Douglas, Aaron

Source:

 African American National Biography

Douglas, Aaron

(26 May 1899–2 Feb. 1979),

artist and educator, was born in Topeka, Kansas, the son of Aaron Douglas Sr., a baker from Tennessee, and Elizabeth (maiden name unknown), an amateur artist from Alabama. Aaron had several brothers and sisters, but he was unique in his family in his singular drive to pursue higher education. He attended segregated elementary schools and then an integrated high school. Topeka had a strong and progressive black community, and Aaron was fortunate to grow up in a city where education and social uplift were stressed through organizations such as the Black Topeka Foundation. He was an avid reader and immersed himself in the great writers, including Dumas, Shakespeare, and Emerson. His parents were able to feed and clothe him but could offer him no other help with higher education. When he needed money to pursue a college degree, he traveled via rail to Detroit, where he worked as a laborer in several jobs, including building automobiles. It was hard work, but it increased his desire to attend college.

Upon his return to Topeka, Douglas decided to attend the University of Nebraska and arrived ten days into the term with no transcripts in hand. This was the first in a series of steps he made to educate himself and improve his artistic skills. The chairman of Nebraska's art department realized Douglas's potential and agreed to accept him on the condition that his transcripts would follow. At Nebraska, Douglas discovered the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and found inspiration in them. By 1921 he was a constant reader of Crisis magazine, and later, Opportunity, and he began to seriously consider the nation's racial situation. Douglas graduated from Nebraska with a BFA in 1922 and accepted a teaching position at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was one of only two black faculty members. In 1925, after seeing a special issue of Survey Graphic magazine, which focused on Harlem and featured a portrait of the black actor Roland Hayes on its cover, Douglas decided to quit his job and pursue his dream of working as a full-time artist. Hoping for wider artistic opportunities and contact with a larger black community, Douglas moved to Harlem in 1925. While he was full of dreams, Douglas had very few connections in New York.

Only days after his arrival, the Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois hired him to work in the magazine's mail room and to help illustrate the magazine. Du Bois, who had been editing Crisis for fourteen years, was struggling against the competition, Opportunity magazine, published by the National Urban League. Needing a stronger visual message, Du Bois turned to Douglas, commissioning bold covers, prints, and drawings to accompany essays, stories, and editorials expressing Du Bois's vision of what African Americans should know about the world around them, and what causes they should support. In 1927 Douglas was made art director at Crisis. When Douglas had started work at Crisis, he had also been hired by James Weldon Johnson to illustrate for Opportunity magazine. Douglas soon found himself in the unique, and pleasant, position of having two major publications vying for his talents. Through his Crisis connections, Douglas met the Bavarian artist Winold Reiss, who offered him a scholarship to study with him in his New York atelier, where Douglas immersed himself in the study of black life. Douglas was soon noticed by other patrons, and he quickly became one of the most sought-after illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance, receiving commissions to illustrate magazines and book covers as well as to execute a number of private commissions and public murals.

Aaron Douglas's Song of the Towers, 1934. It is the fourth panel in the Aspects of Negro Life mural series by the painter and graphic artist. (Schomburg Center.)

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From his earliest Harlem paintings and prints, Douglas developed a strong commitment to establishing an African American identity tied to an African past, a history and identification encouraged by both Du Bois and Alain Locke. Douglas was drawn to African art even while he knew very little about it. As one of the key visual spokesmen for what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas used the art of the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Egypt to establish a firm connection between African Americans and African culture. As he wrote to his future wife, Alta Sawyer, in 1925:

"We are possessed, you know, with the idea that it is necessary to be white, to be beautiful. Nine times out of ten it is just the reverse. It takes lots of training or a tremendous effort to down the idea that thin lips and a straight nose is the apogee of beauty. But once free you can look back with a sigh of relief and wonder how anyone could be so deluded. (Kirschke, 61)"

Douglas married Alta in 1926. Over the years the couple's Harlem home became a central meeting place for the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Meanwhile, Douglas's illustrations, full of race pride and African heritage, had wide distribution and were seen across the country, in libraries, schools, social clubs, beauty parlors, and homes. He also provided artwork for other magazines, including Theatre Arts Monthly, as well as for numerous books. Douglas produced covers and interior illustrations for some of the Harlem Renaissance's most significant literary achievements, including Alain Locke's New Negro, Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry, Paul Morand's Black Magic, James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones, Countée Cullen's Caroling Dusk, and Claude McKay's Banjo, and several works by Langston Hughes. Douglas was moved by the artistic milieu in which he worked, especially the literature of the time, written by his friends, which, along with his own work, described black life. Douglas's work articulated the black experience in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, including the tremendous output of visual arts and music, and the effects of discrimination and the Depression. Douglas offered a unique visual style, which combined elements of American and European modernism, including cubism, orphism, precisionism, and art deco patterning, with a strong Pan-Africanist vision. His linoleum cuts, pen and ink drawings, oils, gouaches, and frescos forged a distinct combination of modernist elements.

In 1928 Douglas and Gwendolyn Bennett became the first African American artists to receive a fellowship to study at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Douglas's one-year fellowship was followed, in 1931, by a year of study in Paris at the Academie Scandinave, where he met the African American painters Henry Ossawa Tanner and Palmer Hayden.

In addition to his work as an illustrator, Douglas was a painter, particularly of portraits. He was interested in murals and received several mural commissions, including a mural at the Harlem branch of the YMCA, the College Inn in Chicago, and Bennett College in South Carolina. His most innovative project—created for Cravath Hall Library at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930—was a massive cycle of murals celebrating philosophy, drama, music, poetry, and science, as well as African and African American culture. Restoration of these murals in 2003 revealed orphist-like geometric circles and abstract papyrus-topped columns, as well as four murals that had been covered for decades. One mural depicts Africans left behind as their family members and friends are taken away, never to be seen again. The mural cycle chronicles the history of blacks from Africa and slavery, to their triumphant release from servitude through education. Ambitious in its Pan-Africanist vision the mural includes elements drawn from Egypt, West Africa, and the Congo. In the 1960s Douglas entirely repainted the Fisk murals with a much brighter, bolder palette. In 1934 Douglas completed Aspects of Negro Life, four large mural panels sponsored by the WPA for the Countée Cullen Library at 135th Street (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Like the Fisk murals, these panels illustrate life in Africa before enslavement, through the years of slavery, emancipation, and into the African American present. Douglas offered hope even in the Depression, through creativity, music, and culture.

The Fisk mural commission led to Douglas's return to the university in 1937, where he established the university's first art department, remaining as chair of the department for over thirty years, until his retirement in 1966. In 1944, after years of part-time graduate work, he earned his MA from Columbia University Teacher's College. He taught and worked as an artist well into his seventies and considered his work as an educator at Fisk to be his greatest accomplishment. Douglas, whose work influenced countless artists with its unique vision of African American identity linked to a Pan-Africanist vision, died in Nashville in 1979.

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