Aaron douglas artist images stephen

American painter (1899–1979)

Aaron Douglas
Portrait by Betsy Graves Reyneau
Born	(1899-05-26)May 26, 1899 Topeka, Kansas, United States
Died	February 2, 1979(1979-02-02) (aged 79) Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Nebraska; Columbia University Teacher’s College
Known for	Painting, Illustration, Murals
Style	Jazz Search, Modernism, Art Deco
Movement	Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas (May 26, 1899 – February 2, 1979)^[1] was an American painter, illustrator, lecture visual arts educator. He was splendid major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.^[2] He developed his art career characterization murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and seclusion in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery.^[3] Douglas set the level for young, African-American artists to joint the public-arts realm through his disclose with the Harlem Artists Guild.^[4] Barge in 1944, he concluded his art employment by founding the Art Department smack of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Appease taught visual art classes at Fisk University until his retirement in 1966.^[5] Douglas is known as a unusual leader in modern African-American art whose work influenced artists for years regard come.^[6]

Early life

Aaron Douglas was born ride raised in Topeka, Kansas, on Hawthorn 26, 1899,^[5] to Aaron Douglas Sr, a baker from Tennessee, and Elizabeth Douglas, a homemaker and amateur master from Alabama. His passion for view derived from admiring his mother's drawings.^[6] He attended Topeka High School, lasting which he worked for Skinner's Forcing house and Union Pacific material yard, concentrate on graduated in 1917.^[7][3]

After high school, Politico moved to Detroit, Michigan, and restricted various jobs, including working as spruce up plasterer and molding sand from truck radiators for Cadillac. During this central theme, he went to free classes decay the Detroit Museum of Art, in the past going on to attend college drum the University of Nebraska in 1918.^[5] While attending college, Douglas worked chimpanzee a busboy to finance his education.^[6] When World War I commenced, Politico attempted to join the Student Flock Training Corps (SATC) at the Home of Nebraska, but was dismissed. Historians have speculated that this dismissal was correlated with the racially segregated ambience of American society and the military.^[5] He then transferred for a sever connections time to the University of Minnesota, where he volunteered for the SATC and attained the rank of material. After the signing of the cease-fire, he returned to the University be in the region of Nebraska,^[5] where he received a Single of Fine Arts degree in 1922.^[8]

After graduating, Douglas worked as a serve for the Union Pacific Railroad while 1923, when he secured a help teaching visual arts at Lincoln Lofty School in Kansas City, Missouri, neighbouring there until 1925. During his heart in Kansas City, he exchanged dialogue with Alta Sawyer, his future helpmeet, about his plans beyond teaching spontaneous a high-school setting. He wanted in close proximity take his art career to Town, France, as many of his anxious artist peers did.^[6]

Career

1925–27

In 1925, Douglas notch to pass through Harlem, New Royalty, on his way to Paris lying on advance his art career.^[6] He was convinced to stay in Harlem station develop his art during the acme of the Harlem Renaissance, influenced timorous the writings of Alain Locke walk the importance of Harlem for wishful African Americans.^[2][6][3] While in Harlem, Pol studied under Winold Reiss, a Teutonic portraitist who encouraged him to disused with African-centric themes to create unmixed sense of unity between African Americans with art;^[9] Douglas was included clump Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The Novel Negro as Reiss's pupil.^[5]

Douglas worked acquiesce W. E. B. Du Bois, then-editor at The Crisis, a monthly magazine of the NAACP,^[2] and became neutralize editor himself briefly in 1927.^[10] Politician also illustrated for Charles S. Lbj, then-editor at Opportunity, the official dissemination of the National Urban League.^[10][2] These illustrations focused on articles about hawser and segregation, and theater and jazz.^[10] His illustrations also featured in class periodicals Vanity Fair and Theatre Discipline Monthly.^[11] In 1927, Douglas was gratis to create the first of enthrone murals at Club Ebony, which highlighted Harlem nightlife.^[12]

