The Judgment Day

1939

Aaron Douglas

Artist, American, 1899 - 1979

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.”

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Aaron Douglas painted The Judgment Day in 1939, more than a decade after creating the book illustration on which the painting is based. In 1927 Douglas had provided eight strikingly original illustrations for a collection of poems titled God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by James Weldon Johnson. Executed in a style that reflected the influence of German émigré Winold Reiss, Douglas’s artistic mentor, as well as the artist’s own study of African art and European modernism, the illustrations marked the advent of Douglas’s mature style. Over a period of several years, Douglas translated his original book illustrations into large oil paintings. The Judgment Day is the final painting in the series.

At the center of the composition, a powerful black Gabriel stands astride earth and sea. With trumpet call, the archangel summons the living and the dead to judgment. Recasting both the biblical narrative and the visual vocabulary of art deco and cubism, Douglas created an image as racially impassioned as the sermons of the black preachers celebrated in God’s Trombones.

The Judgment Day (English)
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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on tempered hardboard

  • Credit Line

    Patrons' Permanent Fund, The Avalon Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 121.92 × 91.44 cm (48 × 36 in.)
    framed: 137.48 × 106.68 × 6.35 cm (54 1/8 × 42 × 2 1/2 in.)

  • Accession

    2014.135.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: The Judgment Day, 1939

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist [1899-1979]. Grace Jones, Nashville, in 1976;[1] sold 1978 to Leonard and Paula Granoff, Providence; purchased 6 November 2014 by NGA.
[1] Jones is listed as lender of the painting in the catalogue for the exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art, that travelled to four venues from 1976 to 1977.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1976

  • Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas; Brooklyn Museum, 1976-1977, no. 99, repro.

Bibliography

1927

  • Johnson, James Weldon. God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Drawings by Aaron Douglas. New York, 1927: cover repro., repro. 52b (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

  • "The Browsing Reader." The Crisis 34, no. 5 (July 1927): repro. 159 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

1976

  • Driskell, David C. Two Centuries of Black American Art. Exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas; Brooklyn Museum, 1976-1977. Los Angeles and New York, 1976: no. 99, repro.

1987

  • Driskell, David. "Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)." In Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. Introduction by Mary Schmidt Campbell, essays by David Driskell, David Levering Lewis, and Deborah Willis Ryan. New York, 1987: 110, 129 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

1993

  • Ater, Renee Deanne. "Image, Text, Sound: Aaron Douglas's Illustrations for James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse." M.A. Thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 1993: 63, fig. 48 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

1995

  • Kirschke, Amy Helene. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson, Mississippi, 1995: 101, fig. 59 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

1998

  • Washington, Michele Y. "Souls on Fire." Print 52, no. 3 (May/June 1998): 58 fig. 6, 60 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

1999

  • Barnwell, Andrea D., with contributions by Tritobia Hayes. The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. Seattle, 1999: 45 fig. 1 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based), 95 pl. 27, 150 (references to a 1927 opaque watercolor of the same image as the NGA painting).

2000

  • Goeser, Caroline. "'Not White Art Painted Black:' African American Artists and the New Primitive Aesthetic, c. 1920-35." Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 2000: 149, 152, 155-156, 376 fig. 4-15 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

2002

  • Carroll, Anne. "Art, Literature, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Messages of "God's Trombones." College Literature 29, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 61, 72, fig. 7 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

2006

  • Detroit Institute of Arts. African American Art from the Walter O. Evans Collection. Preview section of the website for the exhibition: http://www.dia.org/exhibitions/woe/preview5.asp; accessed 15 August 2014, repro. (reference to a 1927 opaque watercolor of the same image as the NGA painting).

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, 2007-2008. New Haven and London, 2007: 225 (reference to NGA painting), pl. 54 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based).

  • Goeser, Caroline. Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity. Lawrence, Kansas, 2007: 223-224, 225 fig. 67 (reference to the 1927 illustration on which the NGA painting is based)..

2008

  • Knappe, Stephanie Fox. "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist: The Exhibition, the Artist, and His Legacy." American Studies 49, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 124, fig. 23 (reference to a 1927 opaque watercolor of the same image as the NGA painting).

2010

  • Gilbert, James. "The Judgment Day." In Essays on Illustration, the website of the Norman Rockwell Museum: http://www.rockwell-center.org/essays-illustration/gods-trombones-judgment-day/; published 18 February 2010, accessed 13 September 2016, repro. (reference to a 1927 opaque watercolor of the same image as the NGA painting).

2014

  • Mault, Natalie A., ed. The Visual Blues. Exh. cat. LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge; Telfair Museums, Savannah, 2014-2015. Baton Rouge, 2014: no. 37, repro. (reference to a 1927 opaque watercolor of the same image as the NGA painting).

2015

  • Met Museum and National Gallery of Art, Washington, Each Acquire Significant Work by Leading Harlem Renaissance Artist Aaron Douglas. Press release, Washington and New York, 14 May 2015.

  • Kennedy, Randy. "The Met and the National Gallery Buy Harlem Renaissance Paintings." New York Times (14 May 2015): C20.

  • "Art for the Nation: The Story of the Patrons' Permanent Fund." National Gallery of Art Bulletin, no. 53 (Fall 2015): 34, repro.

  • Anderson, Nancy. "Gifts and Acquisitions: Aaron Douglas, The Judgment Day." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 52 (Spring 2015): 20, repro. 21.

2016

  • Meier, Allison. "A Rare Encounter with an Aaron Douglas Painting that References Slavery's Past." Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art & Its Discontents; http://hyperallergic.com/265634/a-rare-encounter-with-an-aaron-douglas-painting-that-references-slavery's-past; published 4 January 2016, accessed 9 March 2016.

  • National Gallery of Art. Highlights from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Washington, 2016: 305, repro.

2021

  • Donovan, Patricia A. "Permanence in This Changing World: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowment Challenge Grant." Art for the Nation no. 64 (Fall 2021): 5, repro.

2023

  • Ramos, Carmen E. "Collecting for the Nation." _Art for the Nation_no. 67 (Fall 2023): 12, fig. 14.

Inscriptions

lower right: A. Douglas '39

Wikidata ID

Q20193221

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