New purchases by Sheldon show an African-American
Renaissance
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BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star
Aaron Douglas is, arguably, the most important artist to have graduated from the University of Nebraska.
The first African-American to get an art degree at Nebraska, Douglas became the primary visual artist in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, then spent decades as a teacher, influencing generations that followed him.
Until recently, Douglas has not received the attention he deserves in Nebraska or in the art world at large. But that is changing.
For Sheldon Museum of Art director J. Daniel Veneciano, recognizing Douglas and his work is natural.
“Why aren’t we making a big, huge deal out of this in the way we do Willa Cather?” asked Veneciano, when he came to Lincoln in July. “That’s what we are trying to do now.”
To that end, Sheldon recently acquired significant works by eight artists to form the core of a new African-American Masters Collection. Included in that purchase was “Emperor Jones,” a set of four woodcut prints by Douglas from 1926.
Earlier this year, the university established the Aaron Douglas Professorship for Teaching Excellence to be awarded to faculty holding full professor rank who demonstrate sustained, extraordinary levels of teaching excellence and national visibility for instructional activities.
“It’s really exciting to me what you in Nebraska are doing,” said Susan Earle, curator of European and American art at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “I think it’s terrific that Sheldon and the University of Nebraska are doing this. He’s really important in the history of 20th century American art, not only because he’s an African-American artist, but that’s a big part of it.”
Earle organized and curated “Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist,” the first touring exhibition of Douglas’ work. The exhibition, which began its run at Spencer a year ago, closes today at Harlem’s Shomberg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“I’m just sad the show didn’t come here,” Veneciano said. “I don’t know why it didn’t come here. But it should have.”
To remedy that and add to local exposure for Douglas and his work, Veneciano has been in contact with Earle and others about getting some of the pieces to Lincoln for a future Sheldon exhibition. The show now includes “Window Cleaning,” a 1935 painting that is the only Douglas piece Sheldon owned before the October purchases.
Douglas was born in Topeka, Kan., in 1899 and graduated from Topeka High School in 1917, an accomplishment in itself for a young black man at the time, Earle noted.
He enrolled at the University of Nebraska in the spring of 1918 and earned his bachelor of fine art four years later. He spent three years in Kansas City before moving to New York in the summer of 1925, where he instantly became deeply immersed in the Harlem Renaissance.
“He was very much part of his era,” Earle said. “The ethos in Harlem and Chicago in the ‘20s was African-Americans need to claim their cultural heritage and create a creative expression. Theoreticians like W.E.B. DuBois really believed art and culture were going to bridge the gap between the white world and the African-American world. There was a need for art and culture that would carry the concept of the New Negro.”
A multi-faceted artist, Douglas made paintings and prints, murals for public buildings and did book illustrations and jackets, providing the visuals for works by authors such as Langston Hughes.
Seen now, his work is pioneering for all artists, not only African-Americans, Earle said.
“What I think is really a first that he did before any other artist is combining abstraction and geometrics with figuration,” she said. “Most people either did figurative work or abstract work. They didn’t try to combine the two. Or if they did, they didn’t do it as well as Douglas.
“He did these powerful figures in silhouette rather than representational. They became more powerful, symbolic figures, and he put them in context with the modernist visual language. I don’t think any white artist tried to do that.”
The silhouetted figures and angular abstraction are evident in the “Emperor Jones” woodcuts, even in reproduction.
The artwork purchased by Sheldon had not arrived in Lincoln at the time of interviews for this story with Veneciano and Earle.
However, it will be here soon and is scheduled to be exhibited at Sheldon from Dec. 16 to March 2 in a show titled “New Acquisitions: African-American Masters Collection.”
After spending 1931-1932 in Paris, Douglas returned to New York, settling in Harlem’s prosperous Sugar Hill neighborhood. In 1936, he had a one-person exhibition at the University of Nebraska. The next year, he began touring the historically black colleges of the South and in 1938 accepted a position as an art professor at Fisk University in Nashville, where he taught until his retirement in 1966. He died in Nashville in 1979.
Douglas had retrospective shows during his lifetime and was invited to the White House by President John F. Kennedy for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. But he remains less known than many African-American artists who followed in his footsteps.
“Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, who are much better known, kind of stood on Douglas’ shoulders,” Earle said. “They came a little after he did, and they came at a more open time.”
Douglas’ work flowered in the 1920s. But the Depression of the 1930s followed by World War II caused the art world to tighten. A subsequent post-war openness allowed Lawrence, Bearden and others to gain far greater visibility than that afforded to Douglas, who was in his late 40s following World War II, Earle said.
