. holiday. Sergeant Claude Johnson was another of Locke's favorite sons. Johnson had been orphaned as a young boy and was reared by his aunt, the sculptor May Howard Jackson. Critics always mentioned Johnson's dignified portrayal of blacks and compared his clean, round forms to pre-Columbian artifacts.

Locke also liked the paintings of Malvin Gray Johnson. Johnson was scraping by as a menial laborer when he was discovered by the Harmon Foundation and quickly became an art world sensation. He died young, though, in 1935, in the midst of preparing his first one-man show. The Harmon Foundation mounted the exhibit anyway, and the reviews were enviable.

Alain Locke and his disciples believed the African connection held the key to creating a new kind of visual art in this country. European modernists like Picasso and Matisse had already discovered Africa and were using primitive motifs and tribal forms in their work. If Picasso and Matisse thought African art was worth imitating, it had to be taken seriously by the white establishment, and Locke reasoned, no one had a more legitimate claim to the African heritage. heritage than the African-American.

Well, maybe another contemporary artist said it maybe best, Mel Edwards, who's a contemporary sculptor, and it says he doesn't know why people go on and on and on about the fact that, or looking for things that are black in his work or... African in his work because he is African and so it the same way that you would find things that are European in a Euro-American's work you will find things that are African and an African-American's work because it's simply part of the sensibility that's just who you are but not all black artists found their inspiration in an African past many of them had lived and studied in Europe and were comfortable with that aesthetic what's more in Europe blacks didn't have to limit themselves to Negro art exhibits and eat in color only cafes. And some black artists simply didn't feel connected to Africa.

Du Bois of course had talked about this in the Souls of Black Folk. He talks about the divided souls of the average black American. On one hand you have African soul and on the other you have the American or we might say even the European soul and how they're contending for this body and tearing the body apart except for some superhuman effort on the part of the individual.

to pull the two sides, his or her two sides together, Africa and Europe, or Africa and white America, if you like. That was, of course, the central problem psychologically and artistically, culturally, for blacks who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. William Edward Scott, whose soul was decidedly more European, was a master of the kind of artwork that new negro philosophers like Alain Locke were eager to leave behind. Scott was older than most of the Harmon Foundation artists and had built a respectable career for himself in France, showing regularly at Paris exhibitions and getting good reviews from the French critics.

Nevertheless, Elaine Locke dismissed him as a traditionalist. That label also applied to Laura Wheeler Waring, best known for her serene, delicate portraits of women. After she won the Harmon Gold Medal in 1927, Waring was invited to help judge the annual competitions, and over the years she became part of the Foundation's inner circle. Alan Freelon was another unrepentant traditionalist. He was more interested in solving technical problems of light and color than in changing the world.

Nearly all of Freelon's paintings were thought to be lost until the Newark Museum tracked down Freelon's son in the phone book. It was the first time anyone had seen the work or even asked about it since his father died. Freeland was strongly committed to the New Negro Movement, but he disagreed just as strongly with Elaine Locke about mining the African past.

He wrote that, quote, the American Negro has no more actual knowledge of his tribal background and jungle ways than has the Anglo-American of ancient druidic rights. Freeland was afraid that art by African Americans would be ghettoized into its own separate but unequal category, and he wanted to be judged as an individual. The Negro artists wondered if we should have been following the dates of our heritage, or the Negro, that is, should we have devoted ourselves to Keening? Sculptors? Sculptors.

Without thinking of race. Race. So there was a little confusion of not bickering there. James Lisanne Wells won Harmon Foundation medals in 1930 and 1933. He had some success with commercial galleries in the early 20s, despite the unspoken whites-only policy. But he quickly learned that while it was possible to make a reputation as a printmaker, he would have to make a living as a teacher.

The year before the stock market crashed, he accepted an offer to join the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he remained. remained for more than 40 years. I did follow African sculpture in my early work, and later in teaching, I tried to encourage my students to look carefully.

African art and African sculpture. But becoming interested in other things that were taking place, I somewhat changed aesthetically. I'm a storyteller, and I did develop a certain theme, that is, I did hear a lot about the Negro question, and things like that, and so I... I thought in my naive way that while you hear so much about the question, the social question, that the individual gets lost in the midst of the discussion. So I thought I'd just go make documentaries of people, black people, since I lived amongst them.

I showed myself. with ordinary people. Alan Kreit grew up in Boston and studied at the Boston Museum School of the Fine Arts. His specialty was the genre painting, scenes of everyday life. Kreit has won lots of awards over the years, but very few of his works were ever sold.

He supported himself as a furniture designer and draftsman, and eventually donated his entire collection to the Boston Athenaeum. Lois Mailou Jones, another Bostonian, also attended the Boston Museum School. and later joined her colleague James Wells in the Howard University Art Department.

She was working as a textile designer when she entered her first Harmon Foundation show. The textiles had names, Grograt and Thisbe and had beautiful names, but you never saw Lois Maylor Jones. And I had made up my mind that I wanted to go down in history and in art, and to do that I'd have to paint. Having gone to the Boston Museum, school and had the exposure of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where I would go and look at the works of Sargent and Winslow Homer and aspire more or less in that direction. I wasn't thinking at that time of any particular racial boundary, you know, limit, so that it really was sort of wide open.

But I must say the Harmon exhibits did sort of change you into working in the direction of black art because to interest the people in Harlem, for example, the black subject would be popular. Popular, but not required. Pragmatic to the end, the Harmon Foundation was not governed by any kind of artistic philosophy. They relied on outside experts, hired guns, to choose the art in their annual exhibits. The Harmon juries were usually made up of a handful of established white painters and at least one black, resulting in a mishmash of different styles and levels of quality.

Some thought the diversity was exhilarating. Others complained that diversity was a euphemism for anything goes. Even Aaron Douglas, who was one of the foundation's favorites, criticized what he called the vacuum cleaner approach. to art.

He wrote, neither streets, houses, nor public institutions escaped. When unsuspecting Negroes were found with a brush in their hands, they were immediately hauled away and held up for interpretation. They were given places of honor and bowed to with ceremony. Every effort to protest their innocence was drowned out with big-mouthed praise. A number escaped and returned to a more reasonable existence.

Many fell in with the game and went along making hollow and meaningless gestures with brush and palette, but the Negro artists have emerged. The emergence of the Negro artists provided fresh meat for the critics, but gave scholars a brand new story. subject to study.

Almost immediately, two books about African-American art were published, both of them by African-Americans. The one by James Porter, a painter as well as a scholar, is still considered definitive. Porter went on to be become a professor at Howard University, but he continued to paint and win awards during his long career. Critics liked his work, but they always referred to him as a Negro artist who showed in all black shows. In fact, most critics, both black and white, had difficulty seeing beyond the color of the artist.

Whites especially tended to describe art by African Americans in well-intentioned racial cliches. In the 1920s and 30s, ethnic identity or religious or racial identity was very important. But the African American artists, I think, had more trouble with that. They were just considered too exotic and too other.

And in the art world, African American artists were associated with color, with excitement, with that kind of joy, and you were expected to paint that way rather than in any abstract way or cerebral way or geometric way that would belong, say, to the School of Paris, to which you really didn't belong because that was just not your heritage. And in the 1920s, when so many of the hyphenated Americans were rediscovering their roots or not wanting to lose their roots, critics enjoyed very much wanting artists to paint from their roots. And in reviews of exhibitions of African-American artists, the critics asked for for more African-American experiences, that somehow this would be a contribution to the larger whole of American art, that the African-American artists should not imitate American artists.

But they didn't quite know what to say about these artists, and so they fell back on the stereotypes that they knew, that African artists had rhythm. And in the painting, you don't necessarily find an African rhythm or an African-American rhythm. Well, they would speak about the joy of life that they found.

found in African-American paintings, but this was a stereotype of the minstrel idea. And so they looked at these paintings, welcomed them. I don't think they understood them at all.

There was this assumption that one would buy a Hart Schaffner and Marx suit and then jump on the back of a crocodile and go off into the jungle, and that one simply had to be patient with that kind of condescension. But it was hoped that given the interest of the Harmon Foundation, given the... prizes annually awarded and the rest of it, those opportunities would in fact finally transcend what was a kind of hostaging of creativity to stereotypes.

But the difference between a stereotype and an archetype is often in the eye of the beholder. Honest, unsanitized depictions of African-American life made some black leaders nervous. They wanted positive images, upstanding role models, or at least sympathetic.

characterizations, like Archibald Motley's popular painting, Mending Socks. When Motley's work became less sentimental and more stylized, the anxiety level at the NAACP rose a notch or two, even though Motley's later work is his best. Archibald Motley was simply doing what all real artists do.

do, finding his own voice. Just as the real writers of the Harlem Renaissance were doing, Langston Hughes was one of the first to declare his artistic independence from his readers and from his patrons. Oh, be respectful.

Write about nice people. Show how good we are, say the Negroes. Be stereotyped.

Don't go too far. Don't shatter our illusions about you. Don't amuse us too seriously.

We will pay you, say the whites. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad.

If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful and... ugly, too.

The Tom-Tom cries, and the Tom-Tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. Some blacks were acting out the role of the so-called happy darkie because this was part of the expectation of the audience, I mean what the white audience expected of blacks.

