Rivers ancient as the world
TW: Please note this article references racial violence. It also uses old fashioned language when quoting contemporary works by black writers.
This article covers:
- Harlem
- W.E.B. Du Bois and the Crisis magazine
- Laura Wheeler Waring
- Alain Locke
- Aaron Douglas
- Langston Hughes
- Wallace Thurman and Fire!!
- Richard Bruce Nugent
- Ronald Moody
Harlem
In his introduction to The New Negro anthology, published in 1925, its editor Alain Locke wrote:
“In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro.”
Page 3
The 1920s saw the re-birth of a confident new spirit with the emergence of a Black Middle class, important national leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and a wider popularity of African American art, especially music in the form of ragtime and jazz.
The First World War, which led to the emigration of many recent European immigrants and an increased demand for war work, encouraged many black people to move from the rural south to cities in the north such as New York and Chicago. This was the start of the Great Migration, which saw around six million black people move internally within the USA between 1910 and 1970. The communities benefited from better pay and opportunities, and new urban identities and a refined sense of modernity.
While several urban centers of black cultural life grew, the most important in this period was Harlem.
Harlem, 20 blocks in upper Manhattan, bordered by 155th street, 5th and 8th avenues and Central Park.
Here, Locke wrote: “The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat.” While James Weldon Johnson called it the black metropolis, “The greatest Negro city in the world”.
It was home to important writers, artists and musicians. Alongside Locke and Johnson, you might see W.E.B Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, two important community leaders and political thinkers, who if they did not always agree, lent the area a level of national importance akin to Washington. As well as the sculptor Richmond Barthé and the anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston to name just a few. It is hard to think of a higher concentration of creative energy in a smaller and more condensed space, than at any other time in human history.
This in short was the Harlem Renaissance, which is today judged by the artistic and creative outputs of its leading names.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the Crisis magazine
Ancient Egypt was an important reference to many of the thinkers and artists, who made up the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. It was not, of course, the only influence, but this is a blog examining the influence of ancient art, so I will focus on it here.
The discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb and the publication of the Nefertiti bust after the war had popularized an important stream of contemporary art and design, sometimes called Art Deco.
The engagement with Egyptian motifs, by black artists, was not superficial.
Publications like The New Negro played an important role in the spread of ideas and art forms beyond Harlem, but it was far from the first publication. From 1910, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) published the Crisis edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. This remained an important magazine.
Du Bois, in his own contribution to The New Negro, discusses the important work of the NAACP to raise awareness of white terrorism and the extra-judicial murder of black people (lynching): “it looks as though the record of of 1924 was going to not more than one Negro lynched each month”. In fact 16 people were murdered this way.
It is important to remember that the 20s were also a period of the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan and a series of brutal white-led progroms, such as the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, an attack that ‘was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence’.
Egypt in the Crisis and Laura Wheeler Waring
As well as becoming an important voice for challenging the situation in America, the Crisis engaged with the political situation in Egypt (as well as other African countries).
The magazine’s Man of the Month in June 1921 was Saad Zaghul the Egyptian revolutionary who led a civil disobedience campaign against British imperial control and played an important role in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.
The journal also popularized new artists, some of whom were inspired by Egyptian art.
The cover of the April 1923 issue depicts an African woman playing an Egyptian style harp, while the September 1924 cover depicts an Egyptian queen walking a lion, with a man fanning her. Both are illustrated with an almost Aubrey Beardsley-esque lightness by Laura Wheeler Waring. Wheeler Waring had traveled to Paris before the war, and she was soon to return between 1924 and 1925. Here she sketched in the Louvre and studied first-hand impressionist paintings.
Her style is taut, economical and precise with detail, the energy coming from the layout and the contrast between tension and relaxation in her figures.
Alain Locke
Egypt was understood not just as a source for new motifs, but as an important form of African culture.
Alain Locke, who edited the New Negro, was part of this intellectual circle. But in comparison to Du Bois he was more interested in art and culture.
He visited Egypt in 1924, hoping to witness the excavation of Tutankhamun. This wasn’t possible due to long running disputes between the Egyptian authorities and Howard Carter.
But during his time in Egypt, he was able to visit several important archaeological sites and museums.