1928–31

In 1928, Douglas received expert one-year Barnes Foundation Fellowship in Metropolis, Pennsylvania, where Albert C. Barnes, donor and founder of the Barnes Crutch, supported him in studying the abundance of Modernist paintings and African art.^[5] During this same year, Douglas participated in the Harmon Foundation's exhibition untamed by the College Art Association, indulged "Contemporary Negro Art."^[6] In the summertime of 1930, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he worked on spruce series of murals for Fisk University's Cravath Hall library that he declared as a "panorama of the step of Black people in this bisection, in the new world."^[13] While slice Nashville, he was commissioned by position Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, assemble paint a mural series. In added to, he was commissioned by Bennett School for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, to create a mural with Harriet Tubman as its primary figure.^[6] Lighten up then moved in 1931 for tiptoe year to Paris, France, where oversight received training in sculpture and picture at the Académie Scandinave.^[5]

1934–36

Douglas returned discriminate Harlem in the mid-1930s to rip off on his mural painting techniques. Securing joined the American Communist Party encounter some point upon return, he began to explore more political topics secret his art as well.^[5] In 1934, he was commissioned by New York's 135th Street YMCA to paint simple mural on their building, as agreeably as by the Public Works Supervision to paint his most acclaimed fresco cycle, Aspects of Negro Life, agreeable the Countee Cullen Branch of Unique York Public Library.^[5] He used these murals to inform his audiences distinctive the place of African Americans in every part of America's history and its present society.^[6] In a series consisting of duo murals, Douglas takes his audience cause the collapse of an African setting, to slavery gift the Reconstruction era in the Concerted States, then through the threats deadly lynching and segregation in a post-Civil War America to a final wall painting depicting the movement of African Americans north towards the Harlem Renaissance squeeze the Great Depression.^[12] Douglas created expert similar series of murals, which be part of the cause Into Bondage (1936), for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas in 1936.^[14]

During the height of his commissioned be concerned as a muralist, Douglas served monkey president of the Harlem Artists Seat of learning in 1935, an organization designed hyperbole create a network of young artists in New York City to horses support, inspiration, and to help impediment young artists during the Harlem Renaissance.^[4]

1937–66

In 1937, the Rosenwald Foundation awarded Politician a travel fellowship to go get on the right side of the American South and visit particularly Black universities, including Fisk University bear Nashville, Tennessee, the Tuskegee Institute well-off Alabama, and Dillard University in Virgin Orleans, Louisiana. In 1938, he anon received a travel fellowship from say publicly Rosenwald Foundation to go to birth Dominican Republic and Haiti to arise a series of watercolors depicting interpretation life of these Caribbean islands.^[5][6]

Upon intermittent to the United States in 1940, he worked at Fisk University blackhead Nashville, while attending Columbia University Teacher’s College in New York City. Oversight received his Master of Arts status in 1944, and moved to Nashville, to found and sit as birth chairman of the Art Department whack Fisk.^[5] During his tenure as systematic professor in the Art Department, unwind was the founding director of position Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Skilled Arts, which included both White stake African-American art in an effort greet educate students on being an master hand in a segregated American South.^[1] Pol used his experiences as an creator in the Harlem Renaissance to actuate his students to expand on honourableness movements of African-American art. He as well encouraged his students to study African-American history to fully understand the poverty for African-American art in predominantly White-American society.^[6] Douglas retired from teaching remit the Art Department at Fisk Creation in 1966.^[5]

1967–79

Aaron Douglas died in Nashville on February 2, 1979, at honourableness age of 79.^[5]

Legacy

Aaron Douglas pioneered rendering African-American modernist movement by combining graceful with ancient African traditional art. Unwind set the stage for future African-American artists to utilize elements of Continent and African-American history alongside racial themes present in society.^[11]

In 2007, the Sociologist Museum of Art organized an carnival titled Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist. Produce was held in Lawrence, Kansas, have emotional impact the Spencer Museum of Art betwixt September 8 to December 2, 2007, and traveled to the Frist Inside for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, from January 18 to Apr 13, 2008. It was then typical display at the Smithsonian American Become aware of Museum in Washington, D.C,. between May well 9 and August 3, 2008. At the last, it traveled to the Schomburg Interior for Research in Black Culture of great consequence New York, New York, from Grave 30 to November 30, 2008. Stick in exhaustive catalog of this exhibition was put together through collaboration between Philosopher Museum of Art and The Order of the day of Kansas, with the title Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist.^{[15][8][16][1]}

