Alternate titles: Archibald John Motley, Jr. Naomi Blumberg was Assistant Editor, Arts and Culture for Encyclopaedia Britannica. The naked woman in the painting is seated at a vanity, looking into a mirror and, instead of regarding her own image, she returns our gaze. The figures are more suggestive of black urban types, Richard Powell, curator of the Nasher exhibit, has said, than substantive portrayals of real black men. The mood in this painting, as well as in similar ones such asThe PlottersandCard Players, was praised by one of Motleys contemporaries, the critic Alain Locke, for its Rabelaisian turn and its humor and swashbuckle.. His mother was a school teacher until she married. By displaying a balance between specificity and generalization, he allows "the viewer to identify with the figures and the places of the artist's compositions."[19]. [19], Like many of his other works, Motley's cross-section of Bronzeville lacks a central narrative. But because his subject was African-American life, hes counted by scholars among the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He understood that he had certain educational and socioeconomic privileges, and thus, he made it his goal to use these advantages to uplift the black community. Portraits and Archetypes is the title of the first gallery in the Nasher exhibit, and its where the artists mature self-portrait hangs, along with portraits of his mother, an uncle, his wife, and five other women. I just stood there and held the newspaper down and looked at him. While in Mexico on one of those visits, Archibald eventually returned to making art, and he created several paintings inspired by the Mexican people and landscape, such as Jose with Serape and Another Mexican Baby (both 1953). The center of this vast stretch of nightlife was State Street, between Twenty-sixth and Forty-seventh. The Octoroon Girl was meant to be a symbol of social, racial, and economic progress. The family remained in New Orleans until 1894 when they moved to Chicago, where his father took a job as a Pullman car porter. However, there was an evident artistic shift that occurred particularly in the 1930s. He is best known for his vibrant, colorful paintings that depicted the African American experience in the United States, particularly in the urban areas of Chicago and New York City. Motley's family lived in a quiet neighborhood on Chicago's south side in an environment that was racially tolerant. Above the roof, bare tree branches rake across a lead-gray sky. He was born in New Orleans in 1891 and three years later moved with his family to. He studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months. Thus, this portrait speaks to the social implications of racial identity by distinguishing the "mulatto" from the upper echelons of black society that was reserved for "octoroons. He goes on to say that especially for an artist, it shouldn't matter what color of skin someone haseveryone is equal. Motley is fashionably dressed in a herringbone overcoat and a fedora, has a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and looks off at an angle, studying some distant object, perhaps, that has caught his attention. Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr., never lived in Harlem. ", Oil on Canvas - Collection of Mara Motley, MD and Valerie Gerrard Brown. The owner was colored. With all of the talk of the "New Negro" and the role of African American artists, there was no set visual vocabulary for black artists portraying black life, and many artists like Motley sometimes relied on familiar, readable tropes that would be recognizable to larger audiences. Timeline of Archibald Motley's life, both personal and professional She is portrayed as elegant, but a sharpness and tenseness are evident in her facial expression. [2] Motley understood the power of the individual, and the ways in which portraits could embody a sort of palpable machine that could break this homogeneity. Motley was ultimately aiming to portray the troubled and convoluted nature of the "tragic mulatto. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across Americaits local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Motley died in Chicago on January 16, 1981. Joseph N. Eisendrath Award from the Art Ins*ute of Chicago for the painting "Syncopation" (1925). His saturated colors, emphasis on flatness, and engagement with both natural and artificial light reinforce his subject of the modern urban milieu and its denizens, many of them newly arrived from Southern cities as part of the Great Migration. For white audiences he hoped to bring an end to Black stereotypes and racism by displaying the beauty and achievements of African Americans. We're all human beings. Then he got so nasty, he began to curse me out and call me all kinds of names using very degrading language. After his death scholarly interest in his life and work revived; in 2014 he was the subject of a large-scale traveling retrospective, Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, originating at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Behind the bus, a man throws his arms up ecstatically. Motley died in 1981, and ten years later, his work was celebrated