This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Aaron Douglas, who was born on May 26, 1899 in Topeka, Kansas, is the American
artist perhaps most closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and
for synthesizing formal and symbolic elements of African art with a
modern European aesthetic.
He studied at the University of
Nebraska, from which he graduated, as well as Columbia University
Teachers College. His artistic career began as an illustrator, working
in ink drawings.
In 1925, attracted by the presence of Alaine
Locke, philosopher and cultural critic, Douglas moved to Harlem, New
York to be part of Lockes' New Negro Movement. This movement expressed
African Americans' new pride in their African heritage, manifesting
itself in literature, song, dance, and for Douglas, most significantly
art.
Shortly after his arrival in Harlem, Douglas made the
acquaintance of German- American portrait artist Winold Reiss, who
illustrated the March 1925 New Negro issue of Survey Graphic
for Locke. Locke recognized that the sculptural art of Africa had
inspired the art of such leading modernists as Pablo Picasso and
Constantin Brancusi and that it could lead to the creation of great art
by African Americans. Both Reiss and Locke encouraged Douglas to
develop his own American black style from design motifs in African art.
Douglas followed their suggestions and sought examples of
African art, which in the 1920s were beginning to be purchased by the
collections of American museums and galleries.
Murals and
drawings were his primary works, focusing on religious customs and
favoring a geometric style which he developed in the 1920s while
studying under Reiss. Douglas reduced forms to their fundamental
shapes, such as circles, triangles, and rectangles, and tended to
represent both objects and black people as silhouettes. Most of these
forms are hard-edged and angular, reminiscent of the Art-Deco designs
popular in the United States during the early twentieth century. S ome
figures, however, have a curvilinear character, apparently influenced
by the contemporary Art Nouveau trend in France. Their sense of
movement has been compared to that of Greek vase paintings.
Douglas's entry into the art world came in 1925 illustrating Opportunity magazines cover, and a first-place award from The Crisis magazine for his drawing The African Chieftain.
In
1927, his visual exploration of African motifs and his use of black
subjects attracted the attention of black intellectual and writer James
Weldon Johnson, who commissioned Douglas to illustrate his book God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
(1927). Douglas considered his work for this book to be his most
important and mature set of illustrations. Douglas said, "I tried
to keep my forms very stark and geometric with my main emphasis on the
human body. I tried to portray everything not in a realistic, but in
[an] abstract way, simplified and abstract as . . . in the spirituals."
Soon after the completion of the illustrations for God's Trombones,
Douglas executed for Club Ebony a mural series inspired by Harlem's
night life. Like his illustrations, the mural was done in black
and white. Art collector and historian Albert C. Barnes was
impressed with the murals and remarked that Douglas should try doing
them in color. He offered Douglas a year-long scholarship to
study color at his art school outside of Philadelphia, and Douglas, who
had very little experience in mixing colors, accepted. As a
result of this study, Douglas became to incorporate color into his
murals.
Aspects of Negro Life, in 1934, at the Cullen
Branch of the New York Public Library is Douglas best-known mural
series and consists of four chronological compositions. The first, The Negro in an African Setting,
highlights the African heritage of African-Americans through
representations of African dance and music. The second spans
three stages of African American history: slavery, emancipation, and
Reconstruction. The Idyll of the Deep South, the third
composition, portrays the problem of lynching and how African
Americans, in spite of this omnipresent threat, continued to work,
sing, and dance. The final mural, Song of the Towers,
charts three events: the mass migration of blacks to northern
industrial centers during the 1910s, the flowering of black artistic
expression in 1920s New York City known as the Harlem Renaissance, and
the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The technique
used in the mural became his signature style a series of concentric
circles expanded from a fixed point, imposing figure elements on its
background and altering a person's or object's shade of color in the
places where it intersected with a circle. As a result, a person
or object would bear several diffused shades of the same color.
This procedure lent to Douglas's murals a mystical, dreamlike
quality. This chromatic complexity and sophisticated design of Aspects of Negro Life
is noteworthy compared to others done during the Works Progress
Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), the New Deal program
that supported unemployed artists.
Douglas was not exclusively
an illustrator and a muralist, although these two mediums occupied the
majority of his career. A Rosenwald grant took him to Paris in
1931, and influenced by a year of independent study at the Académie
Scandinave there, he occasionally painted portraits and landscapes,
which were more naturalistic than his other work.
