East of Harlem - Reviews - African American artists in early 20th-century Paris, France - Book Review

Theresa Leininger-Miller. New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 320 pp., 20 color ills., 120 b/w. $60, $32 paper.

Art historians have come to insist upon the importance of African American cultural influences in the shaping of modernism and American art. The literary, musical, and artistic accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance in Manhattan, and the performances of Josephine Baker in Paris frequently act as flash points in this discussion. However, few art historians have taken on the necessary archival and theoretical tasks of tracing and assessing the lives and works of African American artists beyond these well-worn examples of modern interracial exchange. Further, the discussion often presumes a one-way influence, too often leaving behind African American art and artists after the moment of contact. In her New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934, Theresa Leininger-Miller bravely assumes these undertakings, and smartly reconsiders African American art of the interwar period as something more than a tourist attraction or modernist inspiration The book--whic h should attract readers interested in American art history, as well as in the history of international modernism--provides ample evidence for the multidirectionality of cultural influence and change in the hustle and bustle of the early twentieth century.

Organized as a series of individual art-historical biographies thick with archival labor, the text is distinguished by being at once broad in historical scope and keenly--even intimately--detailed. Offering historical reconstructions of their experiences abroad, Leininger-Miller's survey includes the sculptors Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, the painters Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, and Archibald Motley, and the printmaker Albert Alexander Smith. The author describes their struggles to maintain financial stability, their reactions to French modern art, their indulgences in urban diversions, but, above all, their artistic practices while in France. Each artist worked according to different aesthetic principles and had widely varying experiences during their Parisian visits.

Leininger-Miller has chosen to focus on the twelve years between 1922 and 1934-- coincident with the so-called Harlem Renaissance. (1) Interwar Harlem and the presence of Leininger-Miller's artists abroad are not unrelated historical subjects: black artists owed their opportunity to travel in large part to the growth in white Americans' interest in African American culture, from which the popularity of Harlem nightlife also stemmed. Such historical concern with the issue of patronage comprises the crux of the book and also determined the study's end date of 1934, when the Depression discouraged the artists' financial backers, and Parisian exhibitions of black American art declined conspicuously.

By virtue of its extensive documentation, Nov Negro Artists in Paris raises more questions than it claims to answer. Calling her book "clearly an initial study, subject to revision and expansion" (xxii), Leininger-Miller offers her work as a remedy to the paucity of historical documentation of African American artists. Flagging certain routes of inquiry along the way--such as French pan-Africanism and the black French response to African American artists--the author generously and hopefully leaves such ventures to later studies.

A trip to France had of course long figured as a requisite pilgrimage for budding American artists. While expectations of France's cultural offerings shifted throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, a stay in Paris persisted as the optimal foundation of an artist's development until the 1930s, when empty pockets, nationalist sentiments, and government sponsorship kept artists more firmly rooted in the American scene. In addition, France was especially attractive to blacks, who hoped travel abroad would allow them to escape American racial oppression. Leininger-Miller cites African American poet Countee Cullen's wistful 1932 recollection as paradigmatic of the African American attachment to France: "[I] found across a continent of foam/ What was denied my hungry heart at home" (123). The results of this attempt at escape were mixed. Leininger-Miller tells us that Hayden quickly ran through his donated living stipend--in order to catch up on "some good living"-- but only after he learned to car ry a New York Herald Tribune that marked him as an American tourist and distinguished him from France's African colonial subjects (83, 74).

Evoking their sense of racial empowerment and cosmopolitan awareness, Leininger-Miller groups the six traveling artists under the rubric of "the New Negro." This self-descriptive term with roots in the nineteenth century emerged as a banner for black intellectuals who sought political and social transformation through sophisticated, race-specific cultural production. The concept gained new currency, vigor, and artistic specificity with the 1925 publication of Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, a compilation of writings on art and literature, literary works, and illustrations. A better designation than "Harlem Renaissance," Leininger-Miller's choice of terminology effectively broadens the geographical scope of early twentieth-century black American art production. Instead of limiting black Americans' contributions to twentieth- century American art to upper Manhattan, Leininger-Miller expands the possibilities of this history in ways that call for further attention to the role of international modernism--a s well as its interest in African art--in the development of black artists. In this regard, the author's attention to Cezanne's enduring influence, and to the 1931 International Colonial Exposition held in Paris, situates the works of these artists in a more global art history.