Harlem, as Locke wrote in The New Negro,
is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another.
The thoughtful design of the Met’s exhibition seems intended both to emphasize and parallel that great variety, making the diversity of artistic styles apparent not only as viewers move from room to room, but as they shift their attention from one work to the next. While paintings are sometimes grouped by artist, they are more often assembled according to theme. A result is that the work of different artists—prominent among them Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald Motley, William H. Johnson, Aaron Douglas, and James Van Der Zee—is threaded through the exhibition, like multipart harmony through a song.
The first works we encounter are portraits of the movement’s thinkers—Locke, Hurston, Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson—painted by different artists. The German-born Winold Reiss’s respective portraits of Hughes and Locke have in common each man’s faraway expression. They differ in their backgrounds and the rendering of the men’s bodies. Each man, in a jacket and tie, is shown seated, roughly from the waist up. But while Hughes’s dark jacket is painted realistically, Locke’s white suit has so little shading that it almost resembles a line drawing, from which his head and left hand emerge in seeming three-dimensionality. It’s as if Locke himself were asserting his complexity against efforts to deny his full humanity. (Another of Reiss’s portraits, of the writer and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, achieves a similar effect later on in the show.) In Locke’s portrait, the background is completely white, while Hughes’s is surrounded by images of buildings, bedrooms, and blue-and-white musical notes. Together, they might represent the thoughts of this poet and celebrator of Black city life and music.