He was particularly drawn to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and to its charismatic founder, Marcos Simaika Pasha who introduced him to Belata Heroui, the Abyssinian (broadly modern day Ethiopia) envoy. This gave him a sense of a long history of connection and cultural transmission. In his essay, Impressions of Luxor, he argued:
“It was Egypt very probably that gave to culture the conception of immortality, there seems to be peculiar poetic justice in the fact of her having immortalized herself as no other early civilization. The cult of the dead, her most dominant and persistent concern, made the tomb the depositing center of her civilization, and except for this fact probably nothing would have remained to solve in any concrete way the historical problem of Egyptian life and culture.”
The works of Alain Locke, edited with an introduction by Charles Molesworth. Page 175
Locke understood Egypt as an African culture. He refuted arguments that Egypt was essentially and originally a Near Eastern (or ‘semitic’ as it was then called) culture, a claim popularised by the eugenicist Flinders Petrie, essentially for racist reasons.
Locke was strongly aware that for African Americans, unlike other communities in America, there was a brutal break with older cultural traditions.
He further argued that the North African cultures of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia were part of a pan-African American heritage.
This was part of a broader promotion of African art.
Alongside, celebrating Egyptian art, magazines like the Crisis and the New Negro published photos of African art (including in the latter, a photo of the Benin Bronze from the Berlin Ethnological Museum).
Locke, plugged into contemporary art, was aware of the profound interest in ‘primitive art’ both in Europe and America. This was the period when artists like Pablo Picasso and the Surrealists were inspired by the African art they saw in European museums, often collected through colonial officials and imperial armies.
African art revolutionised the art of what we would today call the Global North.
Locke argued that a “more stylized art does not exist than the African’ (The works of Alain Locke, p. 189) But he encouraged artists to seek new forms of expression. He understood the importance of talented minorities to lift the community and also the importance of the community to support artists. He believed that the recognition of African American art and culture, would lead eventually to full emancipation:
“Negro things may reasonly be a fad for others; for us this must be a religion. Beauty, however, is its best priest and psalms will be more effective than sermons”.
The works of Alain Locke, P. 220
“Egypt was attractive”, says Jeffrey C. Stewart, Locke’s biographer reflecting on his interest in the Tutankhamun tomb items, “because Egyptian high aestheticism pioneered the use of art to revitalise an Empire”.
It was against this backdrop that many artists of the Harlem Renaissance drew on Egyptian motifs.
Aaron Douglas
Two creative geniuses in particular were drawn to the theme of antiquity: Aaron Douglas and Langton Hughes.
They had similar backgrounds and were both drawn to Harlem in the 20s.
Aaron Douglas grew up in Topeka, Kansas which allowed him to access educational opportunities not available in other parts of the United States to African Americans.
He was the first black student enrolled at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He received a formal art education taught through the study of old masters.
Throughout his life, he retained a belief in education and a love of serious literature.
He arrived in Harlem in 1925 en route to Paris and decided to stay. He was plugged into the important discussions of Harlem. He joined the Communist Party and supported the Scottsboro Boys, who were wrongly accused in the 1930s.
Douglas was a successful commercial artist, illustrating for Vanity Fair, Opportunity and Theatre Arts Magazine alongside other publications. He is most famous today for his work in black magazines and for murals.
His art cannot be reduced to a simplistic list of influences; however, for the purposes of this article, we can argue ancient Egypt was an important inspiration. We see Egyptian elements throughout his paintings and design work.
His book cover for Wallace Thurman’s The Black the Berry depicts the silhouette of a woman with a note of Egyptian and possibly Greek art: the nemes wig and kilt. It is similar to his cover of the September 1927 issue of the Crisis which depicts a woman holding a globe, with ease above a smoky cityscape. The ancient and the modern coalesce.
While in Building More Stately Mansions, African-American workmen build the new city, but the skyscrapers are dominated by ancient architecture, a Roman arch, two columns remaining of a Greek temple, a pagoda, an immense pyramid and above them all an Egyptian sphinx.
Like Locke, Aaron saw Egypt as an African culture. The faces of his people and sphinges often have slit eyes resembling West African masks. Huggins argues that Douglas got two things from his deep engagement with African art: First, the belief that “art should be more than subject” and second a sense of Africa’s spiritual and cultural importance (Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Irvin Huggins, page 169).
Douglas’ art has an energy and a power, yet are also strangely soothing with their intentionally toned palette. To call them ‘timeless’ does disservice to their disruptive energy and yet they are strangely out of time.
Susan Earle argued:
The struggle for Douglas and others was to claim modernity in a way that was specific enough to speak to the very different history of African Americans while it also participated in the Utopian premise of modernism’s universality.
Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, edited by Susan Earle, page 26.
Alongside the ancient, his art swirls in the dynamism of modernity. Paintings such as Forge Foundry drip with the intensity of the urban experience. It depicts three figures dealing with the elements, fire, metal, earth. Dramatic lighting creates ethereal, almost-pyramid shapes in the background.
On using ancient motifs throughout his work, Aaron wrote:
“I did [this] as if I was an artist working 100 years previously. Say it was 1825, and what i was doing was unconscious of the white world; not that I was antagonistic, but I was interpreting this in terms of black life”
Quoted in Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, page 59.
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was largely raised in Kansas, moving to New York to study at Colombia. He left the university, due to its racism, and was drawn to Harlem by the vibrant black culture and its more cogent intellectual stimuli.
Langston considered Douglas’s poetry to be the equivalent of his poems.
They flow with an internal tension, an almost musical looseness that snaps back onto a resonate theme, a rhythm or an image, that hooks and then unsettles the reader.
We see this clearly in one of his finest poems, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
It sounds almost like jazz, with its improvisational hot solo in the middle section, returning to the original riff.
The poem was first published in the Crisis June 1921 and later in The New Negro anthology in 1925. It was inspired by a train journey across a bridge, where Langston saw the sunset over the River Mississippi.
“No doubt I changed a few words the next day, or maybe crossed out a line or two. But there are seldom many changes in my poems, once they’re down.”
What I think interests me about the choice of rivers is not just which were included, but which were left out. There is no space for the River Jordan, the site of Christ’s baptism, a symbol of rebirth and redemption and an important subject of spirituals. Yet, the Euphrates and Nile are both biblical rivers. On the banks of the Euphrates the Israelites carried into captivity were forced to sing and replied with a song (later made immortal by the Melodians and Boney M).
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;
Psalms, 137 5 -6
While on the great Nile, a baby was found in a rush basket, who would go on to lead his people to freedom and leave Pharaoh’s army and all his horses, drowned in the sea.
The river is an enduring presence, an ever rolling power, hard to tame.
Fire!!
Egyptian motifs were a sign of power, even of rebellion against the powers that be, those seer-suckered white pharoahs of Pennsylvania Avenue.
While The New Negro remains the most famous of the many small magazines published during the Harlem Renaissance, the most interesting from a modern point of view is Fire!! published in 1928.
The catalogue for a recent exhibition of the Harlem Renaissance at the Met, called it a ‘Queer Modernist Manifesto’.
Contributors included Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Burnett, John P. Davis and Zora Neale Hurston.
It was edited by Wallace Thurman. Thurman wrote two classic ‘Harlem Renaissance’ novels, both set in the district.
The Blacker the Berry is a powerful study of colourism in Harlem.
I probably oversay this, but Infants of the Spring should be turned into a TV show. It gives a sense of the background to the Harlem Renaissance and creation of Fire!!
Infants of the Spring is set in the bohemian milieu of Harlem, featuring a cast of ambitious, bitchy and brilliant characters seemingly based loosely on well known figures. Paul the aesthete who cites Oscar Wilde and Des Esseintes as his heroes, is possibly based on Richard Bruce Nugent. But is Stephen Carl van Vetchen?
Pelham, a contemptible character in Thurman’s hand is described as painting ‘well-rounded bodies, prominent nostrils, slit eyes and perpendicular ears’, which could also describe the art of Aaron Douglas. Possibly not.
Thurman had his protagonist discuss the tension between two approaches of contemporary African Art in Infants of the Spring:
“If this Negro Renaissince is going to actually live up to its name and reputation, it’s going to be Paul’s we need, not Pelham’s.”
More Alain Lockes and less W.E.B. Du Boises. More Richard Bruce Nugents and less Aaron Douglases.
Yet the magazine’s cover was designed by Aaron Douglas, an Egyptian sphinx whose eyes resemble the slit eyepieces of West African masks with African symbols printed in red ink on a black page. It is a powerful and urgent, high energy cover. As Dr Freud knew, the sphinx was a sexually ambiguous figure. The message from cover and title is clear. This is hot stuff.
Langston Hughes, who also contributed, wrote the magazine aimed to “burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past”
It was controversial, not least for its overt homosexual themes and topics. In this it was very representative of the Harlem Renaissance. Henry Louis Gates Jr said the movement “was surely as gay as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these”.
