‘A Reclaimed Background’
Egypt in the Art of Charles Dawson and Aaron Douglas
In: Journal of Avant-Garde StudiesSearch for other papers by Antonia Lant in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
Cinematic elements inform the aesthetic innovation of interwar American artists Aaron Douglas and Charles Dawson, particularly in the interplay between ancient Egyptian resources and modern visual expression. Cinema had developed an Egypthood, a set of concepts tying its picture-writing (hieroglyphics) to notions of preserving and reorganizing time (mummies) and an eloquence in compressing volume into surfaces (bas relief). Reaching for the pharaohs belonged within an urgent cultural politics, a campaign for beauty and regeneration against white supremacy. Cinema spoke to artists engaged with organizing eras across a flat surface. Through their compact spaces, and sometimes translucent historical jumps, Dawson and Douglas draw the Nile past forward in what Schomburg would call the use of the “reclaimed background.” Their complex rosters of spatial compression produce the aesthetic shock of historical compression, within a wider effort to transform and break open the Nile’s anchorage in the temporarily and culturally remote.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Ambridge, Lindsay J. “Imperialism and racial geography in James Henry Breasted’s Ancient times, a history of the early world.” Journal of Egyptian History 5 (2012), 12–33.
-
Anonymous. “Our aim.” La revue du monde noir 1:1 (1 November 1931), 4.
-
Barnett, Albert G. “Auditions pageant thrills crowd of 60,000.” Chicago Defender (1 September 1934), 3.
-
Bazin, André. “Ontology of the photographic image.” In What is cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 3–12.
-
Bazin, André. What is cinema? [1958–1962], 2 vols., trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009).
-
Bell, Douglas, An oral history with Carlton Moss (Beverly Hills, CA: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Oral History Program, 1995).
-
Berger, Doris, and Rhea Combs. “Cultivating Black audiences.” In Regeneration: Black cinema 1898–1971, ed. Doris Berger and Rhea Combs (Los Angeles: Academy of Motion Pictures, 2022), 47–54.
-
Bonnet, Charles, and Dominique Valbelle. The Nubian pharaohs: Black kings on the Nile (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2006).
-
Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux and his circle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).
-
Breasted, Henry. “The New Past.” In E.H. Carter and James Henry Breasted, The New Past and other essays on the development of civilisation (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 1–28.
-
Bryan, Bruce. “Movie realism and archaeological fact.” Art and Archaeology: The Arts throughout the Ages 18:4 (October 1924), 130–144.
-
Bryant, Marsha, and Mary Ann Eaverly. “Egypto-Modernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past.” Modernism/Modernity 14:3 (September 2007), 435–453.
-
Caddoo, Cara. Envisioning free: cinema and the building blocks of modern Black life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
-
Churchill, Suzanne. “‘The whole ensemble’: Gwendolyn Bennett, Josephine Baker, and interartistic exchange in Black American modernism.” Humanities 11:74 (August 2022), 1–28.
-
Colla, Elliott. Conflicted antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
-
Corbould, Clare. Becoming African Americans: Black public life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
-
Courage, Richard A., and Christopher Robert Reed, eds. Roots of the Black Chicago renaissance: New Negro writers, artists, and intellectuals, 1893–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020).
-
Curl, James Steven. The Egyptian revival: an introductory study of a recurring theme in the history of taste (Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1982).
-
Curl, James Steven. The Egyptian revival: ancient Egypt as the inspiration for design motifs in the West (New York: Routledge, 2005).
-
Davies, Vanessa. “W.E.B. Du Bois, education, and archeology in Egypt.” Lecture at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, 28 March 2017.
-
Davies, Vanessa. “W.E.B. Du Bois, a new voice in Egyptology’s disciplinary history.” ANKH Revue d’Égyptologie et des Civilisations africaines 28/29 (2019–2020), 18–29.
-
Dawson, Charles C. Touching the fringes of greatness. Unpublished autobiography, Charles C. Dawson Papers, DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago.
-
Dawson, Charles C. “Five great negro buildings.” The Crisis (August 1927), cover.
-
Depillars, Murray N. “Chicago’s African American visual arts renaissance.” In The Black Chicago renaissance, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 165–196.
-
Dingwall, Chris. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: a short history of African American design in Chicago.” In “African American designers in Chicago: art, commerce and the politics of race.” Exhibition brochure (Chicago: Chicago Cultural Center, 2018), n.p.
-
Douglas, Aaron. “Mask of Tut-Ankh-Amen.” The Crisis 32:5 (September 1926), cover.
-
Doyle, Noreen. “The earliest known uses of ‘l’Égyptomanie’/‘Egyptomania’ in French and English.” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 8 (2016), 122–125.
