New York was waiting for Aaron Douglas

New York was waiting for Aaron Douglas, though no one knew just how much, including the artist himself. By the time he arrived in 1925 he had no idea what was waiting, not the lifetime of work, and certainly not the eventual reputation as the Harlem Renaissance’s father of African-American art.

Douglas, with the urging of German-born Art Deco artist Winold Reiss and writers Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois, was encouraged to study African art. Studying cubism and Egyptian art, he blended them with Art Deco and modern design to help create a uniquely African-American aesthetic. His flat silhouettes and muted colors appealed: soon his work was everywhere.

Douglas’s paintings were reproduced in books, such as Locke’s ground-breaking The New Negro, 1925; James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones, 1927; and Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927. The magazines Opportunity and Crisis both commissioned him as a graphic artist, and Crisis editor DuBois hired him.

Image: Betsy Graves Reyneau, Aaron Douglas, oil on canvas, 1953.

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

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