Alain Locke was broadly supportive:
“The youth section of the New Negro movement has marched off in a gay and self-confident manoeuver of artistic secession”.
He did not mean ‘gay’ in the modern sense, but he was aware that many readers might be upset at what they found:
“The strong sex radicalism of many of the contributions will shock many well-wishes and elate some of our adversaries … But if Negro life is to provide a healthy antidote to Puritanism, and to become one of the effective instruments of sound artistic progress, its flesh values must more and more be expressed in the clean, original, primitive but fundamental terms of the senses and not, as too often in this particular issue of Fire, in hectic imitation of the the “naughty nineties” and effete echoes of contemporary decadence.”
Like many of the contributors to Fire!! Locke was gay but he was drawn to classical Greek art, both as a way to understand art, but also in terms of the concept of “Greek Love” as an expression of his homosexual side. The historian Jeffrey C. Stewart has noted that Locke’s model of support and patronage of younger artists was inspired in part by the “Greek ideal of ‘nobel friendship’”. See p. 91 – HR: Modernism and Transformation
Richard Bruce Nugent
Richard Bruce Nugent was openly homosexual throughout his life, recognising his sexual identity:
I have never been in what they call “the closet.” It has never occurred to me that it was anything to be ashamed of, and it never occurred to me that it was anybody’s business but mine.
His contribution to Fire!! was the classic prose poem Smoke, Lilies and Jade. A very sexy work:
as they undressed by the blue dawn…Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being…his body was all symmetry and music…and Alex called him Beauty…long they lay…blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts…and Alex swallowed with difficulty…he felt a glow of tremor…and they talked and…slept…
It is languorous, luxuriant and lapidary: the latter literally, precious gems gleam through Nugent’s work.
Nugent was drawn to decadent themes. A photo portrait by Carl Vetchen shows him looking up lovingly to
More explicit ancient themes can be found in his short ‘Biblical Stories’. Five were written in the later 20s, but were not published. Many more may have been planned or even written.
They are some of the strangest and most sexually alluring biblical stories ever put to paper.
They are set in the East, a land of treasures and decadence.
One story begins with the tableware gracing the King of Ethiopia’s birthday celebrations: Samos glass, Egyptian gold, opal glasses. Later in the same novel, the king is awoken when the sun burns through the translucent emerald gem on his ring.
Nugent hones in on the detail of clothing:
“Melchior donned pleated trousers that clasped at the ankles beneath his blue leather shoes. His great trousers hung like fabulous bags, and where the blue pleats broke at the ankle-fold, the gold lining could be seen. Around his waist was a broidered sash of deeper blue; its ends were weighted with polished brass signs of the heavens.”
The protagonist in The Now Discordant Song of Bells is gifted an exquisite model of a temple to Bastet by Herod to house his cat Sextabius. He kills it, just to shave his eyebrows (which recalls Herodotus II. 66-67). He then meets Caspar, the king of Ethiopia with the gorgeous flatware mentioned above.
On the negative side of the balance, the story also contains one of the densest lines of historical-romance dialogue I’ve ever read, spoken to the Egyptian cat:
“Thou art flagellist. See how thine ears flatten to thy skull in pleasure, and hear how contented is thy purr. Thou hast a strange beauty, Sextabius. It is no wonder I love thee. Thou art so sleek and slim, so dun and dark. Thou art near as strange with thy unembarrassed blue stare in thy dark face as I. And thou art vain. Look how thou art preening.”
Given the lush economy of works like Smoke, Lilies and Jade, the style is intentionally over flamboyant and camp.
Nugent is interesting because he draws on a different aspect of non-classical antiquity to that of Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas, but one just as alive to meaning and celebration.
Ronald Moody
The sculptor Ronald Moody is a recent addition to the Harlem Renaissance canon.
Born in Jamaica, he moved to London to train as a dentist. Other relatives had already made the journey.
His brother Harold was a doctor who founded and led the League of Coloured Peoples, an important Civil Rights organisation in the UK.
(There is a Nubian JAK Community Trust blue plaque to Harold outside the YMCA on the corner of Tottenham Court Road on Great Russell Street, which you may see if you are walking to the British Museum.)
During his medical studies, Ronald visited London’s museums, one day making a ‘fatal trip’ to the Egyptian Hall in the British Museum.
