Aaron Douglas Essay Research Paper Aaron DouglasPeople — страница 2

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for Black artists. The faces and limbs in these series of paintings are carefully drawn to reveal African features and recognizable Black poses. In God’s Trombones, Douglas achieved his mastery of hard- edge painting using symbolized features and lines. Through his use of these things he was able to bring to life the stiffness in the figures which symbolized Art Deco. But, unlike the decorative programs that exist in Art Deco, most of Douglas’s work capitalized on the movement that was influenced by the rhythms of Art Nouveau. Each of the paintings in the God’s Trombone series expresses the humanist concerns of Douglas. For example, in Judgment Day, one of the seven Negro sermons Douglas illustrated for James Weldon Johnson, he planned to place emphasize on the positive

appearance of Black power. In this painting, Gabriel, who represents the archangel, sounds the trumpet to awaken the dead from their spiritual rest. He is portrayed in this Painting as a lean Black man from whom the last earthly vocal sound is heard. The sound, which is perceived to travel across the world, is the inventive music of the Black man, and his blues. The music, which is perceived to waken all nations, is the song of a bluesman or famous trumpet player. The musician, who is consequently the artist, stands in the center of the universe sounding the loud horn on Judgment Day. Douglas also has followed Johnson’s chronicle and used simplified figures and forms to permit his interpretation of the Black man’s place of position to dominate the theme. At the height of his

popularity, Douglas left for Europe in 1931 to spend a year studying at L’Acadenie Scandinave in Paris. When he returned to New York in 1932, the Great Depression was engulfing America. Douglas completed, for the New York Public Library in 1934, a series of murals depicting the entire African- American experience from African Heritage, the Emancipation, life in the rural South, and the contemporary urban dilemma. Three years later after Charles S. Johnson (an activist in the Harlem Renaissance joined the Fisk University faculty and became the University’s president in the 1940’s and a fellow black artist) recruited Douglas to establish an art department in Nashville’s Fisk University. Edwin Harlston of Charleston, South Carolina completed a series of highly significant

murals. These murals depicted the course of Negro History. Douglas taught painting and was chair of the art department at Fisk from 1937 until his retirement in 1966. Prior to Douglas’s death in Nashville of February 3, 1979, his work had been exhibited throughout the country and featured in companion volumes, including Paintings by Aaron Douglas (1971), by David Driskell, Gregory Ridley, and D. L. Graham and The Centuries of Black American Art (1976) by David Driskell. In the decade following his death, the innovative art of “pioneering Africanist” Aaron Douglas was features in numerous exhibitions and in critical publications. Johnson, James Weldon, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Kirschke, Amy Helene, Aaron Douglas: Art,

Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Lewis, David Levering, The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, Volume 1. New York: Viking, 1994.