Other blacks did something that in some respects was equally dangerous, which is they became so prim, so proper, so righteous and self-righteous. That they were acting out, they were playing another role that was equally false in a way. People like Hughes and Hurston, I think, both tried to find the middle ground, which was to recognize that as far as they were concerned, there was a kind of exuberance to black life that could not, should not be lost. And yet still, blacks had a certain kind of responsibility to the race, to the nation as a whole.

and therefore had to be also sober. The struggle was to find the middle ground, and it was always, I think it was perilous for almost everyone concerned. The struggle for that middle ground was in many respects a class struggle within the black community. For most African Americans, higher education meant trade school. Those lucky enough to go to college were rarely encouraged to study something as impractical as art.

Music, oral culture, and writing had much longer traditions in black life than did painting and sculpture. Moreover, by the 1920s and 30s, painting and sculpture had become dominated by major institutions connected to white wealth. That is to say, it was several classes removed from...

from black people and spiritually and emotionally speaking also removed. So it may be that black visual artists and white visual artists who documented black life empathetically were not as well understood as jazz musicians or writers or choreographers or dancers who were just, if you will, a step, if you get the metaphoric thing. A step separated from what black people could do if they wanted to. Most African Americans in the 1920s and 30s were more concerned about supporting their families than supporting the arts.

But there was a substantial and influential black bourgeoisie who shared the same values, aspirations, and even affectations of the white middle class. They did care about art and literature and being a credit to the race. W.E.B. Du Bois called them the talented tenth, the primary gene pool of the Harlem Renaissance.

It was elitist, and the notion was a trickle-down notion, which mirrored the notion in America of social progress. It's trickle-down. The wealthy make things better for us if we don't tax them out of existence.

And it wasn't hypocrisy. It was a firm, innocent belief that if we are good, if we show merit, if we exemplify those qualities that should be admired. Then in fact that will change and transform social attitudes, improve our lot, and by improving our lot we can bring along the mass of migrating peasants and Pullman porters and sharecroppers.

I graduated in 27. I hadn't gone that far, really, in painting, so that it was a matter of doing the textile designs and then thinking of a position. And I went back to the Boston Museum School and talked to the director, Henry Hunt Clark, about perhaps having an assistantship or some such thing. And he said, Lois, we don't have any opening here, but have you ever thought of going south to help your people? And that was really a shock because there I was, this young woman in Boston.

with friends at Radcliffe and Simmons College and Harvard and all, and telling me to go down south. All I knew about the south was Tuskegee and Fisk, and sort of looked down a little bit on sending me down there. But Lois did go south, to Sedalia, North Carolina, to teach at Palmer Memorial Institute. I had been willed a thousand dollars by an elderly couple in Rhode Island, a black couple who realized that I had talent and I told my mother that I thought it would be wonderful to drive down to North Carolina. And so I went and got this very snappy little gray cartridge with jade green and I bought it and thinking of going way down south that it should have a big headlight and that was It's a funny thing of having a big stem and a great big headlight put on the car and then there was one of those horns on the side, you know, that was to be put on for this long trip down south.

And it was quite a thrill to go out and paint in the back. woods all around there. I had never seen Negro cabins. And some of the first paintings that were exhibited finally in the Harmon exhibits were of those cabins.

The Harmon Foundation was delighted to show Lois Melu Jones's southern cabins, but nobody was particularly eager to buy them. The watercolor remains in the artist's own collection, as does much of her work. In fact, very few of the Harmon Foundation artists were ever able to make a living by their art alone. Many turned to teaching to supplement their income. But not everyone was as fortunate as Lois Jones.

Augusta Savage started her own school for aspiring young artists in Harlem. Through it, she became one of the most influential forces in the New Negro movement. Civil rights activists made her a cause celebre when the Fountain Blue School of Fine Arts accepted and then denied her admission because she was black.

Savage always got good notices for her work and good press for her school, but it was bankrupted by the Depression and afterwards she was never quite able to sustain herself. She went into seclusion in upstate New York where one day she took a pickaxe and destroyed all the unsold pieces in her studio. John Wesley Hardrick won a Harmon Medal in 1927. That one prize, unfortunately, proved to be the highlight of his career.

He kept at it, though, turning out landscapes and portraits and even a few murals for churches and high schools in his hometown of Indianapolis. But for the most part, he lived in artistic obscurity, eking out a living as a manual laborer. Elizabeth Prophet also spent her last years in poverty. She was one of the most famous visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, having been discovered by W.E.B. Du Bois in Paris, where she moved in 1922 to attend the École des Beaux-Arts. The French critics adored her elegant austerity, and she was regularly included in the big Paris exhibitions.

She returned to the States in 1930 to collect the Harmon Foundation's award in sculpture, marking the beginning of a decade-long prize-winning streak. She joined the faculty at Spelman College, but gradually dropped out of sight and disappeared altogether after her last show in 1945. When she died, friends had to take up a collection to keep her from going to a pauper's grave. Those were the kind of tragedies the Harmon Foundation tried desperately to prevent.