A second
grant allowed him to tour Haiti and the American South in 1938.
Douglas was also a social activist who, as the first elected president
of the Harlem Artists Guild (1935), worked to obtain WPA recognition
and support for African American artists.
As well as a
painter, he was an educator, and after graduating from the University
of Nebraska, taught art at Lincoln High School in Topeka, Kansas, from
1923 to 1925. Beginning in 1939, Douglas occasionally taught drawing
and painting at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. After
earning a master's degree in art education from Columbia University in
1944, he became a permanent member of the Fisk University faculty,
serving as a professor and chair of the art department there until his
retirement in 1966.
One of the first African American artists to
affirm the value of the black experience, Douglas continued to lecture
and paint until his death, stating his refusal "to compromise and see
blacks as anything other than a proud and majestic people."
Aaron Douglas died in Nashville in on February 3, 1979.
Sources:
Richard J. Powell, "Art of the Harlem Renaissance", American Art Review, April 1998, p. 132
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Theresa Cederholm, Afro-American Artists: A Bio-bibliographical Directory
| |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born Topeka, May 26, 1899; died Nashville, TN, Feb. 2, 1979. Illustrator. Watercolor, easel, and mural painter. Educator. African-American. Studied in Topeka and graduate of the University of Nebraska. Additional study at the Weinold Rice School in New York, the Barnes Foundation in Marion, PA, and Academi Scandinave in Paris under Charles Despiau and Othen Frieze. Became known as “father of black American art” and a key figure during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. First black artist to incorporate African iconography into American art. Taught art at Lincoln High School in Kansas City from 1923-25. Taught and founded the Art Department at Fisk University, Nashville, TN, and served as the chairman for 29 years. Illustrator of God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson (1927); illustrator of Black Magic by Paul Morand. | Source:
COLLECTIONS:
Murals for College Inn at Sherman Hotel, College (destroyed); Fisk University, Nashville; University of Nebraska; New York Public Library; YMCA, New York; Spencer Museum of Art.
SOURCES:
Susan Craig, "Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945)"
Topeka Cap & Topeka J (Topeka Capital, Topeka J (aka Topeka J) newspapers—usually reports of the Kansas Artists Exhibition 1st= Topeka Cap Nov. 11, 1925 9th= Topeka J Nov. 11, 1933 2nd= Topeka Cap Nov. 10, 1926 10th= Topeka J Nov. 10, 1934 3rd= Topeka J Nov. 19, 1927 11th= Topeka J Jan. 7, 1936 4th= Topeka J Nov. 3, 1928 12th= Topeka J Nov. 11 & 14, 1936 5th= Topeka J Nov. 2, 1929 14th= Topeka J Jan. 22, 1938 6th= Topeka J Oct. 18 & Nov. 1, 1930 15th= Topeka J Mar. 10, 1939 7th= Topeka J Oct. 24, 1931 16th= Topeka J Feb. 2 & 10, 1940 8th= Topeka J Oct. 22, 1932 17th= Topeka J Mar. 8 & 17, 1941) (Sept. 15, 1939); Sain, Lydia. Kansas Artists, compiled by Lydia Sain from 1932 to 1948. Typed Manuscript, 1948.; Who’s Who in American Art. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1936- v.1=1936-37 v.3= 1941-42 v.2=1938-39 v.4=1940-47. 1, 2, 3; Newlin, Gertrude Dix (Development of Art in Kansas. Typed Manuscript, 1951); Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Kansas. Kansas: A Guide to the Sunflower State. (American Guide Series) New York: Viking Press, 1939.; Dawdy 2: Dawdy, Doris Ostrander. Artists of the American West: A Biographical Dictionary. Volume 2. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1981.; Who’s Who in American Art. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1936- v.1=1936-37 v.3= 1941-42 v.2=1938-39 v.4=1940-47. 1; AskArt, www.askart.com, accessed Sept. 2, 2005; Kirschke, Amy Helene. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995) | | This and over 1,750 other biographies can be found in Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945) compiled by Susan V. Craig, Art & Architecture Librarian at University of Kansas. |
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Aaron Douglas is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Black American Artists
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