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Audio Stop 954

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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.”

oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase and partial gift from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Collection)
© 2021 Heirs of Aaron Douglas / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Audio courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Aaron Douglas

Into Bondage, 1936

Not On View

Read full audio transcript

KANITRA FLETCHER:
Douglas' painting refers to moments right before a group of Africans board a slave ship. He’s alluding to the fear, the hope, and the unknowability of being displaced.

NARRATOR:
Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art at the National Gallery of Art and co-curator of Afro-Atlantic Histories.

KANITRA FLETCHER:
Aaron Douglas is sometimes referred to as the father of Black American art. He moved to New York City in 1924 from Kansas City during a time known as the New Negro Renaissance. There was a flowering of Black culture in arts, literature, dance and music due to the Great Migration of Black Americans to the Northern and Western states fleeing racial violence in the south.

NARRATOR:
Into Bondage was one of a series of four paintings that charted Black Americans’ history, beginning with the forced journey from Africa and continuing to modern life in the 20th century.

KANITRA FLETCHER:
The image expresses a sense of despair, embodied in the figure in the lower left, a woman with her shackled arms raised in the air in seeming desperation. But there's also a sense of promise or hope suggested by the man in the center.
 
His head is tilted up and he's gazing at a star that illuminates him with a ray of light that's shooting out across the canvas. It's likely a reference to the North Star, which guided escaped slaves to freedom in the Northern states.

NARRATOR:
The painting’s flattened forms and strong silhouettes are typical of Douglas’ style.  

KANITRA FLETCHER:
Douglas' international mix of artistic styles – the elements of cubism, Art Deco, Egyptian art, Sub-Saharan African design, which he used to create his own style – that process or that creation of his own style, recalls the syncretism that would await African and Europeans upon reaching the Americas or the Caribbean. Our language, religion, music, food, visual and performing arts – they reflect this cross-fertilization of cultures.

Afro-Atlantic Histories