Aaron Douglas

American, 1899 - 1979

Explore Selected Works

A winged person blowing a horn stands silhouetted in lilac purple against a field of alternating celery and muted lime-green bands in this abstracted vertical painting. The person’s body is angled toward us but they look over their shoulder, to our left in profile, as they hold a horn to their lips. The horn reaches into the top left corner of the composition, and the wings extend off the top edge of the canvas. A shallowly curving slit indicates the eye. The person stands with each foot on two rounded forms like stylized hills. The mound on our right is higher so the knee is bent, and the person holds a skeleton key in the hand propped on that knee. The hill to our right has wavy bands of muted pine and sage green, and the hill to our left has a zigzag line of the sage across the darker green. Farther from us, four people, smaller in scale, are outlined as amethyst-purple silhouettes. One person to our right of the angel kneels and raises their hands high overhead, face turned to the sky. Two more people standing on or behind the left mound are framed between the trumpeter’s legs. The fourth person stands with hands clasped, also looking up. Concentric arcs of lemon yellow and pale green suggest a sun in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work with dark green paint in the lower right corner: “A. Douglas ’39.”
Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Day, 1939, oil on tempered hardboard, Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund, 2014.135.1

The Judgment Day

Aaron Douglas · 1939 · oil on tempered hardboard ·  Accession ID  2014.135.1

The spruce-green silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing among palm fronds looks up at a faint red star against a field of green circles radiating out from the horizon in this abstracted vertical painting. The scene is made with mostly flat areas of color to create silhouettes in shades of slate and indigo blue, lemon-lime and pea green, plum purple, and brick red. To our right of center, the man faces our left in profile. His eye is a slit and he has tight curly hair. The position of his feet, standing on a coffin-shaped, brick-red box, indicate his back is to us. He stands with legs apart and his arms by his sides. Terracotta-orange shackles around his wrists are linked with a black chain. A woman to our left, perhaps kneeling, holds her similarly shackled hands up overhead. A line of shackled people with their heads bowed move away from this pair, toward wavy lines indicating water in the distance. The water is pine green near the shore and lightens, in distinct bands, to asparagus green on the horizon. On our left, two, tall pea-green ships sail close to each other at the horizon, both titled at an angle to our right. Concentric circles radiate out from the horizon next to the ships to span the entire painting, subtly altering the color of the silhouettes it encounters. To our left, a buttercup-yellow beam shines from the red star in the sky across the canvas, overlapping the man’s face. Spruce-blue palm trees grow to our right while plum-purple palm fronds and leaves in smoke gray and blood red frame the painting along the left corners and edge. The artist signed the painting in the lower right, in black, “AARON DOUGLAS.”
Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Collection), 2014.79.17

Into Bondage

Aaron Douglas · 1936 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2014.79.17

Bibliography

1995

  • Kirschke, Amy Helene. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson, Mississippi, 1995.

1999

  • Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was In Vogue. New York and Oxford, 1999.

2007

  • Earle, Susan Elizabeth, ed. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. Exh. cat. Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. New Haven and Lawrence, 2007.

2008

  • Douglas, Aaron, and Alta Sawyer Douglas. Love Letters from the Harlem Renaissance. Introduction and transcriptions by Mariama S. Hodari. Dallas, 2008.

  • Harris, William T., et al. Aaron Douglas and the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance. Special Issue of papers delivered at a conference, University of Kansas, 28-29 September 2007. American Studies 49, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008): entire issue.

  • Ragar, Cheryl R. "Plunging into the Very Depths of the Souls of Our People: The Life and Art of Aaron Douglas." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2008.

2009

  • Niedzielski-Eichner, Nora. "Integrating Modernism: The Migration Paintings of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden." Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, California, 2009.