Their primary goal was to help black artists become financially self-sufficient, and that meant making sales. Racial expression was fine, as long as it didn't get in the way of moving the merchandise. And over time, the annual awards exhibitions came to resemble high-pressure sales showrooms.

The Foundation tried to actually help encourage people to buy works out of these exhibitions. They always emphasized that all the works were for sale and they wanted to help bring artists into the marketplace for American art, black American artists. them into the marketplace.

They had been almost completely, over the years, excluded from the marketplace. They tried to help artists get gallery exhibitions and they always emphasized that these works could be bought and collected. And because of that they had to realize that the bulk of patrons for art in this country were still white and that if they were painting works that had a very strong racial overtones that most whites were not going to be interested in buying them. So there was a lot of tempering.

I mean the foundation and even other social philosophers like Dr. George Haynes who helped run this program for the Harmon Foundation through the Federal Council of Churches who was a very influential philosopher about social change in this country said that he really felt that black artists should not necessarily look to African roots or racial expression in their work because they felt that if they do that, if they did that at this time, they would never be able to enter the larger mainstream of American culture. But it didn't seem to matter whether black artists made primitive sculptures or impressionist watercolors. Nothing sold.

William Henry Johnson was one of the Foundation's stars. As a young man, he landed a one-man show in Paris, picked up a Harmon Gold Medal in 1929, and returned to Europe for an eight-year sojourn in Denmark, where he married a Danish woman. Johnson continued to send his paintings back to America, and the Harmon Foundation showed them all. When Johnson finally returned to the States, he was hired by the WPA.

but he was never able to lift himself out of poverty. And after his wife died in 1943, Johnson cracked. He was institutionalized after strangers found him wandering in a daze through Denmark.

The Harmon Foundation was left with more than a thousand of his unsold works, which were eventually donated to the National Museum of Art in Washington. Had the Harmon Foundation not stepped in, there might be nothing left at all of Johnson's work. I think that it's extremely short-sighted, in my opinion, to come down too hard on the patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. Artists have always needed patrons. We continue to need patrons, artists and academics and anyone.

who wants to do something a little bit different, something that requires an infusion of money from some basically non-official source, that's an inescapable part of the production of art. In some instances, it backfired because certainly patronage has its dangers. But by and large, if you look at the patronage extended by the Harmon Foundation, then I think you have to say that it was of enormous service to the Renaissance.

I don't think the Harmon Foundation was as blameworthy as its critics have said. The commercializing of the art was inevitable. And that's a rather standard sort of phenomenon, isn't it?

You know, the thing gets going. and the people who really have the talent will somehow survive the institutionalization of it, it will be seen that they really are good. And the best ones continue to have a career long after the Harmon Foundation was simply of interest to historians. The Harmon Foundation mounted its last juried show in 1933, but it continued to support black artists through modest educational programs and occasional small exhibitions. The Foundation's director, the formidable Miss Mary Beattie Brady, adopted a strictly no-nonsense approach to the business of getting her art in front of the public, and many black colleges owe their permanent art collections to the Harmon Foundation's arm-twisting.

But any Renaissance, by definition, has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning of the end of the Harlem Renaissance came with the Wall Street crash of 1929, although its effects were not immediately felt up in Harlem. But by the mid-30s, the robust fortunes that that had financed the movement were starting to wither in the grip of the Great Depression and Harlem began to deteriorate as a community.

The riot of 1935 brought the era to a dispirited end. By 1935 when you have that riot taking place you understand that something has happened. A dream has died, the dream that brought the people from the South to the great city and with expectations of a new life of prosperity. settled prosperity, that that has died, and with it died the Harlem Renaissance. But the great thing about a renaissance is that it leaves behind works of art that continue to work.

And that's exactly what happened. The renaissance lived on in its power. The difference between the era of the Harmon Foundation artists and our own is striking.

Before the modern civil rights movement, before World War II, people had a narrow view of... of human potential. We simply did not see those links within the human family.

So these women and men are struggling against the stereotypical notion that only certain groups are capable of extraordinary genius. The fact that they managed to mete out their genius, um, you know, we're all blessed. You don't have to be black to be blessed by black creativity.

All Americans are blessed that this society, despite itself, was able to produce these artists. Oh, when you're smiling When you're smiling The whole world Smiles with you Oh, when you're laughing, babe, when you're laughing, the sun comes shining through. But when you're crying You bring on the rain So stop your sighing Be happy again And keep on smiling Keep on smiling And the whole world smiles Funding for this program was made possible by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Transcript for:Legacy of the Harmon Foundation in Art

Transcript for:
Legacy of the Harmon Foundation in Art