Brightening the History of Harlem

Unfortunately, the possibilities for imaginative freedom are more limited in her current show, in part because of where it is mounted, and in part because of what has already been said about the Harlem Renaissance. Murrell’s biggest exhibition to date—it’s many times the size of “Posing Modernity”—the show occupies eleven rooms plus a “coda” gallery dedicated to later years, and is divided into sections that focus on different aspects of the New Negro movement, as the Harlem Renaissance was originally dubbed, by the philosopher Alaine Locke: “The Thinkers,” “Everyday Life in Black Cities,” “Portraiture and the New Black Subject,” and so on. Each gallery is awash in colors that seem inspired by the artist Aaron Douglas’s palette, particularly in his allegorical paintings about Black American life: mauve, light green, grays. Murrell has left enough air around the paintings, photographs, sculptures, and other objects for us to really dig into the work without tripping over it. Viewers who are unfamiliar with the work of Winold Reiss, for instance, are in for a treat—he’s featured prominently in “The Thinkers,” the first room off the entryway. Born in Germany, Reiss was a painter, a sculptor, and a graphic designer. Always attracted to difference, the artist, who immigrated to the States in 1913, spent time at the Blackfeet Reservation, in Montana, in 1920, and made some remarkable drawings of the tribe. After that, he illustrated the historic anthology “The New Negro” (1925), edited by Locke. Reiss’s forceful graphic sense highlights his psychological acuity. He’s drawn to his subjects not by their race but by their grounded, lyrical presence. (It was wise of Murrell not to lump him with the other European artists, who are confined to another section of the show.) Like the photographer Richard Avedon, Reiss often poses his sitters in white space, the better to see their faces and minds at work. Looking at his pastel illustration of Locke, I thought about how far outside of Blackness one needs to stand in order to see how it renders itself.

Part of the greatness of “Posing Modernity” had to do with the fact that the artists it featured didn’t assume that they understood Blackness; nor did they romanticize it. Duval, for example, is as tough and modern a figure in Manet’s painting as the white woman at the center of his 1882 work “A Bar at the Folies-Bergères,” and just as alienated. But that alienation—the flip side of modernism—is missing from Murrell’s take on the Harlem Renaissance. We cannot guess from this show how soul-crushing the nineteen-twenties were for the majority of Black folks, in Harlem and elsewhere, who were scrambling to survive racism, low-paying jobs, segregation, and more in the wake of the First World War. (Jervis Anderson’s work “This Was Harlem,” which appeared first in these pages in 1981, remains an essential source when it comes to the politics of those times.) Murrell nods in that direction only by including a few books in vitrines—Langston Hughes’s 1949 work “One-Way Ticket,” for instance, which deals beautifully, and often painfully, with Black urban life. Collectively, the paintings and the drawings that Murrell has chosen are, no matter their pathos, a paean to the joys of Black life, to community, to togetherness. This she stresses in the room devoted to “Everyday Life in the New Black Cities,” with works like Archibald J. Motley, Jr.,’s “Picnic” (1934) and William Henry Johnson’s “Street Life, Harlem” (1939-40), paintings that show just how lively Black people can be. I suppose Murrell felt that she had to come at it this way—to cast sunshine on a dark historical shadow.

In 1969, the Met put on an exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900-1968,” and it was a critical and political disaster. There were no paintings or drawings in the show (even though the legendary painters Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, and Jacob Lawrence lived in Harlem at the time, and the Met had works of theirs in its collection). Instead, the guest curator, Allon Schoener, treated Harlem as a social narrative, told through newspaper clippings, time lines, and numerous photographs by James Van Der Zee. “Harlem on My Mind” has haunted the Met ever since, and to some extent Murrell has been asked to make up for that. There are many paintings, drawings, and sculptures here, but less documentary material than one needs in order to appreciate the complicated history of the place and time. With this omission, Murrell has forgone some layers of complexity. Indeed, her own complexity as a writer and a thinker has been flattened, made more “accessible,” presumably for the Met’s wide audience. Her wall labels overexplain and reduce—using the word “flamboyant,” for example, to describe a Black figure’s look or way of being. “Posing Modernity” showed us a curator who embraced modernism’s fractures, all those stories that were incomplete, sometimes unpleasant, but powerful, because they created us. The current show, by contrast, makes the history of Harlem palatable.

Romare Bearden’s “The Block” (1971) appears—tellingly—as a coda to the show, and this monumental piece shows what Murrell could have done if liberated from the museum machinery: she could have mounted a show that drew on the truth of Bearden’s collage effects, with its cut-up papers and lines broken and reassembled and turned into something else. “The Block” brings to mind Ralph Ellison’s complicated but necessary 1948 essay, “Harlem Is Nowhere.” In Harlem, Ellison writes, “the grandchildren of those who possessed no written literature examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre. It explains the nature of a world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence.” To make Harlem “nice” and vibrant throughout is to iron out—to whiten—the contradictions of the place, to deny both all that it has given and all that it has taken away. ♦