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East of Harlem - Reviews - African American artists in early 20th-century Paris, France - Book Review
Art Journal, Winter, 2002 by Jennifer Marshall
Leininger-Miller is particularly attentive to the ways in which financial pressures may have affected the artists' works. While offering a panoply of possible reasons behind some of Hayden's more parodic depictions of blacks, Leininger-Miller argues that the vast stylistic difference between Hayden's two primary types of production while in France--stereotyped genre scenes and picturesque sea- and landscapes--demonstrates Hayden's sensitivity to white American market demands. (2) Yet Hayden did not limit himself to solely mercenary pursuits, as Leininger-Miller's sustained reading of Hayden's Nulls quatre a Paris (ca. 1928-30) makes clear. Proving the work to be an apt meditation on the terms and tensions of New Negro aesthetics, she connects the work at once to the oft-noted shared flatness of modernism and playing cards, the stylistic influence of African carving on modernist graphics, and Hayden's own Parisian pastimes.
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However, I would like to argue that it is an oversimplification to group Hayden's art into market-driven conservative works on the one hand and avant-garde New Negro works on the other. Indeed, any strict division between white financial support and black intellectual support betrays the politics of advancement that the New Negro thinkers espoused. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s assessment of the New Negro as "a new racial self, the Public Negro self," suggests that white financial patronage was part and parcel of what the New Negro movement had in mind. (3) The complexity of Leininger-Miller's text presents the multiple associations through which the artists benefited and so demonstrates the difficulty of patronage studies. At the same time, her analyses of the effects of financial sponsorship sometimes result in too-easy answers.
Art historians' prevailing inattention to these artists and other black American artists who went abroad in search of improved living and working conditions may in some sense reflect the failure of the era's patronage to maintain either the artists' careers or their artworks. Many of the works that Leininger-Miller discusses survive only in reproduction, while many others have vanished entirely, whether into dosed private collections, or--more frequently--into the thin air of history. The labor behind this book is everywhere evident: in its meticulous biographical reconstructions pieced together through genealogical records, newspaper articles, letters, diaries, recollections, and grant applications; in its historical cataloguing of specific artworks; in its attention to the details of each artist's intellectual and artistic precedents; and in its recounting of the network of financial patronage that allowed these artists to work abroad. This is a book to launch a thousand dissertations. In the meantime we ar e left with a rich, subtle, and provocatively written investigation of a hitherto overlooked topic, one that is necessary to the progress of the history of African American art.
(1.) New Negro Artists in Paris makes clear the geographic myopia of this term, as do the histories of many other interwar African American artists working in Chicago and elsewhere. Even the notion of a "renaissance," has been debated. Leininger-Miller reports that Motley, himself a Chicago-based artist, contested: 'There was no Renaissance.... I think it was quite an advancement over the work that they had been putting out.... But the work did not reflect a Renaissance" (144-45).
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