in the traveling exhibition The Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr. organized by the Chicago Historical Society and accompanied by a catalogue. After he completed it he put his brush aside and did not paint anymore, mostly due to old age and ill health. [10] He was able to expose a part of the Black community that was often not seen by whites, and thus, through aesthetics, broaden the scope of the authentic Black experience. These figures were often depicted standing very close together, if not touching or overlapping one another. In 1924 Motley married Edith Granzo, a white woman he had dated in secret during high school. [5], Motley spent the majority of his life in Chicago, where he was a contemporary of fellow Chicago artists Eldzier Cortor and Gus Nall. During this time, Alain Locke coined the idea of the "New Negro," which was very focused on creating progressive and uplifting images of Blacks within society. ", "I think that every picture should tell a story and if it doesn't tell a story then it's not a picture. Archibald John Motley, Jr. (October 7, 1891 - January 16, 1981), was an American visual artist. ", Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Oil on Canvas, For most people, Blues is an iconic Harlem Renaissance painting; though, Motley never lived in Harlem, and it in fact dates from his Paris days and is thus of a Parisian nightclub. Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr., never lived in Harlem. Regardless of these complexities and contradictions, Motley is a significant 20th-century artist whose sensitive and elegant portraits and pulsating, syncopated genre scenes of nightclubs, backrooms, barbecues, and city streets endeavored to get to the heart of black life in America. 2023 The Art Story Foundation. Upon Motley's return from Paris in 1930, he began teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and working for the Federal Arts Project (part of the New Deal's Works Projects Administration). Despite his decades of success, he had not sold many works to private collectors and was not part of a commercial gallery, necessitating his taking a job as a shower curtain painter at Styletone to make ends meet. Archibald . He did not, according to his journal, pal around with other artists except for the sculptor Ben Greenstein, with whom he struck up a friendship. This piece portrays young, sophisticate city dwellers out on the town. Critic Steve Moyer writes, "[Emily] appears to be mending [the] past and living with it as she ages, her inner calm rising to the surface," and art critic Ariella Budick sees her as "[recapitulating] both the trajectory of her people and the multilayered fretwork of art history itself." Motley spent the majority of his life in Chicago, where he was a contemporary of fellow Chicago artists Eldzier Cortor and Gus Nall. Motley's colors and figurative rhythms inspired modernist peers like Stuart Davis and Jacob Lawrence, as well as mid-century Pop artists looking to similarly make their forms move insouciantly on the canvas. During his time at the Art Institute, Motley was mentored by painters Earl Beuhr and John W. Norton, and he did well enough to cause his father's friend to pay his tuition. Motley married his high school sweetheart Edith Granzo in 1924, whose German immigrant parents were opposed to their interracial relationship and disowned her for her marriage.[1]. His night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture, are perhaps his most popular and most prolific. The excitement in the painting is palpable: one can observe a woman in a white dress throwing her hands up to the sound of the music, a couple embracinghand in handin the back of the cabaret, the lively pianist watching the dancers. After brief stays in St. Louis and Buffalo, the Motleys settled into the new housing being built around the train station in Englewood on the South Side of Chicago. In 1917, while still a student, Motley showed his work in the exhibition Paintings by Negro Artists held at a Chicago YMCA. And, significantly for Motley it is black urban life that he engages with; his reveling subjects have the freedom, money, and lust for life that their forbearers found more difficult to access. She covered topics related to art history, architecture, theatre, dance, literature, and music. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, the first retrospective of the American artist's paintings in two decades, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University on January 30, 2014. Many of Motleys favorite scenes were inspired by good times on The Stroll, a portion of State Street, which during the twenties, theEncyclopedia of Chicagosays, was jammed with black humanity night and day. It was part of the neighborhood then known as Bronzeville, a name inspired by the range of skin color one might see there, which, judging from Motleys paintings, stretched from high yellow to the darkest ebony. Oral History Interview with Archibald Motley, Oral history interview with Archibald Motley, 1978 Jan. 23-1979 Mar. "Black Awakening: Gender and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance." By breaking from the conceptualized structure of westernized