-
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Opinion: the Negro in Egypt.” The Crisis (December 1913), 68–77.
-
Du Bois, W.E.B. “The drama among Black folk,” The Crisis 12:4 (August 1916), 169–173.
-
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria of Negro art.” The Crisis 32:6 (October 1926), 290–297.
-
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Editing the Crisis” The Crisis 58:3 (March 1951), 147–153.
-
Du Bois, W.E.B. The souls of Black folk: essays and sketches (Oxford: Routledge, 2015 [1903]).
-
Earle, Susan, ed. Aaron Douglas: African American modernist (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2007).
-
Eisenstein, Sergei M. “Introductory volume to ‘The general history of cinema.’” In Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes for a general history of cinema [1945–1946], ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 186–188.
-
Eisenstein, Sergei M. Notes for a general history of cinema [1945–1946], ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016).
-
Elsaesser, Thomas. Film history as media archaeology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016).
-
Ewers, John C. “Winold Reiss and the Blackfeet Indians.” In Jeffrey C. Stewart, To color America: portraits by Winold Reiss. (Washington City: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 127–141.
-
Farebrother, Rachel. “The Crisis (1910–1934).” In The Oxford critical and cultural history of modernist magazines. Vol. 2: North America, 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 103–124.
-
Fauset, Jessie. “Nationalism and Egypt.” The Crisis 19:6 (April 1920), 310–316.
-
Fechheimer, Hedwig. Die Plastik der Ägypter (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922).
-
Field, Allyson Nadia. Uplift cinema: the emergence of African American film and the possibility of Black modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
-
Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the race: Black leadership, politics and culture in the twentieth century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
-
Gance, Abel. “Le temps de l’image est venu!” In L’art cinématographique, vol. 2, ed. Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, Lionel Landry, and Léon Pierre Quint (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 83–102.
-
Gates, Henry Louis. Stony the road: reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).
-
Goeser, Caroline. Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance print culture and modern Black identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
-
Gooding-Williams, Robert. “Beauty as propaganda: on the political aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Philosophical Topics 49:1 (Spring 2021), 13–33.
-
Goodyear, William H. The grammar of the lotus: a new history of classic ornament as development of sun worship (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1891).
-
Green, Adam. “The rising tide of youth.” In The middling sorts: explorations in the history of the American middle class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2001), 237–255.
-
Gregor, Joseph. Weltgeschichte des Theaters (Vienna: Phaidon Verlag, 1933).
-
Humbert, Jean-Marcel, Michael Pantazzi, and Christiane Ziegler. Egyptomania: Egypt in Western art, 1730–1930 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1994).
-
Jones, Dewey R. “‘O, sing a new song’ is triumph of race.” Chicago Defender (1 September 1934), 1–2.
-
Jones, Owen. The grammar of ornament (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1982 [1856]).
-
Horace M. Kallen, Art and freedom: a historical and biographical interpretation of the relation between the ideas of beauty, use, and freedom in Western civilization from the Greeks to the present day Volume II (New York: Duell, 1942)
-
Kasman, Amanda. “Charles Dawson’s dioramas, conservation, and racial equity, 1940 to present.” The University of Chicago Press 55:1 (Spring 2021), 14–15.
-
Kirschke, Amy. “Winold Reiss.” In Encyclopedia of the Harlem renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1033–1035.
-
Kirschke, Amy. Art in crisis: W.E.B. Du Bois and the struggle for African American identity and memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
-
Kirschke, Amy. “The Fisk murals revealed: memories of Africa, hope for the future.” In Aaron Douglas: African American modernist, ed. Susan Earle (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2007) 115–135.
-
Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: a psychological history of the German film, rev. edn., ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1947]).
-
Kroeber, Alfred L. Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923).
-
Kushner, Marilyn Satin. The art of Winold Reiss: an immigrant modernist (Lewes, UK: D. Giles Ltd., 2021).
-
Lant, Antonia. “Haptical cinema.” October 74 (Autumn 1995), 45–73.
-
Lant, Antonia. When cinema claimed the ancient Nile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
-
Leininger-Miller, Theresa. “‘A constant stimulus and inspiration’: Laura Wheeler Waring in the 1910s and 1920s.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 24:4 (Summer 2005), 13–23.
-
Lindsay, Vachel. The art of the moving picture (New York: Liveright, 1970 [1915]).
-
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: an interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925).
-
Marks, Laura. The skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
-
Meyerowitz, Lisa. “The Negro in Art Week: defining the ‘New Negro’ through art exhibition.” African American Review 31:1 (Spring 1997), 75–89.
