A young couple poses on West 127th Street in Harlem with their shiny new Cadillac. She is wearing a cloche hat and smiling slightly. He looks coolly from beneath the ample brim of a fedora. They both wear extravagant ankle-length raccoon coats.
James Van Der Zee’s 1932 photograph entitled “Couple” is one of 160 works of art spanning painting, sculpture, photography, film and ephemera in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opens on February 25 and runs through July 28.
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The exhibition is a comprehensive and long-awaited chronicle of how black artists interpreted and portrayed daily life in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1940s, during the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans entered segregated rural left south for a new life. York, Chicago and other cities.
It was the dawn of the Jazz Age with its flapper dress and Zoot suit aesthetic, and as Van Der Zee’s “Couple” makes clear, fashion was an integral element in communicating the prosperity and humanity of Black Americans and in counteracting decades years of racist depictions, from newspaper cartoons to minstrel shows and vaudeville theater.
“Fashion, the act of adornment, was central to this moment in American history in creating a new script for black people,” says Jessica Lynne, writer and art critic and host of The Met’s companion podcast “Harlem Is Everywhere” .
The dominant narrative in terms of visual images and cultural output, Lynne adds, held that black people were “submissive.”
“They were often depicted in clothing that was torn or clothing that indicated a certain class position or occupation, such as a servant or a sharecropper. So James Van Der Zee’s beautiful photo of this Harlem couple, dressed to the nines, is very much a presentation of dignity. And a lot of people weren’t used to thinking about black people that way,” she says.
“It is important to also say that black people of course knew that our dignity was inherent and inevitable and not something that could be earned. But reframing the gesture and presentation on a public stage, especially for non-Black people, is truly an assertion of dignity. And that was certainly a very radical position.”
Van Der Zee was the most successful portrait photographer working in Harlem at the time. The Upper Manhattan neighborhood was the center of black culture, and cosmopolitan city dwellers flocked to his Guarantee Photo Studio (which he founded with his wife Gaynella Greenlee) in their best clothes. His studio was filled with elaborate background equipment: lavish carpets and blankets, intricately carved balustrades and mantles. His studio, historian Bridget R Cooks says in the episode, became a “theater for self-representation.”
Van Der Zee also traveled to homes, schools and churches to record personal milestones, including baptisms and weddings. In all these encounters, clothing was an integral part of conveying prosperity, comfort and status.
Garments were also central to painters of the era, especially in the works of Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald J. Motley Jr., William H. Johnson, and Palmer Hayden.
In 1944, Wheeler Waring – who was adept at depicting the inner lives of her sitters – painted singer and civil rights activist Marian Anderson in a vibrant red off-the-shoulder dress with full sleeves and a train, her nails painted to match her dress to fit. , which accentuates the contemplative position of her hands.
In ‘Girl in a Pink Dress (c. 1927)’ the young nanny wears a fussy chiffon dress with a bouquet of pink and white flowers cascading over her left shoulder, and in ‘Girl With Pomegranate (c. 1940)’ the oversized The sitter’s white cut-out collar is placed atop a muted brown dress, as if to direct the viewer’s gaze to her face.
“There is a deep regard and respect for the individual,” says Lynne. “The immense depth of how seriously they took their sitters, regardless of their name, regardless of their position, that for me is the real gift here, that many people could regard themselves with such beauty and such seriousness, and that their lives could be captured in a way that was held up, unlike the other types of images that came in through other forms of media in their current era.
Of course, clothing was also used symbolically to highlight the continued inequality that pervaded the era. Hayden’s “The Dame From Harlem” (c. 1930) shows an older woman wearing a blue evening dress and pearls with white stockings and shoes, and sitting in her living room with her dog at her feet. But, as Cooks notes in the exhibition catalogue, “although she has adopted the posture of a successful woman and the traditional attributes of privilege and leisure, she remains bound by the Eurocentric constraints that affected her daily life, such as her gaudy, light-colored stockings, which were likely promoted to white consumers as “naturally flesh-colored” by manufacturers who at the time did not make the product in shades that would match the skin tones of black women.
These contradictions are explored in the “Fashion & Portraiture” episode of the five-episode podcast (available on any podcast streaming service), which features Cook and Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan in conversation with Lynne. The first two episodes will be released on February 20, followed by subsequent episodes focusing on ‘Art & Literature’ (March 5), ‘Music & Nightlife’ (March 12) and ‘On the Cusp of Civil Rights’ (March 19).
A significant portion of the exhibition’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are on loan from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art. The exhibition comes more than half a century after The Met’s controversial 1969 exhibition, ‘Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968,” which sparked protests over the preponderance of newspaper clippings and photographs of black leaders and prominent Harlem residents rather than the work of black artists. Since then, the Met has significantly expanded its holdings of works by black artists during the Harlem Renaissance, including paintings by Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles Alston. And in 2021, the museum established the James Van Der Zee Archive in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem.
“Now our public relationship with community and consumption is very different,” says Lynne.
The work created by black artists during the Harlem Renaissance era “experiences as images of death [of Black people] circulate. White communities send postcards of lynchings and mutilations [Black] bodies. And so the combination of these very tender, thoughtful representations and images provides a counterbalance. These works do not appear out of nowhere. They live in a constellation of discourse, of attitudes, of expectations. And when you take that into account, you really understand the intervention that these artists undertook.”
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