Genealogies of continuity and disruption frequently shape the terms of the art-historical debate when discussing the gestures and insurgencies of form encapsulated in the term “modernist.” Narratives of rupture have often signaled a double bind for African American art. As a field, its existence arguably suggests the need for a paradigm shift in the teleology of Western art history. Yet the terms of this debate can often, albeit unintentionally, foreground social relevance to the detriment of artistic influence. Black artists become the supplement to, rather than catalysts of, artistic change. Their modernity is almost a byproduct: a result of these space-making gestures of “insertion” rather than an assertion of their own creative impulse.

Two recent volumes reroute this trajectory, and suggest alternative positions. Not only do their titles reveal their intent – Romare Bearden: American Modernist and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist – but the renewed attention they bring to both Bearden and Motley reframes their relevance as artists whose formal experimentation and innovation are truly consequential to the development of art history – American or otherwise. Archibald Motley (1891–1981), born in New Orleans but raised in Chicago and classically trained at the Art Institute, drew on old-master techniques of painting to observe new vernacular modes of being modern. Romare Bearden (1911–88), trained by artists such as George Grosz, grew up in the cultural milieu of New York's Harlem Renaissance. He powerfully expressed his innovation through a collage aesthetic rendered most often in mixed-media paintings and potent photomontages. Despite their different techniques, their formal experimentations connect them in important ways. Each artist employed strategies that amplified a cubist and expressionist rhythm, innovative use of color, patterned motifs and a musical stylization, whilst centralizing black subjects in their paintings.

Examining these books together allows interesting parallels to emerge in the ways the authors use the term “modernist” as a lens through which to approach the aesthetic, professional and social contexts of these artists. Edited by Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis, Romare Bearden consists of fourteen essays that were presented at a symposium of the same name organized by the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts (CASVA) in 2003. The symposium coincided with the Washington, DC showing of The Art of Romare Bearden, a traveling exhibition organized by the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist is a shorter book (five essays rather than fourteen), published to accompany the traveling exhibition, curated by Richard J. Powell, that opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2014 and closed in fall 2015 at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. In the catalogue, also edited by Powell, the chapters map out Motley's aesthetic innovations in conjunction with the changing terrain of his location. The essays represent the most in-depth and up-to-date accumulation of work done on the artist in recent times, providing a constellation of perspectives that take as their starting point the ways Motley “visualized black modern subjectivity.”Footnote ¹

In her opening essay, Amy Mooney explores the psychological dimensions of Motley's portraits, showing how he synthesizes the color and brushwork of old-master painting with a modern subject: the “new negro woman.”Footnote ² In this fusion, Mooney argues for a new conception of portraiture as a site of empathy. Motley's portraits of multi-shaded (often nameless) female protagonists incorporate a dynamic mode of identification. As the women look back at us, we might also read Motley looking back at both viewer and subject, revealing his artistic prowess and his ability to identify with his subjects. His portraits of women remind us at once of our own subjectivity, and that our subjectivity is informed by interdependence on the “other.” Here Mooney underscores an important point, namely that Motley's portraits stage the formation of identity as performance. In this sense they exude a modernist sensibility not just in terms of their jazz age stylization, but also in their psychological uncovering. Foregrounding the ways that reading others is a relationship based on power and privilege, Motley's portraits inform us of how we consciously know ourselves through others.