portraiture, he began to depict what was essentially a reflection of an authentic black community. While this gave the subject more personality and depth, it can also be said the Motley played into the stereotype that black women are angry and vindictive. By doing this, he hoped to counteract perceptions of segregation. He sold 22 out of the 26 exhibited paintings. The mood is contemplative, still; it is almost like one could hear the sound of a clock ticking. Motley's first major exhibition was in 1928 at the New Gallery; he was the first African American to have a solo exhibition in New York City. Motley himself was light skinned and of mixed racial makeup, being African, Native American and European. When he was a year old, he moved to Chicago with his parents, where he would live until his death nearly 90 years later. Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email. He studied painting at the School of the Art Ins*ute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. . Motley's presentation of the woman not only fulfilled his desire to celebrate accomplished blacks but also created an aesthetic role model to which those who desired an elite status might look up to. [6] He was offered a scholarship to study architecture by one of his father's friends, which he turned down in order to study art. I walked back there. Another man in the center and a woman towards the upper right corner also sit isolated and calm in the midst of the commotion of the club. [17] It is important to note, however, that it was not his community he was representinghe was among the affluent and elite black community of Chicago. They act differently; they don't act like Americans.". Her family promptly disowned her, and the interracial couple often experienced racism and discrimination in public. Motley's grandmother was born into slavery, and freed at the end of the Civil Warabout sixty years before this painting was made. He would expose these different "negro types" as a way to counter the fallacy of labeling all Black people as a generalized people. Archibald Motley captured the complexities of black, urban America in his colorful street scenes and portraits. It was an expensive education; a family friend helped pay for Motley's first year, and Motley dusted statues in the museum to meet the costs. An idealist, he was influenced by the writings of black reformer and sociologist W.E.B. Born October 7, 1891, at New Orleans, Louisiana. He requests that white viewers look beyond the genetic indicators of her race and see only the way she acts nowdistinguished, poised and with dignity. He graduated from Englewood High School in Chicago. [2] After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1918, he decided that he would focus his art on black subjects and themes, ultimately as an effort to relieve racial tensions. Motley was inspired, in part, to paint Nightlife after having seen Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942.51), which had entered the Art Institute's collection the prior year. He is a heavyset man, his face turned down and set in an unreadable expression, his hands shoved into his pockets. The background consists of a street intersection and several buildings, jazzily labeled as an inn, a drugstore, and a hotel. They are thoughtful and subtle, a far cry from the way Jim Crow America often - or mostly - depicted its black citizens. He used distinctions in skin color and physical features to give meaning to each shade of African American. Corrections? Archibald Motley was a master colorist and radical interpreter of urban culture. Free shipping. While Paris was a popular spot for American expatriates, Motley was not particularly social and did not engage in the art world circles. The preacher here is a racial caricature with his bulging eyes and inflated red lips, his gestures larger-than-life as he looms above the crowd on his box labeled "Jesus Saves." The whole scene is cast in shades of deep indigo, with highlights of red in the women's dresses and shoes, fluorescent white in the lamp, muted gold in the instruments, and the softly lit bronze of an arm or upturned face. [7] He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,[6] where he received classical training, but his modernist-realist works were out of step with the school's then-conservative bent. Free shipping. He lived in a predominantly-white neighborhood, and attended majority-white primary and secondary schools. In the midst of this heightened racial tension, Motley was very aware of the clear boundaries and consequences that came along with race. Recipient Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue . Archibald J. Motley, Jr's 1943 Nightlife is one of the various artworks that is on display in the American Art, 1900-1950 gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. Though Motley could often be ambiguous, his interest in the spectrum of black life, with its highs and lows, horrors and joys, was influential to artists such as Kara Walker, Robert Colescott, and Faith Ringgold. Updates? Archibald Motley (1891-1981) was born in New Orleans and lived and painted in Chicago most of his life. 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