Lawrence and Bearden are among the eight artists whose work was purchased by Sheldon for the African-American Masters Collection.
Developing that collection has again placed Sheldon in the forefront of museums collecting American art.
When five sculptures by Elizabeth Catlett went to New York’s June Kelly Gallery earlier this year, the first to sell was purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the second by the Smithsonian Institution, the third by the Detroit Institute of Arts and the fourth by Sheldon.
After its October auction of African-American art, Swann Galleries cited two museums as having been the “winners” at that sale — The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Sheldon Museum of Art.
“This is the company we keep,” Veneciano said. “This is what is being collected by the major museums in the country. We are right there with them. … The Sheldon is a world-class museum, and I think we have to behave like one. Buying works in an art market like this is what we should be able to do.”
Museums are now seriously collecting African-American art because of what Veneciano calls a “new ethos in museum practice” rooted in the question “how do we tell the full story of American art?” But they are also purchasing those works because they can.
“We can afford to buy works like this,” Veneciano said. “We couldn’t afford to buy another (Edward) Hopper, at least not a painting, and we certainly couldn’t buy a (Jackson) Pollock drip painting.”
According to Antiques and the Arts Online and the Swann Galleries, here are the prices Sheldon paid for some of the pieces it acquired at the Oct. 7 auction:
* Charles White’s pen and ink drawing “Frederick Douglass Lives Again (The Ghost of Frederick Douglass),” 1949, $204,000;
* Alvin D. Loving Jr.’s “Untitled (Hexagon Composition),” acrylic on shaped canvas, circa 1967-69, an artist record price of $156,000;
* Charles Alston’s “Untitled (Figures with Architecture),” tempera and crayon on paper, 1949, $19,200;
* Jacob Lawrence’s “Eight Passages,” eight color screen prints illustrating the King James version of the Book of Genesis, 1990, a record $50,400;
* Douglas’ “Emperor Jones,” a scarce set of four woodcuts on Japan paper, 1926, from the edition of 20, signed and dated 1972, $22,800.
Sheldon’s purchases were made from endowments established solely for the purchase of artwork. No tax dollars or other university funds were used to buy the art.
“Frederick Douglass Lives Again (The Ghost of Frederick Douglass)” was the most important piece in the Swann sale, according to Veneciano, one of whose specialties is African-American art, something he developed while working at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
The purchase of White’s drawing also illustrates a change in Veneciano’s buying philosophy.
Initially, Veneciano planned to buy works that fit easily into Sheldon’s collection, such as Alston’s “Deserted House,” a classic regionalist lithograph circa 1938, and Lois Mailou Jones’ 1938 portrait of a young white girl and a cat titled “Fille assise avec chat.”
“The subject matter made it easier — the beautiful young girl with a cat,” he said. “That’s the kind of safe approach I may have had initially. But I changed in thinking about what we could do. I was getting some pieces that were safer, then I realized, ‘No, there shouldn’t be a limitation I should place on a museum collecting great American art.’ This (Frederick Douglass) is great American art.”
The 20-by-30-inch pen-and-ink over pencil drawing on illustration board is an historically important image, having been reproduced in publications like the Jewish Quarterly and Daily Worker. Politically charged, the piece addresses the trials of Jim Crow, segregation and the early days of the Civil Rights movement.
Sheldon has already received loan requests for the drawing — an indication of its significance in the history of African-American and American art.
“I see it being celebrated, not unlike the way we celebrate Hopper’s ‘Room in New York,’” Veneciano said. “It’s a very important piece.”
Lawrence’s “Eight Passages” is another important acquisition, in part because Sheldon was able to purchase all the prints in the well-traveled and exhibited suite.
But the series also depicts an historically important figure, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, as he sermonizes on the Book of Genesis, with the events he’s preaching about taking place outside the windows of the church.
Also historically significant is Loving’s “Untitled (Hexagon Composition).” The painting was part of his 1969 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. After receiving criticism that his hard-edged abstractions resembled those of Frank Stella, Loving cut up many of the paintings that were in the exhibition. The Sheldon purchase is one of the rare survivors from that show.
“It’s immaculate, and it is in such good condition,” Veneciano said. “It is really a brilliant piece.”
Coincidentally, the announcement of the African-American Masters Collection was made a week after the election of Barack Obama to be the first African-American president.
“This was all decided back in October, before the election,” Veneciano said. “Is it coincidence, or is it riding the wave of history and not being left behind? It is in the air and it is being in touch with our historical moment. I think that’s what a forward-thinking museum ought to be able to claim.”
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.
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