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If the geographical separation of Lenox and Seventh Avenue has structured understanding of Harlem as racial space then the traps of either New Negro gentility or primitivist coarseness have long been seen as the inevitable fate of Harlem’s visual artists and writers. On the contrary, however, the work of Rudolph Fisher, Claude McKay, Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen as well as images by Sargent Claude Johnson and Aaron Douglas (to name just a few) consistently undermine this polarisation.
 

Sargent Claude Johnson’s lithograph, Lenox Avenue (1938) maps racial space as racial face. In tracing the outlines of a stylised and racially exaggerated African American profile (the fully everted lips being a Johnson trademark) Johnson also provocatively outlines contradictory aspects of the race capital and suggests a dynamic engagement between European modernism, American abstraction, Africanist primitivism and folk art. The image spatialises Harlem creativity, marking the characteristics of African American expression as constituent elements of Lenox Avenue geography. The piece is divided into three sections horizontally, with each section then subdivided by a carefully balanced arrangement of straight lines and curves, which segment the image and allow for a tonal organisation across a spectrum from ivory through creams, browns and finally black. Most immediately, then, the colour spectrum speaks to the intra-racial variousness of Lenox Avenue and the face maps for us the diversity of Harlem even as it initially appears to conform to certain stereotypes of primitivism.

  

Sargent Claude Johnson,
Lenox Avenue, 1938
Reproduced with permission of
the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
 
 

These tones gesture toward the various activities that fill the Lenox Avenue face in the image: music, in the form of the piano keys that run up the left hand side of the face; painting, in the light and dark artist’s palette that forms the left hand eye of the face; and voice, emblematised through the heavily emphasised lips, representing African American creativity in song, poetry, political protest and preaching. The swinging metronome in the lower portion of the painting ties the composition of the painting to the insistent (and by 1938 mythic) musical rhythms of Lenox Avenue jazz.
 
 

Each of these activities, we should note, can be understood to speak across the Lenox/Seventh divide, as the colour organisation of the image also refuses to polarise light from dark brown. So, the artist’s palette is connected by a delicately ascending wavy line that leads the eye into the upper section of the image, where we see three versions of black hair – from the smooth to the nappy-headed. The cigarette that rises vertically through the upper portion evokes images of a sophisticated jazzer, yet – as Richard Powell suggests – the vertical block might also be a pencil, neatly connecting nightlife to high cultural expression (Powell, 1997a, 21). The palette also balances against the abstraction of the lighter shaded half moon and the dark curve of the eye, which in turn lead to the lower portion of the image and to the black metronome that threatens to swing back and reverse the chromatic organisation of the image entirely.

 
 

The same kind of alterity can be seen encoded in the lips of the face. Certainly they appear to correspond with racist figurations of African American physiognomy, and it is true that often Johnson’s work seems to flirt with essentialist understandings of Negro characteristics. Yet, as Powell points out, the lips gesture toward diverse traditions of African American expression, from Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, Bessie Smith’s blues singing, to Langston Hughes blues poetry, the political oratory of Marcus Garvey or the inspiration preaching of the black church (Powell, 1997a, 21). We should also note that formally the lips are balanced against the piano keys, anchoring the connection with modes of creative expression. Furthermore, the painting turns on the axis of the metronome between the lips, the piano keys and the palette suggesting that the key to the face lies in the delicate balance between these elements.
 

This idea of balance between different expressive forms is also useful for understanding the formal modes of painterly expression the image speaks to. On the one hand, this picture – and much of Johnson’s work – has been read as an example of folk art (Patton, 1998, 131-2). The naïve features, the lips, the references to music all suggest this. At the same time, however, the smooth abstraction of the piece, the juxtaposition of blocks of colour, fine lines, delicate tonal shifts and patterning all suggest a relationship to abstract expression and locate the painting as part of burgeoning black modernist experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s. Embracing each of these interpretations we might say that the picture stands as an example of primitivist modernism. One then faces the difficult question of how this is utilised by an African American painter (rather than a white modernist one) and that the formal simplicity of the painting is rather at odds with conventional understandings of primitivist engagements with racial features.
 

Sargent Johnson, Lenox Avenue
 

There is an absence in the painting of any obvious African element; indeed any primitivism in the piece seems to lie in its evocation of African American rather than African stereotype. However, there is one possible interpretation that interestingly frames the image within an emergent discourse of Negritude (and thus in line with Lois Mailou Jones’ painting of the same year, Les Fetiches). The outline of the head suggestively traces the contours of the African continent. If one then sees the solid block of colour at the mid-base of the image as mount then the face appears as an African mask (echoing Jones’ use of the mask in Les Fetiches) and one is also reminded of one of the more famous evocations of Africa from the Harlem Renaissance, ‘Africa? A book one thumbs/ Listlessly, till slumber comes’ (Cullen, 1925). Perhaps the best one can say is that the composition of the piece suggests the persistent transgression of distinctions such as modernist against folk art, popular and high culture, light and dark skin, Lenox against Seventh Avenue.
 