No doubt this awareness came to Motley himself, as he strolled through the streets of Chicago's Bronzeville, or the nightclubs of 1920s Paris. Between the sitters and the artist a connection may have developed: some of the women are friends or lovers or family members. Motley's urban scenes, however, depict a community from which he was removed, as a middle-class man in an interracial marriage, and one who lived in a predominantly white ethnic neighborhood. In these scenes the radical blues aesthetic he developed fused avant-garde techniques, expressionist color and the stylizations of the African American, and Afro-diasporic, cultures that Motley observed in Chicago and Paris. Davarian L. Baldwin examines these urban paintings in the context of the burgeoning black neighborhoods of Chicago's Bronzeville, and thoroughfares such as “the Stroll,” a commercial and amusement district centered on Thirty-Fifth and State (and later Forty-Seventh and South Parkway).Footnote ³ In paintings including Bronzeville at Night, Black Belt (1934) and Street Scene, Chicago (1936), Baldwin shows how these spaces became “a public showcase for black expressive behavior”Footnote ⁴ that reflected the personal and communal desires of black Chicagoans for a different kind of world, away from the sting of racism.Footnote ⁵ Remarkably, then, what Motley observed was how this growing black community was reshaping the modernity of Chicago itself. Oliver Meslay's essay “Motley's Paris: Missed Opportunities” takes us through the artist's days in Paris in 1929–30. The opportunities missed are those that might have given him connections with a glittering avant-garde circle. But more important to this reader was Motley's engagement with the pan-African community in Paris. What must it have been like for this African American man, a self-identified “Creole,” to find himself amongst a community where constructions of blackness had other markers of meaning beyond the American context?Footnote ⁶ His time in Paris should be further researched, for it can expand our understanding of the connections and interactions between black modern subjects across the Atlantic. Fascinatingly Motley also sought to hone his techniques by visiting the “old masters” at the Louvre, reinforcing his academic training. As an observer in Paris or Chicago, his paintings reveal another kind of urban modernity, new for their time. They sketch out the modernity of their black subjects, devoid of exoticism, yet wholly dynamic in their unconventional traditionalism.

All of this is to say, of course, that despite Motley's “beliefs in the academy ideals,”Footnote ⁷ his work is far from traditional. At a time when the “negro was in vogue,”Footnote ⁸ Motley's black subjects are given a psychological grounding. As Richard J. Powell shows in his essay, in departing from a realist mandate Motley was interested in cadences, rhythms and affects that became bold spheres of interlocking shapes, colors and movement. These aesthetic directions came from the jazz riffs, the dance moves, the vernacular speech and the choreography he saw in the black communities around him. What we come to see is that part of Motley's crucial aesthetic innovations lay in his understanding of black Americans as modern subjects, and his ability to portray that seriously, originally and thoughtfully.

Powell deepens his reading of Motley's work by connecting his interest in the “vernacular transgressive”Footnote ⁹ and the folkways of working-class black and rural Mexican communities to similar enterprises by anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston. There are moments, however, when these paintings make us pause, when a scene such as that depicted in The Argument (1940) avails itself of the caricatured black bodies common in mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Powell argues, however, that Motley's work is energized, rather than doomed, by these scenarios. They “advance … towards a broader concordance of representation,”Footnote ¹⁰ and make space for more nuanced comprehensions of black working-class culture that mirror similar enterprises in music and literature of the time. Perhaps, too, they also shed light on the class stratification of black communities that defined the modern experience, something also hinted at in Baldwin's essay. More discussion of this dynamic is needed, particularly as we find similar satirical expressions in the work of more recent artists such as Robert Colescott or Kara Walker. But what Motley also bequeathed to subsequent generations – including artists such as Romare Bearden – was a way of superimposing modern life onto the canvas. As Powell points out, artists like Bearden and their “subsequent paradigm-shifting statements in African American art … would not have been imaginable without Motley's inroads decades earlier.”Footnote ¹¹

The essays in Romare Bearden take a more prismatic approach to the artist's modernist sensibilities. Centralizing the term “American modernist,” the chapters address its varied meanings in relation to European and American modern-art movements, pre- and post-World War II culture, and the long arc of the civil rights movement. Darby English's opening essay for Romare Bearden revisits Ralph Ellison's 1964 essay “The Art of Romare Bearden.” Ellison's piece was written to accompany a small exhibition entitled Romare Bearden: Paintings and Projections at the State University of New York at Albany, and focusses on his black-and-white photostats and subsequent collages. English highlights Ellison's and Bearden's challenge to the anti-integration tendencies of the black arts movement, to rethink the separate spheres of existence in which African American artists continue to move today. English also returns us to the radical processes of Bearden's collage aesthetic, in which black people are often the subject but in which blackness does not become a category of separation. He asserts that in Bearden's refracted visions and dynamic plasticity we come to see the mutuality of existence, the ways “identity is made and unmade in a kind of constant, collaborative project among people and our perception of one another.”Footnote ¹² For English, Bearden's artistic production reflects the condition of subject formation, and in depicting these processes Bearden's black subjects express the fragmented experiences of modern selfhood in America.