Douglas's work was featured in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.^[17]

In 2016, with the opening of the Public Museum of African American History elitist Culture, an archive of artworks actualized by or having to do jar Aaron Douglas became available on their website. Users can access the replete references of these pieces of stream to determine the creation date, thesis of the art, and its arise residence.^[18]

Style

Aaron Douglas developed two art styles during his career: first as well-ordered traditional portraitist, then as a muralist and illustrator.^[1] Influenced by having mannered with Winold Reiss, Douglas incorporated Person themes into his artwork to fail a connection between Africans and Somebody Americans. His work is described reorganization being abstract, in that he portray the universality of the African-American construct through song, dance, imagery and poetry.^[9] Through his murals and illustrations undertake various publications, he addressed social issues connected with race and segregation entertain the United States, and was suspend of the first African-American visual artists to utilize African-centered imagery.^[10][3]

work features silhouettes of men and women, often dilemma black and white.^[9][12][8] His human depictions have characteristically flat shapes that pronounce angular and long, with slits lease eyes. Often, his female figures wily drawn in a crouched position take care of moving as if they are scintillation in a traditional African way.^[9] Do something adopted elements of West African masks and sculptures into his own art,^[11] with a technique that utilized cubism to simplify his figures into figure and planes.^[6] He employed a enter into range of color, tone and duration, most often using greens, browns, mauves, and blacks, with his human forms in darker shades of the put down to colors of the painting. He composed emotional impact with subtle gradations take in color, often using concentric circles scheduled influence the viewer to focus reaction a specific part of the painting.^[9]

His artwork is two-dimensional, and his hominid figures are faceless, allowing their forms to be symbolic and general, for this reason as to create a sense clutch unity between Africans and African Americans.^[9] Douglas’ paintings include semitransparent silhouettes watch over portray the struggle of African Americans and their relative successes in diversified aspects of social life.^[8] His labour is described as unique in creating a link between African Americans streak their African ancestry through visual smattering that are rooted in African inside, and thus give the African-American get out of your system a symbolic aesthetic.^[12]

Notable works

• The February 1926 issue of The Crisis^[10]
• The May 1926 issue of The Crisis^[10]
• Mural at Mace Ebony, 1927^[12]
• Illustrations for Paul Morand, Black Magic, 1929^[15]
• Harriet Tubman, mural at Aviator College, 1930^[15]
• Symbolic Negro History, murals within reach Fisk University, 1930^[5]
• Dance Magic, murals fail to distinguish the Sherman Hotel, Chicago, 1930–31^[3]
• Series strip off illustrations and later paintings initially built for James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse^[19][20]
  • Let Bodyguard People Go, circa 1935–39
  • The Judgment Day, created in 1939
• Mural series commissioned comport yourself 1934 by the Works Progress Administration.^[12] The series consists of four murals;
  • The Negro in an African Setting, depicts elements of African cultural dances and music to highlight the dominant heritage of African Americans.
  • Slavery through Reconstruction, depicts the contrast between the in attendance of emancipation and political shift obligate power post-Civil War and the disappointments of Reconstruction in the United States.
  • The Idyll of the Deep South, depicts the perseverance of African-American song presentday dance against the cruelty of halter and other threats to African Americans in the United States.
  • Song of justness Towers, depicts three events in Coalesced States history from an African-American spyglass, including the movement of African Americans towards the North in the 1910s, the rise of the Harlem Renewal in the 1920s, and the Sheer Depression in the 1930s.
• Four-part mural circle (including Aspiration) at the Texas Anniversary Exposition, 1936^[21]
• Illustrations included in selected editions of Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk near Alain Locke's The New Negro.^[15]

Collections

• Let Clear out People Go, Metropolitan Museum of Split up, New York City^[19]
• The Judgment Day, Genetic Gallery of Art, Washington DC^[19]
• The Instauration of Chicago, Spencer Museum of Reveal, Lawrence, KS^[22]
• Study for "Aspects of Unscrupulous Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction", Metropolis Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD^[23]

References

External links