Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, the son of Aaron, Sr., a baker, and Elizabeth, an amateur painter. After graduating from Topeka High School, he worked briefly at the Cadillac plant in Detroit while compiling a small portfolio of drawings. He used this portfolio to gain admission to the University of Nebraska, where he became the first African-American to receive a BFA degree. Returning closer to home, he taught high school art for two years in Kansas City, Missouri. But his ambition at the time was to become an artist in Paris, and he traveled to New York in 1925 with this in mind. His experiences in Harlem set the course of his future career, and he traveled to Paris only for a year of study in 1931. Douglas boldly applied to Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, which was then edited by W.E.B. du Bois. Impressed with Douglas's chutzpah, Du Bois offered him a job as a mailroom clerk, but allowed him to submit illustrations for the magazine. Meanwhile Douglas won a scholarship to study with Winold Reiss, whose anthropological outlook on art made a permanent mark on his style. Reiss urged Douglas to explore his African roots and to incorporate African motifs into his work. As Douglas's style evolved, his illustrations for Crisis were a great success, and he was soon in demand from magazine and book publishers and from leading writers and poets of the era. He even served briefly as the art director for Crisis. Inspired by the lifestyle they saw on their trip to Paris, Douglas and his wife Alta Sawyer opened an artistic salon upon their return to Harlem. Their salon became a regular haunt for Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas was active in persuading the government to include African-American artists in federal projects. He himself was commissioned to paint murals for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. In 1938 he was hired to create an art department for Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. To this end, he enrolled in a Master's program in art education at Columbia University, receiving a degree from them in 1944. He had a long career at Fisk, retiring in 1966.Judgment Day, 1939
Critical Analysis
Douglas's interactions with Winold Reiss led him toward a unique and very compelling style. His artwork combines elements of cubism with themes from African art. He combined overlapping geometric shapes with silhouettes of human figures, sticking to a flat two-dimensional presentation with a very limited tonal range. The effect is to cast the humans in shadow, an aspect that was seized upon by art historians eager to read a whole theory of the Black experience in America into Douglas's paintings. Given Douglas's close association with the most creative figures of the Harlem Renaissance, this theory has many elements of truth. But Douglas's work presents a unique artistic aesthetic as well as a historical outlook. His work is haunting for both of these reasons.
Murals
New York, New York - Harlem YMCA: Evolution of Negro Dance
New York, New York - Harlem YMCA: Evolution of Negro Dance
New York, New York - Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: Aspects of Negro Life
Nashville, Tennessee - Cravath Hall, Fisk University: Symbolic Negro History
References
BHS, Aaron Douglas, Black History Now June 3 (2014).
