Motley’s ability to not only create pictorial stories of African American life, but to visually translate those narratives through jazz-inflected compositions and colors, individuated him among his peers, and made him the quintessential jazz painter, without equals. This bifurcated strategy – of recounting the Jazz Age via painting, rhythmically and expressively – recalls jazz historian William Howland Kenney’s scholarly distinction between jazz, an innovative American musical art form, and the Jazz Age, a cultural period characterized by social dancing, patronizing cabarets, going to movie theaters, dressing provocatively, drinking bootleg gin, etc. That Archibald Motley perfectly encapsulated these “jazzy urban behaviors” within the formal structures and improvisational contingencies of jazz itself spoke to his special grasp on his moment in history, as well as speaking to his sophisticated understanding of the intersections of race, music, and culture in early twentieth-century Chicago. Such a delicate balance between painting the actors and painting the act was only possible by someone – a New Orleans-born, Chicago-raised artist/participant – who intuitively knew what a post-Renaissance/post-black migration view of the world might visually entail.
For Archibald Motley becoming modern meant being true to himself, as a man and interpreter of the world around him; responding to his surroundings and times through the mechanics of easel painting, subcutaneous observations, and the ineffaceable imprint of African American life. But unlike comparable artistic journeys into the African American experience and spirit by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and others from the next generation of black artists, Motley brought a cynicism and an eternally wry, often whimsical perspective to his subject matter: an irreverence that, in tandem with his existential exposés, patchwork compositions, gut-bucket idolatry, and incandescent palette, brokered neither nobility nor sympathy for his people. In a career that stretched from the Red Summer of 1919 to the Civil Rights era of the nineteen sixties, Motley privileged color, expressionism, and atmosphere in his paintings of black America, rendering flesh and brick alike into blazing spectacles, and the beloved community into a hot-house of urban energy and raw, unapologetic reality.
Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2014.
