… The fabled, upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem has long held a special place in the history of this urbanizing process, and in the greater cultural mythos surrounding a twentieth-century black identity. “Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and talented of the whole Negro world,” hawked James Weldon Johnson in 1925. Perhaps more than any other African American community, Harlem has connoted a particular type and degree of city credential: that of possessing the biggest and the most ethnically diverse community of peoples of African descent in the world; of its residents (whether deserving the label or not) being the penultimate, world-wise cosmopolites; and of symbolizing (through its community organizations, local businesses, cultural and leisure activities, and national headquarters) black modernity writ large. Although Harlem’s reputation was, in part, the residual effect of being located in New York City, the community’s African American face and its magnetic pull on an inordinate number of black movers and shakers in public life contributed to its legendary status, which was firmly established by the beginning of the first World War.
One of the earliest artworks to convey something about Harlem’s tumultuous origins is George Bellows’ Tin Can Battle, San Juan Hill, New York. Although not an image of Harlem, Bellows’ drawing of this old Negro quarter in Manhattan’s West Sixties – demolished after World War II to make way for the Amsterdam Housing Projects and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts – made vivid the terrible living conditions and random violence which compelled its residents to pack up and move uptown. Like his fellow Ashcan artist Robert Henri, Bellows delighted in depicting the poor and the common masses, and his spirited treatment of black tenement dwellers in various states of repose and arrested action had the buried message of giving a forum to the related notions of Negro insurgency and flight (to Harlem): a sentiment San Juan Hill’s notorious history of race riots could have easily planted in the mind of the socially aware Bellows.
“New Negroes, Harlem, and Jazz (1900-1950),” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, V, Part 2: The Twentieth Century, The Rise of Black Artists, eds. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 53-104, 310-313.
