Roaring Twenties

Harlem Renaissance Music and Art: Beyond the Writers

The Harlem Renaissance is best known for its writers, but the most internationally visible parts of the movement were the music and the visual art. The Harlem Renaissance jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and Bessie Smith, transformed American popular music in a single decade. The visual artists, including Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Archibald Motley, and the young Jacob Lawrence, invented a visual language that fused African mask traditions, Art Deco geometry, and American subject matter. Together, the music and the art carried the Harlem Renaissance around the world at a moment when the literary wing was still reaching for its wider audience.

For the wider context, see the parent Harlem Renaissance cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the literature, For the most important single writer,

Aaron Douglas and the New Visual Language

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) was the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, often called the “father of Black American art.” Born in Topeka, Kansas, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska in 1922, taught in Kansas City, and moved to Harlem in 1925. His style synthesized the silhouette, the flat plane, the African mask tradition, and the geometric vocabulary of Art Deco in a way that was uniquely identified with the movement.

His major murals include the four-panel cycle Aspects of Negro Life (1934) at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the murals at the Fisk University library in Nashville. The stylized, cubist-influenced silhouettes, the rhythmic repetition, and the angular figures made a new and immediately recognizable visual idiom. Douglas taught at Fisk from 1937 until his retirement in 1966, and his work became the foundational text of the African American visual tradition.

Augusta Savage and the Harlem Sculpture Scene

Augusta Savage (1892-1962) was the sculptor who, in 1923, became the first African American admitted to the Cooper Union art school, and who, in 1930, won a scholarship to study at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France. Her portrait bust Gamin of 1929, a study of a streetwise Harlem boy, won the Otto Kahn Prize. Her most ambitious work, the monumental sculpture The Harp (also called Lift Every Voice and Sing, after the James Weldon Johnson anthem), was commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The 16-foot sculpture, a Black female figure whose body was formed by the sounding-board of a harp and whose hands were the strings, was one of the most celebrated public sculptures of the era. Savage ran the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem from 1937, training a generation of Black artists including Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. She retired to Saugerties, New York, in 1945.

Meta Warrick Fuller, Archibald Motley, and Jacob Lawrence

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) was the first African American woman to receive a federal art commission. She had studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris alongside Auguste Rodin in the 1890s. Her 1907 Ethiopia Awakening, a female figure rising from a mummy case, became the founding image of the Pan-African visual movement. Her 1914 Mary Turner, a sculpture commemorating a Black woman lynched in Georgia, was the first major American artwork to treat the subject of lynching.

Archibald Motley (1891-1981), the “Jazz Age Modernist,” was a Chicago painter whose 1924 studies in Paris introduced him to the European avant-garde. His 1929 Black Belt and 1930 Cocktails depicted the Black urban life of Chicago with vivid color, satirical edge, and a sophisticated sense of social geography. Largely forgotten after the 1930s, he was rediscovered in the 1970s.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, grew up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. His most famous work, the 60-panel Migration Series (1940-41), told the story of the Great Migration in vivid, flat, hard-edged color. The series was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 and made him, at 23, the first Black artist in the permanent collection of a major American museum.

The Galleries, the Exhibitions, and the 1930s Support

The visual artists were supported by a small but determined set of institutions. The 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center) hosted exhibitions and lectures. The Harmon Foundation, established by the white real-estate developer William E. Harmon, ran annual exhibitions of Black art between 1927 and 1933; the 1929 exhibition was the first major museum-quality show of contemporary African American art. The Whitney Studio Club and the Whitney Studio Galleries founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney also exhibited Black artists.

The Great Depression and the New Deal transformed the economic basis of Black art. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) of 1933-34, the Federal Art Project (FAP) of 1935-43, and the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture all hired Black artists for the first time on a large scale, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) supported community art centers, including the Harlem Art Workshop. The institutional framework that had been built in the 1920s survived the Depression in better shape than the literary wing did.

The Music of the Harlem Renaissance

The musical wing of the Harlem Renaissance, although it overlapped with the literary wing only at the edges, was by far the most internationally visible. Duke Ellington (1899-1974) moved to Harlem in 1923, took over the Cotton Club band in 1927, and wrote the compositions that defined the sound of the decade. Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1922 and, in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-28 for Okeh Records, defined the language of jazz improvisation. Bessie Smith (1894-1937), “the Empress of the Blues,” sold 780,000 copies of “Down Hearted Blues” in the first six months of 1923 and was the first major Black recording star. (For Armstrong, Smith, and the rest, Cab Calloway took over the Cotton Club band in 1931, and Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom was the first Black band to play a downtown Broadway house.

The musical wing carried the Harlem Renaissance further and faster than the literary wing could. The nightclubs, recordings, and dance bands reached audiences that the books and poems would not reach for another generation.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Controversy and the Legacy

The principal controversy of the visual and musical Harlem Renaissance was the 1926 speech “Criteria of Negro Art” delivered by W.E.B. Du Bois to the National Association of Colored Women in Chicago. Du Bois called for the Black artist to produce “propaganda” art, art that exposed the conditions of segregation, lynchings, and labor exploitation. The more experimental wing, including Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Jean Toomer, argued for a free synthesis of folk, classical, and modernist vocabularies. (For the literary side,

The Harlem Renaissance ended, in any meaningful institutional sense, by the mid-1930s. The 1950s-1960s civil rights movement brought a revival of interest, and the 1970s-80s saw the recovery of Hurston, Motley, and Savage from obscurity. The visual artists and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance are now, alongside the writers, central to the canon of African American modernism.

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