by A young couple stands on West 127th Street in Harlem with their shiny new Cadillac. She wears a cloche hat and smiles, offering a cool stare from beneath the brim of a fedora. They are both wearing unusual ankle-length raccoon coats.
James Van Der Zee’s 1932 photograph, titled “Couple,” is among 160 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and ephemera in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s comprehensive exhibition “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” which opens on February 25 and which runs through July 28.
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The exhibition is a comprehensive, and long overdue, history of the ways in which Black artists interpreted and represented everyday life in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1940s, during the early years of the Great Migration when millions left African American rural South segregated for New York, Chicago and other cities.
It marked the beginning of the Jazz Age with its flapper dress and Zoot suit aesthetic, and as Van Der Zee’s “Couple” makes clear, fashion was integral to expressing and promoting the prosperity and humanity of Black Americans. the face of decades of racist depictions, oh. newspaper cartoons to minstrel shows and vaudeville theater.
“Fashion, the act of adornment, in this moment in American history was central to creating a new script for Black people,” says Jessica Lynne, writer and art critic and host of The Met’s “Harlem Is Everywhere” podcast.
Lynne said that with the dominant narrative in terms of visual representation and cultural output, Black people were “subordinated”.
“They were commonly depicted in tattered clothing or clothing that indicated a certain class’ job or occupation, such as a servant or sharecropper. So James Van Der Zee’s beautiful photo of this couple in Harlem, dressed to the nines, is a dignified expression. And a lot of people weren’t used to black people thinking that way,” she says.
“It is also important to say, of course, that black people knew that our dignity was innate and inalienable and not something to be earned. But the sign and the presentation on a public stage conveys a great deal, especially to non-Black people, an assertion of dignity. And it was certainly a very radical position.”
Van Der Zee was the most successful portrait photographer working in Harlem at the time. The Upper Manhattan neighborhood was the epicenter of Black culture and cosmopolitan urbanites flocked to his Guaranty Photo Studio (which he founded with his wife Gaynella Greenlee) in their best clothes. His studio was stocked with elaborate backdrops: lush carpets and blankets, intricately carved railings and mantles. His studio, says historian Bridget R Cooks in the programme, was a “theatre of self-expression”.
Van Der Zee also made trips to homes, schools and churches to document personal milestones, including baptisms and weddings. In all these gatherings, clothing was essential to convey prosperity, comfort and status.
Clothing was also central to painters of the time, particularly in the works of Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald J. Motley Jr., William H. Johnson and Palmer Hayden.
In 1944, Wheeler Waring – skilled at depicting the inner life of her sitters – painted the singer and civil rights activist Marian Anderson wearing a vibrant red off-the-shoulder dress with bell sleeves and a train, her nails painted to match her dress to match. , emphasizing the reflective position of his hands.
In “Girl in a Pink Dress (ca. 1927),” the young sitter wears a fussy chiffon dress with a spray of pink and white flowers cascading down her left shoulder, and in “Girl With Pomegranate (ca. 1940),” the Tá collar The sitter’s oversized white leotard sits atop a muted brown dress, as if to direct the viewer’s gaze to her face.
“The individual is valued and respected,” says Lynne. “The enormous depth they took to their sitting, regardless of name, regardless of their position, that is this real gift to me, that so many people could be considered so beautiful and so great, and that their lives could be recorded. in a way that was held up, against the other types of images that were coming through other types of media in his contemporary moment.”
Of course, clothing was also used symbolically to emphasize the continuing inequality of the era. Hayden’s “The Dame From Harlem” (ca. 1930) shows an older woman wearing a blue evening dress and pearls with white stockings and shoes, sitting in her living room with her dog at her feet. But, Cooks notes in the exhibition catalogue, “although she has adopted the behavior of a successful woman and has the traditional attributes of privilege and leisure, she is still bound by the Eurocentric restrictions that have affected her daily life, such as her light-wave. hosiery, which was probably promoted among white consumers as ‘natural flesh tone’ by manufacturers who did not, at the time, make the product in colors that would match the skin tones of Black women.”
These juxtapositions are explored in the “Fashion & Portraiture” episode of the five-episode podcast (available on any podcast streaming service), in which Cooks and Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan chats with Lynne. The first two episodes drop on February 20, followed by subsequent installments focused on “Art & Literature” (March 5), “Music & Nightlife” (March 12) and “On the Cause of Civil Rights” (March 19) .
A significant portion of the exhibition’s paintings, sculptures and works on paper are on loan from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum and Howard University Art Gallery. The exhibition comes more than half a century after The Met’s controversial 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968,” which drew protests for its predominance of newspaper clippings and photographs of Black leaders and prominent Harlem residents instead of works by Black artists. Since then, The Met has greatly expanded its holdings of works by Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance, including paintings by Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles Alston. And in 2021, the museum established the James Van Der Zee Archive in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem.
“Our public relations with community and consumption are very different now,” says Lynne.
The work created by Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance era is “happening as images of death [of Black people] spreading. White and black communities are sending postcards of lynchings [Black] body. And so the juxtaposition of these highly emotional representations and performances offers a counter-reflection. These works do not appear out of nowhere. They live in a constellation of discourses, attitudes, expectations. And when you take that into account, that’s really when you make sense of the intervention that these artists were up to.”
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