 

Lois Mailou Jones, The Ascent of Ethiopia

One sees another such example in Lois Mailou Jones’ 1932 painting, The Ascent of Ethiopia. The image at first glance seems the very antithesis of Johnson’s Lenox Avenue – it is highly coloured, with clearly African symbols and an apparently transparent allegorical meaning about the journey of African Americans from Egypt to the new world, and more particularly Harlem. The bold placement of the highly ornamented Egyptian head in the foreground and the ascent toward artistic excellence represented in the symbols of painting, theatre and music in the top left hand corner of the painting seem rather obvious – even tacky – especially in comparison to the restrained abstraction of Johnson’s work. However, such a reading would be to do the painting a real disservice. The painting forges what we might term (after Paul Gilroy) a populist modernism, framed within the context of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993a). Jones’ painting certainly allegorises the journey from Africa to Harlem, but her symbols for this journey – those African and African American – are presented in populist terms. So, the Egyptian head in the foreground is highly stylised, brooking no connection to an anthropologically accurate Africa. Similarly, the supplicant figures in the lower left hand corner suggest a culturally mediated image of the slave ancestor – they evoke the Sorrow Songs rather than any direct connection to African or early African American history. As one traces the ascension to the triumphal arts and skyscrapers on the hill, one is confronted with overdetermined images of artistic endeavour. Perhaps if this painting had been completed at the height of the New Negro Renaissance it would offer up a different meaning – as it is it seems very difficult to avoid seeing the piece as an ironic vision of Harlem aspirations.

 
 

Reading the painting as an ironic vision of aspirations failed would certainly be in line with Aaron Douglas’ 1934 mural Song of the Towers or his 1936 Aspiration but this doesn’t fully exhaust the work of the painting. In many ways the critique of ascent in the painting seems too obvious (particularly from a painter of Mailou Jones’ complexity). We should be alert to the compositional structure of the painting, which might suggest another view of the piece. From the top left hand radiating outwards the painting is organised as a series of concentric circles – with the arts arrayed on different spherical levels. We then see that this circular organisation extends to the placement of the Egyptian head and the ascending slave figures. This presents a clearly articulated sense of cyclical (Africanist) time and gives an alternative conception of ascent. As the title of the picture reminds us, the skyscraper heights of the picture are cyclically connected to the Egyptian beginnings embodied in the head; in fact given the scale of the picture one must attribute at least as much significance to the Egyptian references as to the city arts represented top right. Drawing on populist myths of Africa and Harlem Mailou Jones encodes an Africanist reading of African American progress, and claims the cyclical connection between Egypt and Harlem not to claim the triumph of New Negro Renaissancism but to suggest its ongoing processual nature.

 

If we turn to the literary field the work of Rudolph Fisher develops a critical cosmopolitanism – an urbane attitude which is formulated as the ideas of race pride, aesthetic excellence and civility meet the contradictory demands of a class-differentiated and multi-ethnic urban polis.
 

Negro Harlem’s three broad highways form the letter H, Lenox and Seventh Avenues running parallel northwards, united a little above their midpoints by east-and-west 135th Street … These two highways, frontiers of the opposed extreme of dark-skinned social life, are separated by an intermediate any-man’s land, across which they communicate chiefly by way of 135th Street. Accordingly 135th Street is the heart and soul of black Harlem; it is common ground, the natural scene of unusual contacts, a region that disregards class. It neutralises, equilibrates, binds, rescues union out of diversity (Fisher, 1927a, 183)

  
Distribution of the Negro Population of Harlem 1930.
Source: New York City Census
 

‘Blades of Steel’, which opened this essay, employs an oft-used trope in Rudolph Fisher’s work. It introduces a powerful representation of Harlem as geographical location and hierarchised social space. It is – as I’ve suggested – a heaven and hell dichotomy that structures much writing from and about Harlem. As Fisher traces the shape that is Harlem’s physical reality and signature he marks out the cultural and class dimensions of the race capital and marries social institutions, material location and social aspirations. This oppositional structuring of Harlem, however powerfully it is evoked, is not one we should accept and as I’ve been suggesting the work of many Harlem artists reveals consistent transgression of these two ‘opposed highways’. As 135th Street apparently ‘rescues union out of diversity’ so too should our understanding of Harlem respond to the complex patterning of this urban space as both race capital and ghetto.

