Alain Locke’s claim to immortality rightly rests on his epochal 1925 anthology, “The New Negro” and midwifing the first generation of Harlem Renaissance writers. But Locke was a polymath, and his thumbprint was all over African American cultural productions of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Locke was also gay, short, effeminate and politically astute enough to avoid getting blown up by a sexual orientation he couldn’t change and refused to bury.
Besides literature, Locke’s contribution to the theorization of a Black visual aesthetic was seminal. He wrested an early interpretation of African art from the crazy and controlling Albert Barnes; he was an avid advocate for the visual arts, championing the work of Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthé, and Jacob Lawrence. He frequently contributed essays to exhibition catalogs and, in 1927, he organized a landmark exhibition of African art from the Blondiau-Theatre Arts collection.
When the Harmon Foundation stumbled into its role as the principal early promoter of African American art, its white lesbian director, Mary Beattie Brady, turned to Locke to organize its two important shows of 1931 and 1933. No one in the Harmon Foundation had any formal art or art history background. The criterion of evaluation was based on race, not aesthetic excellence. (In a 1934 essay, a young Romare Bearden excoriated the Foundation on this point.) Nonetheless, Locke made sure that every important African American artist of the period was represented in the shows.
In his contribution to the catalogs, Locke argued for the development of an art that consciously connected to African art and that focused on Black representation. (Miss Brady didn’t like that idea at all.) What was revolutionary about Locke’s position was that he championed the beauty of the Black body against the grain of an American tradition which either rated the Black body as beneath the consideration of Fine Art or as suitable only for caricature. (There were exceptions, such as Henry O. Tanner’s “The Banjo Lesson,” but they were rare.)
Hard to believe that the Black face and body were considered “ugly” by mainstream America, but such was the case. And, of course, at that time, what white America believed was largely adopted by the aspiring African American “Talented Tenth” elites. But because Locke was gay and a race man, he loved the Black body, especially the male Black body. Fortunately, he had a Western art historical tradition through which he could “redeem” that Black body – the male nude.
Enter Richmond Barthé, also gay, also enamored of the Black body. Prior to Barhé’s work in the 30s and 40s, depictions of African American nudes were considered beyond the Pale. Barthé broke that taboo again and again, and the results were so striking and self-evidently “artistic” that a space was made for the representation of the Black as a figure of beauty and dignity (and also of homoerotic desire, but we don’t talk about that). If Richmond Barthé hadn’t appeared on the Harlem Renaissance scene in 1929, Alain Locke would have had to invent him.
All well and good. The Queer Harlem Renaissance in the visual arts gets its due – or does it? None of this condensed history is hard to uncover. Jeffrey C. Stewart lays it all out in his magisterial biography of Locke, “The New Negro” (2018). Isaac Julien created a five-screen installation for the Barnes Foundation, “Once Again …. (Statues Never Die” (2022), that really rams the point home. That same year, Kobena Mercer published a whole book, “Alain Locke and the Visual Arts.”
Part of Shoga Films’ mission is to educate and spread awareness about the Queer Harlem Renaissance. As far as the literature of the movement is concerned, that battle has been won. (Look for a “Langston Countee Wallace Richard Bruce” shirt near you!) That’s not so much the case with the queer contributions of Alain Locke, Richmond Barthé, and Richard Bruce Nugent to the African American visual arts. I’ll look for a mention of it when I visit the New York Met’s exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” later this month, but I’m not optimistic.
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