The exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York includes works by African-American artists, but also by Germaine Casse. This painter has, during her career, highlighted the landscapes, but also the faces of Guadeloupe.
The Met isn’t just known for its annual gala and its stars who flock to attend. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the largest art museum in the United States and one of the largest art museums in the world.
Since February 25, it has hosted the unique exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism”.
This grandiose museum backed by Central Park presented a complete panorama of the first international modern art movement founded by African-American artists, supposed to represent “the modern daily life of new black neighborhoods like Harlem in New York and the South Side in Chicago in the years 1920-1940.
“Through portraits, scenes of urban and nocturnal life, by major artists of the period, this exhibition highlights the central role of the “Harlem Renaissance” movement in shaping the modern black subject and even modern art of the early 20th century“, explained the director of the Met, the Austrian Max Hollein.
Featured artists include Charles Alston, Miguel Covarrubias, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee and Laura Wheeler Waring.
Among these works by African-Americans, paintings by the French painter Germaine Casse. She is famous for her representations of West Indians and landscapes of Guadeloupe.
The presence of European artists is a way for the director of the Met to demarginalize and enhance the status of the “Harlem Renaissance”, a movement neither structured over time nor confined to Harlem, a multicultural and popular neighborhood in northern Manhattan.
The painter was born in Paris in 1881. She is the daughter of the Guadeloupean deputy Germain Casse, who was notably governor of Martinique. The man is a committed abolitionist. The painter’s mother, Julie John, comes from Senegal.
Germaine spent her childhood in the West Indies. Very early, she took up painting. In 1923, she organized the first official artistic exhibition in Guadeloupe. The following year, she created a “Society of West Indian Artists” in Pointe-à-Pitre with the stated aim of introducing modern art to Guadeloupe and Martinique.
While living in the archipelago, she painted at least 145 paintings, beaches, scenes of life or portraits of men and women. The one called “Édoualine, portrait of a young girl“, represents a Guadeloupean woman wearing a madras scarf. Faces that we rarely see on canvases, exhibited in 1925, during an exhibition dedicated to Germaine Casse at the Georges Petit gallery, in Paris.
From 1923, his paintings attracted the eye of Americans, particularly that of thewriter, philosopher and patron Alain Locke. He has written extensively on the Afro-cultural “Harlem Renaissance” movement. This current enters 1918 and 1937 approximately “constituted the richest phenomenon of influences in black American literary history. Active in the fields of literature, music, performing arts and visual arts, its members attempted to rethink the conception of the “Negro” without taking into account the white stereotypes which had influenced the relationship that blacks had with their roots. and between them” specifies the Universalis encyclopedia.
Locke, in the African-American journal Opportunity underlines the contribution of Germaine Casse in the new treatment of the representation of black people” and salutes the “development of mature interest” for the representation of black people.
It was then for Germaine Casse the beginning of recognition in North America. Five years later, in 1928, another newspaper praised it. This time it is the bi-weekly “The Afro American of Baltimore”, which recalls the painter’s mixed race. An article published at a time when the United States is debating the question of the plastic representation of black people.
Advocating an assimilationist and colonial discourse, Germaine Casse was then excluded from the militant and committed approach of African-American artists as well as that of Négritude.
His name was cited again in 1940 by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers among the black and mixed-race personalities who marked the history of France.
The Met has chosen to highlight part of Germaine Casse’s story. In 1924, she organized an exhibition described as “revolutionary modern art” in Guadeloupe.
Her drawing for the exhibition poster is a true manifesto of West Indian art and, more particularly, a call to women to contribute to the artistic production of the islands. She personifies society as a modern black woman surrounded by the attributes of painting, sculpture, writing and music. If the composition fits into the codes of assimilationist painting – madras, warm colors, landscape – it also criticizes a society which, for around three centuries, has prevented the black youth of Guadeloupe and Martinique from studying fine art. arts. The poster served as an invitation to people of black and multiracial heritage to stage an artistic renaissance in the West Indies.
Germaine Casse presented by the Met
The exhibition is visible until July 28, 2024 in New York.
Source: the association Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions
