At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism

May 7, 2022–Feb 26, 2023

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Aaron Douglas

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Born 1899 in Topeka, KS
Died 1979 in Nashville, TN

Aaron Douglas moved to Harlem from the Midwest in 1925 and quickly became the most sought-after graphic artist of the Harlem Renaissance, designing covers for the two leading African American magazines and jackets for books by Black writers. The three woodcuts on view were based on gouaches he made to illustrate scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, which had premiered in 1920 and was revived in 1925 with Douglas’s friend Paul Robeson—now well known for his acting, singing, and civil rights work, but then a newcomer—in that title role. The prints typify Douglas’s signature style: flat, abstracted silhouettes in black and white fashioned after Art Deco, folk art cutouts, and Egyptian tomb paintings. Simplified versions of these images accompanied Alain Locke’s 1926 article “The Negro and the American Stage” in Theater Arts Monthly as well as his 1927 book Plays of Negro Life.

Bravado, from Emperor Jones, 1926

A black and white print of a seated figure on a raised platform interacting with an approaching figure on the steps below.
A black and white print of a seated figure on a raised platform interacting with an approaching figure on the steps below.

Aaron Douglas, Bravado from the series Emperor Jones, 1926. Woodcut, 8 × 5 1/2 in. (20.5 × 14 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Promised gift of Crystal McCrary and Raymond J. McGuire to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and The Studio Museum in Harlem. P.2022.3.1

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