The Negro Artist and Modern Art

Bearden, Romare. "The Negro Artist and Modern Art." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 138-41. Print.

Bearden hits the nail on the head in this little essay. He all but says that the blacks in the Renaissance that are creating art are not representative of their race, and he suggests (a bit timidly) that the art that is being produced is merely a shallow reflection of what white people expect to see. Although he isn’t as scathing as other writers have been, as well as myself, he manages to get the same message across without the hostility. The message he is conveying comes back to the idea that the people we remember from the Harlem Renaissance were merely white-ified blacks that in no way represented black culture as a whole. This may be an extreme position, for surely they represented some aspects of black society, but isn’t far from the mark.

The lack of depth that Bearden speaks of is apparent not just in artists of the Renaissance that he speaks of, but in artists in general. Today it is easy for any nobody to grab a laptop and begin writing, only to produce a horrible novel that, because it is watered down and generic, gets published. The Twilight books are a perfect example of this: the writer, Stephanie Meyer, has absolutely no advanced composition skills, nor can she weave a coherent story. Yet she is famous and rich for her books. Generic dime-a-dozen bands release albums that no one will remember in five years, while paintings and artwork are splayed across the internet so thickly it is difficult to retrieve any of the worth from the depths of mediocrity. And the reason for this? There is an unguided believe in the world today that anybody can be an artist. I do not believe this to be true. Art requires a level of introspectiveness and pessimism that many people simply do not possess (as well as a degree of intelligence that, too, many are void of), which is why there are so many worthless pieces of art and literature floating around clogging up the art scene.

What Bearden is saying, and what I’m arguing, is that people need to leave art to those that have something to say. Rather than recreate what is popular, create something new. Rather than give art a bad name, step back and let those who know what they are doing perform their work. The Harlem Renaissance had a lot of junk produced, some of which we’ve read for this class, others of which are mentioned very directly by Aaron Douglas, which, perhaps, weakened aspects of art that should have been taken more seriously. Of course, it had a lot of worth created as well, and much of that is what we remember today. I suppose, really, the things that deserve to be remembered end up being written into history, while the rest pass by.