Skip to Main Content

 Admission is always freeOpen today: 10:00  to 5:00  Directions             Play Artle            

                  -  Visit                      - Visit
                    - Getting Here
                    - Accessibility
                    - Tours, Guides & Maps
                    - Food & Drink
                    - Gallery Shops
                    - Visitor Policies 
                  -  Collection                      - Collection
                    - Highlights
                    - Search the Collection
                    - Artists Search
                    - Acquisition Highlights
                    - Stories
                    - Games 
                  -  Exhibitions                      - Exhibitions
                    - Current
                    - Special Installations
                    - Upcoming
                    - On Tour
                    - Past 
                  -  Calendar                      - Calendar
                    - Films
                    - Performances
                    - Talks
                    - Guided Tours
                    - After Hours
                    - Fun for Kids
                    - Festivals
                    - Workshops 
                  -  Learn                      - Learn
                    - Teachers
                    - Families
                    - Teens
                    - Adults
                    - Learning Resources
                    - Music Programs
                    - Film Programs 
                  -  Conservation                      - Conservation
                    - Projects
                    - Publications
                    - Resources 
                  -  Research                      - Research
                    - The Center
                    - Publications
                    - Make an Appointment
                    - Archives
                    - Library
                    - NGA Online Editions 
                  -  Support                      - Support
                    - Donate Now
                    - National Membership
                    - Circle Membership
                    - Leadership Groups
                    - Planned Giving
                    - Major Giving
                    - Gifts of Art 
                  -  Shop                      - Shop
                    - Books
                    - Jewelry
                    - Apparel & Accessories
                    - Kids
                    - NGA Custom Prints 
                  -  Play Artle

Home>Research>Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts>Publications>Center Report>Center 41>Members' Reports>Kathryn Jane Brown

Preface

Dean’s Report

People

Meetings

Publications and Presentations

Research Projects

Research Associates’ Reports

Members’ Reports

Credits and Acknowledgments

All *Center*Reports

# Members’ Reports

**Kathryn Jane Brown**Center 41

# Kathryn Jane Brown

Artists’ Books of the Harlem Renaissance

Cover of *God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse* by James Weldon Johnson, drawings by Aaron Douglas, lettering by C. B. Falls (New York: Viking Press, 1927), National Gallery of Art Library, Washington

From the end of World War I to the final years of the 1930s, the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance generated a wide range of innovative graphic production. While magazines including *The Crisis*, *Opportunity*, *Survey Graphic*, and *Fire!!* were powerful vehicles for challenging racial stereotypes, articulating African American identity, and exploring the legacies of African cultural production, artists and writers also made distinctive contributions to emerging histories of the artist’s book. Despite the absence of an established critical and bibliophilic framework for this genre in the United States during the early 20th century, Harlem Renaissance poets and painters thought carefully and creatively about the materiality, visual style, and typography of their collaborations. They also engaged closely with the symbolism of the codex by exploring its connections to different religious, legal, and sociocultural contexts. Understanding these works as contributions to the history of artists’ books in the United States reshapes genealogies of print culture, provides insight into the infrastructure of the publishing industry, and opens new conversational possibilities between objects and ideas.

During my fellowship at the Center, I focused on art that Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) contributed to a variety of book publications. This included examining the drawings he produced for Alain Locke’s *New Negro* anthology (1925), his woodblock prints for Eugene O’Neill’s play*Emperor Jones*(1926), and his collaboration with Langston Hughes on *Six Poems* (originally an “art folio” for a 1926 edition of *Opportunity*). In 1927 Douglas designed the dust jacket for a reissue of James Weldon Johnson’s *Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man* and contributed illustrations to the author’s suite of poems, *God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse*.

It is striking that Douglas repurposed many of his figures and motifs to meet different creative ends, sometimes altering compositional details or imbuing images with new meanings by anchoring them in different linguistic contexts. In his designs for *God’s Trombones*, for example, Douglas subtly altered the visual rhetoric of images that he had contributed to Hughes’s *Six Poems*. The composition and central figure accompanying “Hard Luck” in*Six Poems* became the basis of the image for Johnson’s “Prodigal Son”; the upturned face and rectangular body of the figure produced for Hughes’s “Feet o’ Jesus” feature in the second image of *God’s Trombones*, thereby replacing the image with which that poem had originally been paired in the *New Negro* anthology.

Aaron Douglas, *The Judgment Day*, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1

These visual connections contributed to an image network that Douglas was fashioning across his creative output. The image paired with “Listen, Lord,” the opening poem of *God’s Trombones*, recalled an advertisement that Douglas had produced for one of Carl Van Vechten’s novels in 1926. This solitary figure—with an upturned head, open mouth, and deep eye slit—recurs in *Rise, Shine for Thy Light Has Come* (c. 1927), the cover design of Arthur Huff Fauset’s *For Freedom* (1927), and in an illustration for “Congo,” a short story in Paul Morand’s *Black Magic*(1929). In 1930 Douglas repurposed his image for Johnson’s “Judgment Day” in his slipcase design for the author’s poetry volume titled *Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day*. Finally, from the mid- to late 1930s, Douglas released the images in*God’s Trombones* from their linguistic framework and transformed them into large-scale oil paintings. In consequence, *God’s Trombones*needs to be understood as both a book and a space through which images pass and metamorphose. Eschewing the idea of “illustration,” Douglas encouraged audiences to make connections throughout an image network that he was developing across media, time, and interpretive frameworks.  

Douglas’s approach to creativity meant that he could extend the life of his book imagery and communicate to new audiences. This helps to explain the simultaneous presence of contrasting styles later in his career. When Douglas was reprising the distinctive idiom of his imagery from *God’s Trombones* in paintings of the 1930s, he was also producing realist works that depicted aspects of contemporary African American life. Rather than viewing these styles as antithetical, it is possible to understand them as part of a dialogue that Douglas maintained between works and as a strategy for keeping alive the graphic arts of the Harlem Renaissance.

Examining Douglas’s distinctive contribution to the history of artists’ books in the United States generates a better understanding of his creative trajectory and encourages a more expansive conception of the book itself. Crucially, Douglas’s art did not culminate in fixed signification between word and image within the space of the page. Rather, by creating allusions to other images that extended across a graphic network, Douglas reshaped print traditions and opened the horizons of the book to include multiple readings, performances, and expressive possibilities.

Loughborough University Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, winter 2021

***Kathryn Jane Brown will return to her position as associate professor of art history and visual culture at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.***

Back to Members’ Reports

### Stay connected

Learn more about our exhibitions, news, programs, and special offers.

About
          - About the National Gallery
          - Stories
          - Press
          - FAQs
          - Contact Us

Plan a Visit
          - Getting Here
          - Accessibility
          - Today's Tours
          - Food & Drink
          - Calendar
          - Downloadable Map

Get Involved
          - Donate
          - Membership
          - Volunteer
          - Opportunities
          - Shop Online

Resources
          - Search the Collection
          - Conservation
          - Library
          - Archives
          - The Center
          - Film Programs
          - Music Programs
          - Audio/Video
          - Open Access Images

Hours: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily

**West Building**6th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter or exit from Constitution Avenue, 4th Street, or 7th Street. The Madison Drive entrance is currently closed.*

**East Building**4th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter and exit from 4th Street.*

**Sculpture Garden**7th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter and exit from 7th Street, Constitution Avenue, or Madison Drive.*

We are closed on December 25 and January 1.

*The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.*

          -  Twitter 
          -  Facebook 
          -  Instagram 
          -  Pinterest 
          -  YouTube 

© 2024 National Gallery of Art   Notices   Terms of Use   Privacy Policy