East of Harlem - Reviews - African American artists in early 20th-century Paris, France - Book Review

Jennifer Marshall

Theresa Leininger-Miller. New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 320 pp., 20 color ills., 120 b/w. $60, $32 paper.

Art historians have come to insist upon the importance of African American cultural influences in the shaping of modernism and American art. The literary, musical, and artistic accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance in Manhattan, and the performances of Josephine Baker in Paris frequently act as flash points in this discussion. However, few art historians have taken on the necessary archival and theoretical tasks of tracing and assessing the lives and works of African American artists beyond these well-worn examples of modern interracial exchange. Further, the discussion often presumes a one-way influence, too often leaving behind African American art and artists after the moment of contact. In her New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934, Theresa Leininger-Miller bravely assumes these undertakings, and smartly reconsiders African American art of the interwar period as something more than a tourist attraction or modernist inspiration The book--whic h should attract readers interested in American art history, as well as in the history of international modernism--provides ample evidence for the multidirectionality of cultural influence and change in the hustle and bustle of the early twentieth century.

Organized as a series of individual art-historical biographies thick with archival labor, the text is distinguished by being at once broad in historical scope and keenly--even intimately--detailed. Offering historical reconstructions of their experiences abroad, Leininger-Miller's survey includes the sculptors Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, the painters Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, and Archibald Motley, and the printmaker Albert Alexander Smith. The author describes their struggles to maintain financial stability, their reactions to French modern art, their indulgences in urban diversions, but, above all, their artistic practices while in France. Each artist worked according to different aesthetic principles and had widely varying experiences during their Parisian visits.

Leininger-Miller has chosen to focus on the twelve years between 1922 and 1934-- coincident with the so-called Harlem Renaissance. (1) Interwar Harlem and the presence of Leininger-Miller's artists abroad are not unrelated historical subjects: black artists owed their opportunity to travel in large part to the growth in white Americans' interest in African American culture, from which the popularity of Harlem nightlife also stemmed. Such historical concern with the issue of patronage comprises the crux of the book and also determined the study's end date of 1934, when the Depression discouraged the artists' financial backers, and Parisian exhibitions of black American art declined conspicuously.

By virtue of its extensive documentation, Nov Negro Artists in Paris raises more questions than it claims to answer. Calling her book "clearly an initial study, subject to revision and expansion" (xxii), Leininger-Miller offers her work as a remedy to the paucity of historical documentation of African American artists. Flagging certain routes of inquiry along the way--such as French pan-Africanism and the black French response to African American artists--the author generously and hopefully leaves such ventures to later studies.

A trip to France had of course long figured as a requisite pilgrimage for budding American artists. While expectations of France's cultural offerings shifted throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, a stay in Paris persisted as the optimal foundation of an artist's development until the 1930s, when empty pockets, nationalist sentiments, and government sponsorship kept artists more firmly rooted in the American scene. In addition, France was especially attractive to blacks, who hoped travel abroad would allow them to escape American racial oppression. Leininger-Miller cites African American poet Countee Cullen's wistful 1932 recollection as paradigmatic of the African American attachment to France: "[I] found across a continent of foam/ What was denied my hungry heart at home" (123). The results of this attempt at escape were mixed. Leininger-Miller tells us that Hayden quickly ran through his donated living stipend--in order to catch up on "some good living"-- but only after he learned to car ry a New York Herald Tribune that marked him as an American tourist and distinguished him from France's African colonial subjects (83, 74).

Evoking their sense of racial empowerment and cosmopolitan awareness, Leininger-Miller groups the six traveling artists under the rubric of "the New Negro." This self-descriptive term with roots in the nineteenth century emerged as a banner for black intellectuals who sought political and social transformation through sophisticated, race-specific cultural production. The concept gained new currency, vigor, and artistic specificity with the 1925 publication of Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, a compilation of writings on art and literature, literary works, and illustrations. A better designation than "Harlem Renaissance," Leininger-Miller's choice of terminology effectively broadens the geographical scope of early twentieth-century black American art production. Instead of limiting black Americans' contributions to twentieth- century American art to upper Manhattan, Leininger-Miller expands the possibilities of this history in ways that call for further attention to the role of international modernism--a s well as its interest in African art--in the development of black artists. In this regard, the author's attention to Cezanne's enduring influence, and to the 1931 International Colonial Exposition held in Paris, situates the works of these artists in a more global art history.

When she de-emphasizes Harlem, Leininger-Miller is true to the tenor of the time. Even during the 1920s and 1930s, many African Americans balked at cultural observers' exclusive focus on Harlem as the center of black art and politics. Indeed, at least some of the artists under study actively dissociated themselves from Harlem. Returning to New York in 1932 to publicize her work, Prophet complained in her diary that she had gone "from Paris to the sordid filth of Harlem" (60). Leininger-Miller's methodologically savvy switch from Harlem to France thus produces a study closer not only to the historical experiences of some of the era's black artists, but to the international consciousness of American black intellectuals, often more politically motivated by a "pan-African" than an "African American" identity. The ideology of the New Negro spoke to these concerns, and Leininger-Miller wisely resurrects this term, though she does not devote enough attention to a critique of its historical tensions and contradictions.

In fact, what information Leininger-Miller gives her readers on the New Negro phenomenon tends to elucidate the movement's literary--rather than visual-arts--focus. The author reports briefly on the French black writer Rene Maran's publication of an essay by Locke on New Negro poetry in 1924, and Maran's subsequent attempts to publish the 1925 anthology. Although Leininger-Miller occasions this history within a discussion of a portrait of Maran by Smith, the connections between a literary movement that was gaining steam on the northeastern coast of the United States and six disparate American artists in Paris seem tenuous. Similarly, although Leininger-Miller describes relationships between individual artists and either Locke or W E. B. Du Bois, it is not dear how or even whether these relationships translate into an artistic and ideological community. More to the point in this discussion are the artists' dealings with two primary African American publications of the time, The Crisis (edited by Du Bois) and O pportunity, both of which practiced a cultural form of political uplift in the manner of the New Negro ideology. Many of the artists whom the author cites supplied illustrations for these two journals, which also acted as conduits for the critical (if usually celebratory) treatment of working black artists, including Prophet, Savage, Woodruff, and Smith. Nonetheless, as other passages from the book make clear, the relationships between artists and their supporters do not imply ideological kinships between them.

Leininger-Miller's book reads provocatively as a subtle inquiry into the role of patronage--both intellectual and financial--in the lives and works of black artists in the early part of the twentieth century New Negro intellectual support was principally manifested in Du Bois's many letters to benefactors on behalf of artists, Locke's discussions with Woodruff on the topic of African art, and The Crisis and Opportunity. Financial backing for artists emerged from a similarly complex web, carefully respun by Leininger-Miller. The stories are sometimes bleak--her depiction of Prophet's destitution should banish once and for all any romantic conceptions of the starving artist. Unable to rely on selling their works, the artists under consideration turned to other means of support, such as grants, prize winnings from competitive exhibitions, and gifts from wealthy supporters.

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.

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).

(2.) Leininger-Miller. 82. She concludes that these troubling works "seem to be made with affection and suggest...good-natured humor," even as she holds out the dismal possibility that they may instead constitute "a form of vicarious suicide, caused by deeply ingrained self-hatred" (100).

(3.) Gates, who dates the peak of the New Negro movement to between 1895 and 1925, discusses the concept as a defensive fiction against prevailing negative stereotypes of African Americans--a "new" black subject constructed to counter an "old" Sambo. "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black." Representations 24 (Fail 1988): 129-55.

Jennifer Marshall is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

COPYRIGHT 2002 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group