The Harmon Basis Performed a Pivotal Position within the Harlem Renaissance


Through the Nineteen Twenties and ’30s, a cohort of Black artists, writers, and intellectuals, a lot of whom have been primarily based in Harlem, ushered in what was then referred to as the New Negro Motion. At the moment, the Harlem Renaissance is famend for its popularity of ushering within the New Negro, and the motion is at the moment the topic of a serious survey on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York.

Largely championed by Howard College professor and thinker Alain Locke through his seminal anthology of the identical title, the New Negro Motion put Harlem on the map for its affect on Black artwork and tradition. Nevertheless it has lengthy been historicized as predominantly a author’s motion, with a few of its preeminent members together with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

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A white woman with dark blonde hair wearing a black long-sleeve top, looks at the camera.

The visible arts of the Harlem Renaissance are typically lesser identified to the general public primarily as a result of Black artists on the time weren’t exhibited in mainstream museums and galleries. Typically, they have been proven at excessive faculties, houses, libraries, YMCAs, and artwork faculties and Traditionally Black Schools and Universities. However a shift occurred when Locke inspired actual property tycoon William H. Harmon to philanthropically help the paintings of Black artists. Although there have been alternatives and awards for Black artists that predate Harmon’s largesse, the Harmon Basis, by way of its exhibitions and awards, notably made a profound, if nonetheless underknown, influence on Black visible artwork.

Harmon, who was white, was the son of a lieutenant within the tenth Coloured Cavalry, a segregated African American unit of the US Military fashioned after the Civil Conflict. Harmon fils spent a substantial period of time with the regiment’s Black troopers, which impacted him vastly, and he finally developed the assumption that African People may succeed by way of private accomplishments. In 1922, Harmon established the Harmon Basis with the aim of encouraging and stimulating self-help.

Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, a Black man who is seated in front of a lush landscape with a nude figure standing next to one cloaked in white.

Laura Wheeler Waring, James Weldon Johnson, 1943.

Nationwide Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Establishment, Washington, D. C., Present of the Harmon Basis

Although Harmon died in 1928, the Harmon Basis continued below the course of Mary Beattie Brady, who would oversee it till its finish in 1967. Miss Brady, as she was identified to these near her, was keen on seeing artwork as a device for propaganda to advertise social change by commissioning optimistic photos of Black folks, like its 1944 exhibition “Portraits of Excellent People of Negro Origin” of figures like George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson.

Students like Locke have criticized this viewpoint held by folks like Brady. In a 1928 essay titled, “Artwork or Propaganda?,” Locke wrote, “My chief objection to propaganda, aside from its besetting sin of monotony and disproportion, is that it perpetuates the place of group inferiority even in crying out towards it.”

A full-length painted portrait of Marian Anderson, a Black woman in a red velvet evening gown.

Laura Wheeler Waring, Marian Anderson, 1941.

©Laura Wheeler Waring/Nationwide Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Establishment, Washington, D. C., Present of the Harmon Basis

Artist, scholar, and curator, David C. Driskell, who had a considerably shut relationship with Brady, wrote within the introduction for Breaking Racial Boundaries: African People within the Harmon Basis Assortment, that she would typically write him in depth letters with unsolicited recommendation on issues like operating an artwork division or how artists may enhance their public picture. He wrote that for Brady, “it was by way of artwork that [she] thought-about herself to be an enlightened crusader for social justice.”

The William E. Harmon Awards for Distinguished Achievement Amongst Negroes and the annual Harmon Basis exhibitions have been pivotal in establishing the careers of artists, together with William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Laura Wheeler Waring, who’re all featured within the Met exhibition together with through works commissioned by the Harmon Basis. By 1939, the Basis has supported the work of some 400 Black artists.  

In 1929, the primary of the annual Harmon exhibitions was held at Worldwide Home in New York’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, away from Harlem however at a web site that housed worldwide college students as a built-in viewers. Round 6,500 folks visited the exhibition in a matter of the primary three weeks. After the exhibition closed that 12 months, the Basis toured “An Exhibition of Portray and Sculpture by American Negro Artists,” which traveled to arts establishments and universities campus in 11 cities throughout the nation; over 8,000 folks visited the present’s cease on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington D.C.

A Black man on a scaffold attending to a frieze-like artwork showing athletes running and jumping.

Sargent Claude Johnson, 1940.

San Francisco Historical past Middle

Jacqueline Francis, an artwork historian and dean on the California Faculty of the Arts in San Francisco, stated Harmon Basis exhibitions have been “a chance for artists who didn’t produce other alternatives to exhibit in venues that have been mainstream, principally white-owned and white-curated, areas.” One such artist is Sargent Claude Johnson, who gained the exhibition prize in 1928; Johnson is at the moment the topic of a retrospective on the Huntington Library, Artwork Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which Francis co-curated. For artists like Johnson, who was primarily based within the Bay Space, help from the Harmon Basis gave his artwork nationwide acclaim and allowed it to tour the nation. (Johnson, nonetheless, doesn’t function within the Met’s present exhibition.)

