A movement defined by two faces

This moment may not be repeated soon: Two major Washington museums give us the chance to watch two founding fathers of black art work their way through blackness — and art.

One of them struggles to find a place in the mainstream of the avant-garde while also making pictures that resist a mainstream that excluded black Americans.

The other helps us see what a challenge that balance could be: He wore resistance on his sleeve but his art almost never managed to embody it.

That first artist is Jacob Lawrence and his great work of artistic resistance is the Migration series, completed in 1941. The Phillips Collection recently reassembled all 60 of its panels, which have been split between the Phillips and the Museum of Modern Art almost since they were made.

The foil to that work is on view in Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, a show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that is on tour from the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

It gives the first comprehensive look at one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas was the leading visual artist in a movement dominated by thinkers and writers.

Both shows are crucial to understanding a keystone moment in African American art. You can't recognise the genius of Lawrence's success in his Migration paintings without having the chance to see and understand Douglas's hard-fought failures.

No-mentor artist

Lawrence started The Migration of the Negro — that is the complete original title of his series — in 1940, when he was 22.

He was born in New Jersey to parents who had recently left the South, had grown up in Pennsylvania and had lived in Harlem since his early teens.

When he won a grant to paint the Migration pictures, Lawrence hadn't had much formal training and was barely beginning his career, though he had been in contact with some of the artistic leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. (Douglas seems to have been an influence but not a mentor.)

The crucial thing about Lawrence's Migration is how it is so completely centred on its subject matter. The series was made in the great age of modernist style, whose consuming interest was in how a picture looked.

Yet Lawrence's art is consumed with the story it wants to tell.
The 60 hardboard panels of Migration, only 12 by 18 inches each, walk us through the flight of African Americans from the rural South around the time of the First World War.

We see Southern troubles: the boll weevil that destroyed the cotton crop, the lynchings, the unfair courts and oppressive labour practices, the poverty.

We see the moment of migration: the black newspapers and Northern labour scouts encouraging migrants to move; the efforts of the Southern establishment to keep them from leaving; the crowded trains that carry them away.

It is clear that Lawrence's commitment to communicating these facts is greater than his interest in pretty-picture making.

Lawrence doesn't simply ignore the radical changes that had hit painting over the previous four decades. He couldn't work in any of the old realist techniques because those were too closely tied with the bad old days they were born in.

To be of their time and to look forward with some semblance of hope, Lawrence's Migration paintings had to work in a timely, modern style that was widely seen as speaking to the future.

But somehow, as a black man treating the outsider status of his race, his use of that vanguard style also had to register some opposition to it as the product of oppressive white society.

That opposition is especially clear in the casual crafting of the Migration series. Almost all of Lawrence's forms and figures are stylised, as modern art demanded. But rather than sleek outlines and geometric elegance, they have sloppy contours and crude shapes.

It is as though he recognises a fully modern style as the only language he can credibly speak in but insists that it is the message, rather than the language, that really matters to him.

Lawrence will work in a modernist style but he refuses to advance its cause or move it on to its next stage. Fancy style, his pictures say, is inadequate to the subjects they are treating; it starts to fall apart when it comes face to face with matters of such weight.

He takes care to spell those matters out as clearly as could be, one scene at a time.

There is never anything high-flown or needlessly complex in Lawrence's Migration of the Negro, no allegory or coy symbolism or arcane references.

But like such frescoes, part of that power comes from how inadequate all images are to the stories they tell.

Pictures have never been a simple replacement for narrative: Even Giotto's frescoes didn't function as the “bible of the unlettered'' of the old cliché, as medievalists have been insisting for a decade or more.

Instead, storytelling images work because of the effort it takes to decipher them — to match them to the stories that you know or to contemplate what unknown stories they illustrate.

And they work because that effort gets you looking that much closer and thinking that much harder about the situations depicted in them.

The man, the influence

Lawrence retains just enough of modernism's disjunctions — broken spaces and forms of Cubism and Futurism — to stand for the painfully fractured world he is depicting, and to concentrate our minds on it. But there is never so much modernism that its style distracts from his subject.

Take everything that has just been said about the Migration series and reverse it, and you have got the art of Aaron Douglas.

Douglas was born 18 years before Lawrence, in Topeka, Kansas, to migrant labourers. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in Nebraska — he was his university's first black graduate in art — taught high school in Kansas City, then moved to New York in 1925 with the intention of becoming part of Harlem's cultural scene.

His highly polished art was meticulously modern but mostly in the way an Art Deco mural was in a picture-palace lobby.

It was about an overlay of stylish effects rather than a real recasting of how depiction works, or about how such a recasting might help us rethink race.

Most of Douglas's pictures could be repainted in an absolutely different manner, from slick realism to fractured impressionism, without doing any real harm to their basic structures or subjects.

Douglas's “private'' sketches and landscapes and portraits are done in the perfectly traditional mode he was most comfortable in.

His art's conventional underpinnings get dolled up with deco stylings only in the pictures he intended for a larger public.

For racial issues that it touches on, Douglas's work tends to capitulate to mainstream taste and values rather than pushing back against them.

There is not a shred of doubt that Douglas, as a person and a thinker, was fully dedicated to the radical cause of racial equality. But his fancy paintings, full of vaporous allegory and genteel symbolism, give almost no sign of such rebellion.

They seem happy to be part of the artistic establishment; they are not up to the task of rejecting it. It feels almost as though, at the time that Douglas came of age, for a black Kansan to be making skilled art of any kind was already a radical enough gesture.

“They [white America] believe that a black artist is impossible,'' Douglas said in an early letter to his wife. He earned the title “dean'' from his fellow painters, and just that may have been his major anti-racist move. It took younger artists such as Lawrence to make such gestures come alive in their art.

Troubling portrayals

Yet in that same letter, written soon after his arrival in Harlem, Douglas also said: “I want to be frightful to look at. A veritable black terror.''

And there are moments of aggressive, angstful complexity at that point in his career. In 1926, an explicitly radical magazine called Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, which the black establishment shouted down after a single issue, inspired some of Douglas's best work.

He contributed cryptic images of wobbly black figures — a painter, a waitress — that look troubled and are troubling.

By 1930, however, the studies for a mural called Dance Magic, commissioned by a Chicago nightclub, have so many minstrel-show clichés you would think they had to have been done by an insensitive white.

There is a black woman writhing to the sound of drums and banjo-strumming' cotton pickers.

A 1936 picture called Into Bondage, showing chained Africans being led to slave boats bound for America, has a cheery, decorative tone that you are more likely to associate with celebration than lament.

It was one of four murals commissioned from Douglas for the Hall of Negro Life — which had been built only because Franklin D. Roosevelt provided funds that the segregated state refused to give.

The Hall and its paintings were a success, at least according to the Dallas Morning News. The paper spoke of crowds of “dusky country merrymakers'' with “rolling eyes and flashing white teeth''.

Whites visited only to conclude that Douglas's polished murals couldn't have been painted by an African American.

But those racists were also telling us something significant about the paintings themselves: that there was nothing in their making that a white painter, or a segregationist audience, would hesitate to lay claim to.

Whereas an art that captured the spirit of the struggle for racial equality ought to have given them pause. Or at the very least, white viewers ought to have recognised that struggle in the fabric of the pictures and seen them as suited to the task Douglas, a black man, had taken on.

Making that equation work was a tall order — more than Douglas could achieve. The surprise isn't that Douglas couldn't overcome the obstacles to make the first fully convincing black art. It is that Lawrence, in his Migration of the Negro, did.