 

‘Blades of Steel’ tells of a conflict over a woman between Dirty Cozzens and Eight-Ball, the first a vicious representative of Lenox Avenue’s worst tendencies and the second the everyman hero of 135th Street. Though the story of competitive love interest moves the plot along what is really debated in the story, as in so many Fisher pieces, are modes of urban behaviour and the relationships between Harlem’s inhabitants and the social institutions which make up the ‘H’. In ‘Blades of Steel’ success is exemplified by the ability to negotiate a divided racial space by recognising that community and, in Locke’s terms, ‘race spirit’ are constructed not simply through elite institutions such as the library or the college, nor through the actions of an artistically minded ‘talented tenth’, nor through a supposedly authentic street culture, but in the negotiations between and across these spheres. Fisher refuses a city polarised along genteel versus primitive lines. His urban aesthetic draws life-blood and inspiration from across the Lenox/Seventh Avenue divide, drawing together usually divided realms of popular and high-brow African American culture. In ‘Blades of Steel’ it is the barbershop that stands as the symbol for progressive urban culture, a ‘common ground’ that maintains a tradition of African American vernacular culture, as well as a commercially inflected race pride, ‘of, for, and in spite of the people.’ (Fisher, 1927a, 137)
 
The image of the barbershop (and its female equivalent the beauty parlour) finds an important place in Harlem’s visual culture, with many artists, including James VanDerZee, taking it as a subject. It stands as one of the stereotypical Harlem spaces, representative of an indigenous industry, a community site and a vernacular style (on the persistence of this see Kobena Mercer’s essay ‘Black Hair/Style Politics’ Mercer, 1994, 97-130).  
Barbers shop, Courtesy, New York Public Library
 

In ‘Blades of Steel’ this populist urbanity allows the transgression of usually divided spaces and modes of expression. The story commences in the symbolic space of interaction – the barbershop – but it moves quickly and flexibly across and in between the apparently divided realms of Seventh and Lenox. While Dirty Cozzens (the villain of the piece) is clearly a ‘rat’ and the ball to which the protagonists attend part of the dicty world, the location of Eight-Ball and the resourceful Effie are more open to question. As recognisably modern (New Negro) characters they refuse to accept the terms of the primitivist versus genteel debate, eschewing the violence of Lenox street culture yet still partaking of it to defeat Dirty Cozzens; clearly educated and aspirational yet able to participate in the expressive traditions of the blues.
 

The story finishes in an open-ended fashion with a repeated blues record playing on the phonograph – “Tessie” Smith’s ‘Lord Have Mercy Blues’. The blues refrain shades the story with tragedy and draws from black music an ambivalent reading of the urban scene: ‘Grief, affliction, woe, told in a tone of most heartbroken despair’ (Fisher, 1927a, 92). This use of the blues as an urban countertext is repeated to great effect in Fisher’s 1932 novel, The Conjure Man Dies.
 
 
Mailou Jones,
The Ascent of Ethiopia

The Conjure Man Dies stands as the literary correlate of the populist Africanist modernism one sees in the paintings of Aaron Douglas and Lois Mailou Jones – indeed its irreverent attitude to African myth and Harlem culture make it a companion piece to Mailou Jones’ painting of the same year. This antinomian modernism finds a potent symbol in the figure of Frimbo, the central character of Fisher’s text. The most exaggeratedly urbane of Rudolph Fisher’s city dwellers, Frimbo is African prince, conjure-man, psychoanalyst, quack doctor, philosopher, ladies man. He is also the primitive within the city and the outsider figure who can most perceptively read the dynamic urbanism that characterises his Harlem setting. He fulfils a clutch of paradigmatic urban figures all at once: being the flaneur, able to move in and out of his house and around the city all seeing but unseen; the intellectual, whose disinterested investigation into the social make-up of Negro Harlem has led him to understand both the nature of urbanism and racial being; the primitivist, whose African otherness is a thrilling and compelling draw to women; and the psychist, whose ability to predict the future is bound up with his ability to see the city as the future.

 

As Fisher explores the nature of African American urbanity, he discovers the multiple and dissonant voices that make up the spirited conversation about African American urbanism in the 1920s. That these voices are often outlandish and exotic does not render Fisher’s novel ‘primitivist’ in any straightforward way. Nor does his exploration of so-called white philosophical debates mark the novel as compromised by white influence, nor his embrace of the blues make it a folk text. Rather, Fisher understands that the ‘Bang Clash’ modernism of Harlem – to use Amiri Baraka’s evocative description – is made up by the cacophony of these voices as they seek to define the nature of urbanism and racial being for African Americans (Baraka, 1979, 101). In taking up the role as Harlem’s populist interpreter Fisher delineates a city of refuge that often fails as a material reality but is maintained as the future (space) of the race.
 

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