Along with exhibiting the work of Black artists, the inspiration’s awards got here with a money prize of $400 ($6,969.88 at present) for gold and $100 ($1,742.47 at present) for bronze. And several other of the winners typically used the funds to journey to Europe to see the works of Previous Masters in individual and work together with their contemporaries throughout the pond. Palmer Hayden, who gained the gold prize in 1926, traveled to Paris to pursue his research as a non-public pupil of Clivette Le Fevre on the École des Beaux-Arts, whereas Hale Woodruff, who gained the bronze that very same 12 months, was capable of spend 4 years at Académie Scandinave and the Académie Moderne in Paris.

A still life showing a vase with flowers, an African bust sculpture, a cigarette in an ash tray and a table runner, with a curtain behind.

Palmer Hayden, Fétiche et Fleurs, 1932.

Photograph Yosi Pozeilov/Museum of African American Artwork, Los Angeles, Courtesy the Hayden Household Revocable Artwork Belief

On the time although, the Harmon Basis wasn’t the one philanthropic endeavor aimed toward supporting the Black neighborhood. Philanthropists like George Foster Peabody, John D. Rockefeller, and Julius Rosenwald donated funds on to communities for efforts to construct YMCAs or different hubs of Black life in locations like Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. And historian and bibliophile Arthur Schomburg additionally mounted exhibitions on the Harlem department of the New York Public Library between 1921 and 1923 that exhibited 261 work by 65 Black artists from throughout the nation.

Although the Harmon Basis was comparatively well-respected, it did obtain criticism from Black artists, together with Romare Bearden who felt the group targeted on Black artists’ distinctive personalities and biographies reasonably than their creative benefit. As a younger artist in 1943, Bearden revealed an article, titled “The Negro Artist and Trendy Artwork,” in Alternative journal in regards to the Harmon Basis, which he seen as “from the start [having] a coddling and patronizing nature.” Bearden would later change his views of the Harmon Basis, writing within the 1993 guide he wrote with Harry Henderson, A Historical past of African American Artists 1792 to the Current, that the inspiration was instrumental to the event of Black artists. “But no matter its faults,” they wrote, “aesthetically and from an African-American viewpoint, the Harmon Basis introduced encouraging public consideration to the event of African-American artists in a important interval.”

Francis added, “Famously, Bearden took it again, as a result of he stated, I used to be younger, and I had my sturdy concepts and my sturdy opinions. However I feel by the point Bearden and Harry Henderson began to jot down A Historical past of African American Artists, he was like, on the very least, it helps some artists keep their visibility.”

View of a large-scale collage showing a block of Harlem.

Romare Bearden, The Block, 1971, set up view.

Photograph Anna-Marie Kellen/Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York

Curator Adrienne Childs, who served as an adviser to the Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition, stated that the institutional help Black artists acquired from the Harmon Basis was important, “actually, within the early twentieth century, when Black artists are simply beginning to grow to be visible artists,” she stated. “So, the Harmon Basis is type of accelerating this by focusing one a part of their agenda to concentrate on Black artwork and Black artists, supporting them by sending them abroad.”

As a result of its annual exhibitions and awards occurred many years earlier than the civil rights motion, the Basis was in some ways forward of its time, giving Black artists much-needed recognition for his or her abilities. Artists like Augusta Savage, who gained a prize within the 1928 exhibition, opened two galleries, directed the Harlem Group Artwork Middle, and inspired youthful artists like Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis to proceed pursuing their artwork.

A bronze sculpture of several figures rising out of a bent arm as if in a harp.


Augusta Savage, Carry Each Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939.

Photograph Ryan Fairbrother/College of North Florida, Thomas G. Carpenter Library, Particular Collections and College Archives, Eartha M. M. White Assortment

The Harmon Basis started to wind down its actions within the mid-Fifties following the Supreme Court docket’s 1954 resolution in Brown v. Board of Schooling, with the assumption that the ending of segregation in faculties now not necessitated its mission. The Basis ended the tour of “Portraits of Excellent People of Negro Origin,” which had been touring the nation for a decade.

The board donated the complete assortment to the Nationwide Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum in addition to to HBCUs, like Fisk College and Hampton College, after the group’s termination in 1967.

When serious about the influence that the group had at the moment, Francis stated, “We all know loads in regards to the good, the unhealthy, and in between the Harmon Basis, and perhaps issues [without it] would have moved alongside not directly, or they’d haven’t moved alongside. However you understand, it simply would have been a special and never solely predictable narrative.”

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