“Vowed as I was to search for truth whatever the consequences might be, I continued my way and found that I was taking an interest in Art. I often went to the British Museum, National Gallery and other Art Galleries, coming away, I am afraid, more puzzled than pleased, until one day I discovered Egyptian sculpture all for myself. It was an amazing experience and I haunted that room for a long time after. The use of the material, the massive forms treated with such amazing skill, sensitiveness, delicacy and daring, and lastly, the spirit behind it was strangely sympathetic. From that moment I felt I wanted to do sculpture. But how? I knew nothing about it and until now hardly thought of myself as an artist.”
He began sculpting, using the plaster of paris left over from his nascent dental work. Later he moved to wood carving, then enjoying a vogue.
His sculpture Midonz was exhibited in the Contemprary Negro Art exhibition in the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939. The exhibition was conceived by Alain Locke.
Locke’s biographer Jeffrey C Stewart writes that a photograph of two children looking up at Moody’s work represents Locke’s aims of this exhibition, and by extension more broadly across his career.
As Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski writes in his biography of Moody “the children display hope, optimism and wonder at the huge possibilities before them”.
Moody fell in love with Paris. He and his wife Helene moved there in 1938 against the advice of close friends including Marie Seton and Antonia White who warned of the dangers of impending war. They were proved correct when Moody and his Jewish wife fled the city only a day before it fell. They fled to the South of France ‘a steady thirty kilometers in front’ of the Nazis. They were trapped in Marseille. At one point, Moody slept in a field, an experience that impacted his health for the rest of his life.
Fortunately they both made it back to England.
Moody was inspired by several ideas, motifs and styles throughout his career. For example, Savacou his sculpture of 1964 commissioned for the University of West Indies was a bird inspired by Carib mythology. The Caribs were the indigenous people who gave their name to the Caribbean islands.
Moody wrote
“I found Savacou a very exciting subject for a piece of sculpture. He is of West Indian origin, human and divine, and ruler over two very unruly elements. I confined myself to his stay on earth as a bird and have given him some tinge of earthly qualities; a certain arrogance expressed in his form and stance combined with a feeling of power, because of his difficult job, and perhaps a hint of things to come in the vaguely star-like shape of his comb.”
We might notice the implicit Egyptian themes of divine-animals, the earth-bound and the cosmic combined.
Earlier Moody had described statues of Ra:
“I have seen bronzes and carvings of this god that have all the majestic calm and greatness one associates with the portrait of a god, despite the incongruous mixture of animal and human.”
Although Savocou is not half-human half-god, it has the same majestic calm and awe-filled greatness.
Moody was an important artist. His work was exhibited in major galleries. At one point, Three Heads was the only modernist artwork displayed alongside classical Indian sculpture in Indira Gandhi’s collection.
He also created sculpture portraits of several important cultural figures including his brother Harold, the poet and ‘translator’ of Homer Christopher Logue and Terry Thomas. My younger readers may not recognise this name, but Thomas was the synonymous upper class cad of post war British Film. Moody’s wife was his secretary and Terry became a close friend. A representative greeting ‘Happy New Year Chaps, and of course bottoms up.’
Moody also represented Britain as Chair of the Visual Arts Sub-Committee during FESTAC 77, a major international festival of Black and African Arts and Culture that took place in Lagos. (Its symbol was the Benin Mask, an art object taken by the British during the Punitive Campaign against Benin and held by them in the British Museum.)
Although he was celebrated during his life, he was more or less forgotten after his death. His niece Cynthia Moody tirelessly campaigned to promote her uncle. Cataloging and collecting his work and writing to art historians and curators. It is largely thanks to her dedication that Moody is once again rightfully today he is recognised as a major artist connected to the international art-trends that linked Harlem, Paris, London and Kingston, Jamaica.
Today, you can see his work in the National Gallery of Jamaica and Tate Britain.
Summary
This post just scratches the surface of the rich art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. I hope I have inspired you to discover more.
I wrote this post in the summer of 2024. Since then, a far right government has taken control of the United States. In these times, we do not need to be reminded of the importance of engaged criticism. It is a tool to educate, inform, enrich and enrage people.
But in this fight against Trumpism, and all the grim permeations of his evil ideology, our great support and rallying cry will remain art, truth and beauty.
Read more
Blog posts and web articles
The Harlem Renaissance, art, politics and ancient Egypt published by the UCL Equiano Centre.
Books
Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Irvin Huggins.
The Harlem Renaissance and transatlantic modernism edited by Denise Murrell.
Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life edited by Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski.
Rhakotis 
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