Motley used portraiture "as a way of getting to know his own people". He produced some of his best known works during the 1930s and 1940s, including his slices of life set in "Bronzeville," Chicago, the predominantly African American neighborhood once referred to as the "Black Belt." It appears that the message Motley is sending to his white audience is that even though the octoroon woman is part African American, she clearly does not fit the stereotype of being poor and uneducated. [5] Motley would go on to become the first black artist to have a portrait of a black subject displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Archibald John Motley, Jr. (October 7, 1891 - January 16, 1981), [1] was an American visual artist. In 1917, while still a student, Motley showed his work in the exhibition Paintings by Negro Artists held at a Chicago YMCA. By breaking from the conceptualized structure of westernized portraiture, he began to depict what was essentially a reflection of an authentic black community. Near the entrance to the exhibit waits a black-and-white photograph. Title Nightlife Place Shes fashionable and self-assured, maybe even a touch brazen. At the time he completed this painting, he lived on the South Side of Chicago with his parents, his sister and nephew, and his grandmother. In the 1950s, he made several visits to Mexico and began painting Mexican life and landscapes.[12]. While he was a student, in 1913, other students at the Institute "rioted" against the modernism on display at the Armory Show (a collection of the best new modern art). He did not, according to his journal, pal around with other artists except for the sculptor Ben Greenstein, with whom he struck up a friendship. Motley was the subject of the retrospective exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, organized by the Nasher Museum at Duke University, which closed at the Whitney earlier this year.. Born into slavery, the octogenerian is sitting near the likeness of a descendant of the family that held her in bondage. ", "The biggest thing I ever wanted to do in art was to paint like the Old Masters. This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). Motley experienced success early in his career; in 1927 his piece Mending Socks was voted the most popular painting at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Although Motley reinforces the association of higher social standing with "whiteness" or American determinates of beauty, he also exposes the diversity within the race as a whole. Motley scholar Davarian Brown calls the artist "the painter laureate of the black modern cityscape," a label that especially works well in the context of this painting. The New Negro Movement marked a period of renewed, flourishing black psyche. It was where strains from Ma Raineys Wildcat Jazz Band could be heard along with the horns of the Father of Gospel Music, Thomas Dorsey. $75.00. Archibald J. Motley Jr. Illinois Governor's Mansion 410 E Jackson Street Springfield, IL 62701 Phone: (217) 782-6450 Amber Alerts Emergencies & Disasters Flag Honors Road Conditions Traffic Alerts Illinois Privacy Info Kids Privacy Contact Us FOIA Contacts State Press Contacts Web Accessibility Missing & Exploited Children Amber Alerts In his youth, Motley did not spend much time around other Black people. His depictions of modern black life, his compression of space, and his sensitivity to his subjects made him an influential artist, not just among the many students he taught, but for other working artists, including Jacob Lawrence, and for more contemporary artists like Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall. He engages with no one as he moves through the jostling crowd, a picture of isolation and preoccupation. The Picnic : Archibald Motley : Art Print Suitable for Framing. [2] Motley understood the power of the individual, and the ways in which portraits could embody a sort of palpable machine that could break this homogeneity. I was never white in my life but I think I turned white. Archibald Motley (1891-1981) was born in New Orleans and lived and painted in Chicago most of his life. The family remained in New Orleans until 1894 when they moved to Chicago, where his father took a job as a Pullman car porter. The Octoroon Girl features a woman who is one-eighth black. He painted first in lodgings in Montparnasse and then in Montmartre. Archibald Motley: Gettin' Religion, 1948, oil on canvas, 40 by 48 inches; at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas, By Steve MoyerWriter-EditorNational Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Many critics see him as an alter ego of Motley himself, especially as this figure pops up in numerous canvases; he is, like Motley, of his community but outside of it as well. The rhythm of the music can be felt in the flailing arms of the dancers, who appear to be performing the popular Lindy hop. 1, "Chicago's Jazz Age still lives in Archibald Motley's art", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Archibald_Motley&oldid=1136928376. In the foreground, but taking up most of the picture plane, are black men and women smiling, sauntering, laughing, directing traffic, and tossing out newspapers. During this time, Alain Locke coined the idea of the "New Negro", which was focused on creating progressive and uplifting images of blacks within society. Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email. But because his subject was African-American life, hes counted by scholars among the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Though Motleys artistic production slowed significantly as he aged (he painted his last canvas in 1972), his work was celebrated in several exhibitions before he died, and the Public Broadcasting Service produced the documentary The Last Leaf: A Profile of Archibald Motley (1971). In her right hand, she holds a pair of leather gloves. The overall light is warm, even ardent, with the woman seated on a bright red blanket thrown across her bench. He retired in 1957 and applied for Social Security benefits. Here she sits in slightly-turned profile in a simple chair la Whistler's iconic portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black No. During World War I, he accompanied his father on many railroad trips that took him all across the country, to destinations including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hoboken, Atlanta and Philadelphia. She holds a small tin in her hand and has already put on her earrings and shoes. ", Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Oil on Canvas, For most people, Blues is an iconic Harlem Renaissance painting; though, Motley never lived in Harlem, and it in fact dates from his Paris days and is thus of a Parisian nightclub. Despite his early success he now went to work as a shower curtain painter for nine years. Here Motley has abandoned the curved lines, bright colors, syncopated structure, and mostly naturalistic narrative focus of his earlier work, instead crafting a painting that can only be read as an allegory or a vision. He suggests that once racism is erased, everyone can focus on his or her self and enjoy life. Motley spoke to a wide audience of both whites and Blacks in his portraits, aiming to educate them on the politics of skin tone, if in different ways. Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr., never lived in Harlem. Its a work that can be disarming and endearing at once. George Bellows, a teacher of Motleys at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, advised his students to give out in ones art that which is part of oneself. InMending Socks, Motley conveys his own high regard for his grandmother, and this impression of giving out becomes more certain, once it has registered. The owner was colored. Archibald Motley, Jr. (1891-1981) rose out of the Harlem Renaissance as an artist whose eclectic work ranged from classically naturalistic portraits to vivaciously stylized genre paintings. One central figure, however, appears to be isolated in the foreground, seemingly troubled. These figures were often depicted standing very close together, if not touching or overlapping one another. His nephew (raised as his brother), Willard Motley, was an acclaimed writer known for his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door. ", Oil on Canvas - Collection of Mara Motley, MD and Valerie Gerrard Brown. In those paintings he was certainly equating lighter skin tone with privilege. He took advantage of his westernized educational background in order to harness certain visual aesthetics that were rarely associated with blacks. Described as a "crucial acquisition" by . In 2004, a critically lauded retrospective of the artist's work traveled from Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University to the Whitney Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. And that's hard to do when you have so many figures to do, putting them all together and still have them have their characteristics. [2] By acquiring these skills, Motley was able to break the barrier of white-world aesthetics. [9], As a result of his training in the western portrait tradition, Motley understood nuances of phrenology and physiognomy that went along with the aesthetics. In his attempt to deconstruct the stereotype, Motley has essentially removed all traces of the octoroon's race. Archibald Motley was a prominent African American artist and painter who was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1891. Motley's portraits are almost universally known for the artist's desire to portray his black sitters in a dignified, intelligent fashion. The crowd comprises fashionably dressed couples out on the town, a paperboy, a policeman, a cyclist, as vehicles pass before brightly lit storefronts and beneath a star-studded sky. 1, Video Postcard: Archibald Motley, Jr.'s Saturday Night. He reminisced to an interviewer that after school he used to take his lunch and go to a nearby poolroom "so I could study all those characters in there. While this gave the subject more personality and depth, it can also be said the Motley played into the stereotype that black women are angry and vindictive. It could be interpreted that through this differentiating, Motley is asking white viewers not to lump all African Americans into the same category or stereotype, but to get to know each of them as individuals before making any judgments. ", "And if you don't have the intestinal fortitude, in other words, if you don't have the guts to hang in there and meet a lot of - well, I must say a lot of disappointments, a lot of reverses - and I've met them - and then being a poor artist, too, not only being colored but being a poor artist it makes it doubly, doubly hard.". Motley's beloved grandmother Emily was the subject of several of his early portraits. [19], Like many of his other works, Motley's cross-section of Bronzeville lacks a central narrative. His sometimes folksy, sometimes sophisticated depictions of black bodies dancing, lounging, laughing, and ruminating are also discernible in the works of Kerry James Marshall and Henry Taylor. As art critic Steve Moyer points out, perhaps the most "disarming and endearing" thing about the painting is that the woman is not looking at her own image but confidently returning the viewer's gaze - thus quietly and emphatically challenging conventions of women needing to be diffident and demure, and as art historian Dennis Raverty notes, "The peculiar mood of intimacy and psychological distance is created largely through the viewer's indirect gaze through the mirror and the discovery that his view of her may be from her bed." He would break down the dichotomy between Blackness and Americanness by demonstrating social progress through complex visual narratives. Motley was inspired, in part, to paint Nightlife after having seen Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942.51), which had entered the Art Institute's collection the prior year. Archibald J. Motley Jr. Photo from the collection of Valerie Gerrard Browne and Dr. Mara Motley via the Chicago History Museum. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. The center of this vast stretch of nightlife was State Street, between Twenty-sixth and Forty-seventh. Ultimately, his portraiture was essential to his career in that it demonstrated the roots of his adopted educational ideals and privileges, which essentially gave him the template to be able to progress as an artist and aesthetic social advocate. He understood that he had certain educational and socioeconomic privileges, and thus, he made it his goal to use these advantages to uplift the black community. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Motley explained his motives and the difficulty behind painting the different skin tones of African Americans: They're not all the same color, they're not all black, they're not all, as they used to say years ago, high yellow, they're not all brown. His work is as vibrant today as it was 70 years ago; with this groundbreaking exhibition, we are honored to introduce this important American artist to the general public and help Motley's name enter the annals of art history. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Motley explained this disapproval of racism he tries to dispel with Nightlife and other paintings: And that's why I say that racism is the first thing that they have got to get out of their heads, forget about this damned racism, to hell with racism. Grey and black no depict what was essentially a reflection of an authentic community. 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