Why did Negro Renaissance painters Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden, artists who sought to complicate and transform visual articulations of black Americans, create figures that recall racial caricatures? Art criticism of the period, examinations of racial stereotype, examples of humor and stereotype in Western art, and statements by the artists furnish the context in which they made their aesthetic choices. An analysis of key works reveals that their formal devices were considerably more complex and layered than often assumed. Nonetheless, their work demonstrates the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of constructing a completely “New” Negro detached from popular tropes of blackness.
© 2001-2024 Fundación Dialnet · Todos los derechos reservados