Harlem Renaissance
 

I really enjoyed The Harlem Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's expansive and beautifully curated, including paintings by many artists whose work I love, notably William H. Johnson. His paintings of Jitterbugs and portraits are likely familiar, even if his name isn't. One of his early paintings hangs in the exhibit next to a landscape in the Met's collection by Chaim Soutine, a painter Johnson emulated when he lived in Europe early in his career. He was one of the first expatriate Black artists in Paris. There is also a small gouache by Ernest Chrichlow, whose night class I attended at the Art Student's League of New York in the 1990s. I was delighted to see him represented, along with other underrepresented painters. This painting by Palmer Hayden is tremendous: The Janitor Who Paints. There was no huge crowd trying to get in when I went on a Monday afternoon, which is rare for a major special exhibit at the Met. If you're in or near NYC, you are no doubt planning to visit. You will probably go more than once.

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This is great. Lots to look through. Thanks for the links. We're in NYC the last week in May so I'll check to see if it's still there.

(Just checked and see it's running through the end of July, so we go)

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Thanks for highlighting this exhibition and your impressions of it, Rick, and for your well-chosen links.

It's good to see it demonstrated that the work of early 20th-century Black American artists was definitely in conversation with what else was going on in modernism, often using the same visual vocabulary as their artistic contemporaries and recent predecessors in Europe.

Too often the celebration of Black artists is so narrowly focused on trying to represent the underrepresented that it overcompensates, and ends up making their work look parochial, isolated, and uninformed, when it wasn't.

You'll love it Jim.

Good point, Julie. One thing that I find strange, having been through the exhibit five times or so, is that there is no huge crowd, which you would get for a major exhibit of this size at the met. Usually you have to check in and wait in a huge crowd until you get a text saying you are in the next group of 150 art lovers that will be admitted. It's nice not having to crawl between people's legs to see the pictures. But one wonders.