Explicating this further, other authors in this section revisit key moments in Bearden's engagement with jazz, poetry and performance. Rocío Aranda-Alvarado's essay stands out in its discussion of the international contexts of Bearden's work. The chapter examines Bearden's post-World War II engagement with the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and its connections to the cubist painter Carlos Enriquez. Tracing these transnational connections, Aranda-Alvarado argues that we can see in each of these artists’ work the creation of an “accessible modernism” that incorporated heroic forms of expression with the struggles of everyday life.Footnote ¹³ In the section on “Training and Professionalism,” Ruth Fine incorporates the contradictions of biography, the affection of memory and the clarity of technical prowess to examine Bearden's development as an artist across mediums. Here too, Bridget R. Cooks explores the ways Bearden navigated the dichotomous cultural spheres of exhibition spaces that showed specifically white or black artists. Richard J. Powell's essay uses a specific work, The Woodshed (1969), a collage of cloth, photostats, paper, ink and pencil, to evoke the accumulative nature of Bearden's work. This piece, Powell writes, is “open-ended, forming a unified yet heterogeneous picture of mid-century modernity that was attainable only by means of his recognition of contemporary life's aggregate, multisensory environment.”Footnote ¹⁴

The two other sections of the book, “Iconic Investigations” and “The Question of the Avant-Garde,” also evoke this expressive way of describing Bearden's work that seamlessly incorporates aesthetics and politics. Here we find new readings of Bearden's iconography (“Bearden's Hands”) that move us to reconsider Bearden's explorations of memory and biography.Footnote ¹⁵ There are also new approaches to his religious motifs in the context of abstraction (Kymberly N. Pinder's essay “Deep Waters: Rebirth, Transcendence and Abstraction in Romare Bearden's Passion of Christ”) and extended discussions of his involvement in broader artistic and political movements from the 1930s onwards (Amy Helene Kirschke's “Bearden in the Crisis: Illustrating Identity and Political Action” and Pepe Karmel's “The Negro Artists's Dilemma: Bearden, Picasso, and Pop Art”). Both of the books under review are also about legacies, and David C. Driskell, in both volumes, writes of the influence and mentorship that Motley and Bearden provided for artists who followed. In this regard Patricia Hills's essay “Cultural Legacies and the Transformation of the Cubist Collage Aesthetic by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Other Afro-American Artists,” is particularly significant, and a good place to conclude. Here she explores the syncretic process of Bearden's collage aesthetic and its dialogic relationship with European, American and African art-making. She highlights Bearden's “adaptive creativity,” and how he, like Motley, made use of both formal avant-garde traditions and the everyday life he witnessed around him. These improvisational fusions – paradigm-shifting forms – continue to serve artists of the black diaspora as they explore the “aesthetic choices of their immediate communities in specific places.”Footnote ¹⁶

As Darby English points out, centralizing aesthetics is crucial for any discussion of the term “modernist,” a term that in art history indicates an attention to questions of form, above questions of content.Footnote ¹⁷ In these two volumes, using the term “modernist” is a bilateral maneuver. It allows authors and readers to locate, and reinsert, these artists within a particular art-historical chronology. Simultaneously it signals an important shift, and a challenge, to forge interpretations of African American art that take its aesthetic language as seriously as its social context. The authors of these essays model the scholarly directions they look forward to. In the process they offer us a richer account of these innovative artists whose work made profound contributions to the conventions and histories of modernism.