Duke Ellington (photo source Wikipedia)
Langston Hughes (photo source Wikipedia)
Photo of jazz and blues singer Bessie Smith (photo source Wikipedia)
The Harlem Renaissance thrived on the streets, salons, and clubs of upper Manhattan between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, and it still resonates today in art, literature, music, and politics.
When I think of the Harlem Renaissance, the hard-living Bessie Smith stomps through my head with her "Down Hearted Blues" and Cab Calloway scats behind her while Duke Ellington plinks on the piano keys after his nightly gig at the whites-only Cotton Club. The Buddy ghees and brees* of the Savoy's integrated crowd Lindy Hop in there, too, - and Charleston - not just for the white flappers, you know, until the early bright,** and Satchmo, the best of the Gabriels*** blows his trumpet in my ear, real loud.
*guys and girls
**morning
***horn players
Cab Calloway's Hepster Dictionary:
http://www.swingvirginia.com/reading/hepsterdictionary.html
People dancing at the Savoy in Romare Bearden's "Of the Blues: At the Savoy" (1974)
Langston Hughes witnessed the jazz and blues, the achievement and art flowing and wrote it down - jazzy like - Jazzonia - and Alain Locke, the unofficial daddy of it all, quotes Hughes' poem "Youth" in his 1925 essay "Enter the New Negro."
Langston Hughes' poem "Youth"
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.
Yesterday
A night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.
And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
Alain Locke wrote of the black "negro" community entering a new dynamic phase- finding their voice as a people, defining themselves - not by the white man's definition of slave, servant, and subordinate, secondary citizen. As black people left the Southern plantations behind, hopping the trains to New York, Chicago, St. Louis (the cities Jacob Lawrence includes in his migration painting below) and other northern urban centers, their newly-independent souls sang out from the choirs of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church and through the blues and jazz that turned the teaching tables on the white man who began to realize that the black man or woman was not here to slave and serve - but to educate and enrich. And enrich, enrich the Renaissance did as black men and women became doctors, lawyers, teachers, editors, political leaders, intellectuals, prose writers and poets, playwrights, actors, and artists.
Romare Bearden's collages of his early life and extended family in the South often feature trains in the background. The train heading North.
Romare Bearden, "The Train" (1975)
Romare Bearden "Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings" (1964)
Jacob Lawrence's painting titled "During the World War There Was a Great Migration North by Southern Negroes" (1940-41)
Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (His parents were Southerners from South Carolina and Virginia.)
******
When I think Harlem Renaissance, my mind forms a collage of all these wonderful elements and it is no wonder that Romare Bearden's art evolved into collage - eventually and definingly. "Romie" grew up in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance straight off the train from North Carolina's Mecklenburg County. Bearden's dynamic mother Bessye was a newspaper editor and well-respected in the community. Bearden's quiet father Howard, a sanitation inspector for New York City, played the piano in the Bearden family's living room, which was a regular meeting place for actors, writers, musicians, and politicians. Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington were among the regular guests mingling with Bessye's dozen-or-so Siamese cats. Romie had a front seat to history.
He soaked in the music, literature, the street , the times. Consider Bearden's collages and Hughes' poetry:
Romare Bearden's "Of the Blues: Showtime" (1974)
This could be Bessie Smith (or Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald...) belting out her song with Satchmo laughing on the left, trumpet in hand.
Langston Hughes poem "Trumpet Player"
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has a head of vibrant hair
Tamed down,
Patent-leathered now
Until it gleams
Like jet -
Were jet a crown.
The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire.
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire -
Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea's a bar-glass
Sucker size.
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Whose jacket
Has a fine one-button roll,
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
Its hypodermic needle
To his soul-
But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.
***
Bearden's etching/aquatint "Out Chorus" (1979-1980)
Hughes' time-capsule poems - "Jazzonia" :
Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?
Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!
In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
***
The sights and sounds of Harlem surrounded Bearden, influencing his work. Jazz notes guided his art. "I listened for hours to recordings of Earl Hines at the piano," Bearden said. "Finally, I was able to block out the melody and concentrate on the silences between the notes. I found this was very helpful to me in the placement of objects in my paintings and collages. Jazz has shown me ways of achieving artistic structures that are personal to me."
Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/the_block/listen.html
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's website features Bearden's "The Block," depicting 1930s Harlem.
Bearden's "The Block" (1971)
Beardon on the block: "I think of Harlem as a young boy as a place of great energy. I tried to encapsulate some of these memories and make visual concepts out of them in this large painting that I did called, The Block."
Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/the_block/guide.html
Bearden saw himself as the Brueghel of his time, capturing the everyday around him in art. In 1969 he wrote, "Painting the life of my people as I know it - as passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel painted the life of the Flemish people of his day."
Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/most/hod_1978.61.1-6.htm
Bearden studied the great master painters and was always visiting museums. Compare Bearden's "Of the Blues: Showtime" (1974) with Edgar Degas' 1879 "Cafe Singer" :
***
In his essay "Enter the New Negro," Alain Locke wrote of the "Negro" having "slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation," achieving a "spiritual emancipation" through self-understanding. Art work depicting the plight of the slave and his struggle for freedom emerged during the Harlem Renaissance and after, as the black artist explored the themes of social struggle and injustice, exercising his voice.
Romare Bearden's "Captivity and Resistance" (1976)
Aaron Douglas' "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery through Reconstruction" (1934) is an epic depiction of African America history.
Locke encouraged Negro artists to not emulate white artists, but to look to Africa for themes and models. Douglas was considered a primitivist artist. In his "Aspects of Negro Life" series, he looked to the black American experience, but also to African ritual:
Study for "Aspects of Negro Life: The Negro in an African Setting" (1934)
*****
As the Duke told the world in 1932, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)."
The Harlem Renaissance brought the swing to our souls.
****
Sources:
Bessie Smith recordings:
http://www.redhotjazz.com/bessie.html
Duke Ellington:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Ellington
Lindy Hop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Hop
Cab Calloway:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab_Calloway
Cab Calloway's Hepster Dictionary:
http://www.swingvirginia.com/reading/hepsterdictionary.html
Louis Armstrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong
Langston Hughes Wikipedia site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/jazzage.html#harlem
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/exploring/harlem/infocredits/credits/imagecredits.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois
Jacob Lawrence:
http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/1998/art/pages/lawrence.htm
Aaron Douglas:
http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_AfAm/pages/AfAm_3.shtml
Romare Bearden
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1428038
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romare_Bearden
http://www.beardenfoundation.org/artlife/biography/biography.shtml
http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/the_block/index_flash.html
http://www.nga.gov/feature/bearden/170-199.htm
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/painting/bearden.asp