-
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. The wings of Ethiopia: studies in African-American life and letters (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990).
-
Musser, Charles. “To redream the dreams of white playwrights: reappropriation and resistance in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and soul.” In Oscar Micheaux and his circle, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 97–131.
-
Peatross, C. Ford. “Stepping out in Winold Reiss’s New York, 1915 to 1952.” In The art of Winold Reiss: an immigrant modernist, ed. Marilyn Satin Kushner (Lewes, UK: D. Giles Ltd., 2021), 29–47.
-
Nurhussein, Nadia. Black land: imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
-
Powell, Richard J. “The Aaron Douglas effect.” In Aaron Douglas: African American modernist, ed. Susan Earle (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 2007), 53–73.
-
Powell, Richard J. “Paint that thing! Aaron Douglas’s call to modernism.” American Studies 49:1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008), 108–112.
-
Riegl, Aloïs. “Late Roman or Oriental?” [1902]. In German essays on art history: Winckelmann, Burckhardt, Panofsky, and others, ed. Gert Schiff. The German Library Series, vol. 79 (New York: Continuum, 1988), 173–190.
-
Rogers, Ariel. “Screen practices and Hollywood cinema in the 1930s.” Screen 60:2 (Summer 2019), 197–223.
-
Rogers, J.A. World’s greatest men and women of African descent (New York: J.A. Rogers Publications, 1935).
-
Schomburg, Arthur A. “The Negro digs up his past.” Survey Graphic 53:11 (March 1925), 670–672.
-
Schulman, Daniel. “Charles Dawson.” AIGA: The Professional Association for Design, 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20210216144308/https://www.aiga.org/design-journeys-charles-dawson.
-
Somaini, Antonio. “Cinema as ‘dynamic mummification.’” In Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes for a general history of cinema [1945–1946], ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 19–106.
-
Spingarn, J.E. Letter in “Editorial.” The Crisis 13:3 (January 1917), 111–115.
-
Stern, Robert A.M., Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: architecture and urbanism between the two world wars (Rizzoli: New York, 1987).
-
Stewart, Jeffrey C. To color America: portraits by Winold Reiss (Washington City: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).
-
Stewart, Jeffrey C. “Winold Reiss’s American studies.” In The art of Winold Reiss: an immigrant modernist, ed. Marilyn Satin Kushner (Lewes, UK: D. Giles Ltd., 2021), 40–55.
-
Strateman, Klaus. Duke Ellington: day by day and film by film (Copenhagen: JassMediaAps, 1992).
-
Trafton, Scott. Egypt land: race and nineteenth century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
-
Versluys, Miguel John. “Haunted by Egypt: a long-term perspective on history, mnemohistory and material culture.” In Beyond Egyptomania: objects, style and agency, ed. Miguel John Versluys (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), 15–21.
-
Wenzel, Diana. “Wundervolle Dinge: Zur Rezeption des Grabschatzes des Tutanchamun im Film ‘Die Sklavenkönigin.’” In Imaginierte Antike: Österreichische Monumental-Stummfilme, ed. Armin Loacker and Ingrid Steiner (Vienna: Film Archive Austria, 2002), 229–242.
-
Wheeler Waring, Laura. “Egypt and spring.” The Crisis 25:6 (April 1923), cover.
-
Worringer, Wilhelm. Egyptian art, trans. Bernard Rackham (London: Putnam’s, 1928 [1927]).
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 454 | 350 | 24 |
| Full Text Views | 10 | 7 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 27 | 19 | 4 |
‘A Reclaimed Background’
Egypt in the Art of Charles Dawson and Aaron Douglas
In: Journal of Avant-Garde StudiesSearch for other papers by Antonia Lant in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Cinematic elements inform the aesthetic innovation of interwar American artists Aaron Douglas and Charles Dawson, particularly in the interplay between ancient Egyptian resources and modern visual expression. Cinema had developed an Egypthood, a set of concepts tying its picture-writing (hieroglyphics) to notions of preserving and reorganizing time (mummies) and an eloquence in compressing volume into surfaces (bas relief). Reaching for the pharaohs belonged within an urgent cultural politics, a campaign for beauty and regeneration against white supremacy. Cinema spoke to artists engaged with organizing eras across a flat surface. Through their compact spaces, and sometimes translucent historical jumps, Dawson and Douglas draw the Nile past forward in what Schomburg would call the use of the “reclaimed background.” Their complex rosters of spatial compression produce the aesthetic shock of historical compression, within a wider effort to transform and break open the Nile’s anchorage in the temporarily and culturally remote.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 454 | 350 | 24 |
| Full Text Views | 10 | 7 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 27 | 19 | 4 |
