Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance. A term describing a flowering of activity among black American artists in the 1920s, centred on the Harlem district of New York. It was primarily a literary movement, one of the leading figures being Alain Locke (1886–1954), an editor, literary critic, art historian, and philosopher (from 1907 to 1910 he had been the first black Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and in 1918 he became professor of philosophy at Howard University, Washington, DC). In 1925 he edited a special issue of the Survey Graphic magazine entitled ‘Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro', and he expanded this into The New Negro, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays, published in the same year. His introduction to the volume expressed the idea that there was a new spirit of opportunity among black writers. Locke encouraged black American artists to explore their ancestral heritage, and he wrote several books dealing with black American culture and the influence of African art on modern painting and sculpture, among them Negro Art: Past and Present (1936) and The Negro in Art (1941). Among the visual artists who were involved in the Harlem Renaissance, the outstanding figure was the painter and illustrator Aaron Douglas, who is regarded as the first black American painter consciously to incorporate African imagery in his pictures. Palmer Hayden (1890–1964) and Malvin Gray Johnson (1896–1934) were among the other artists associated with the movement, which was ended by the Great Depression of the 1930s. An exhibition entitled ‘Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance’ was held at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1997; a reduced version was subsequently shown in Bristol and Coventry.