Augusta Savage and the Harlem Renaissance

by James Rodgers

Augusta Savage was a leading sculptor and influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic movement of African American intellectuals spanning from the 1920s to the early 1930s. Much of the movement revolved around the concept of “The New Negro”, a term coined by Howard University professor Alain Locke in 1925. This was a discourse that called for a new, racially distinctive art to express a distinctive African American identity. Artists strove to portray positive and complex African American subject matter in protest of the dehumanizing caricatures such as the “mammy” and “sambo” figures as well as the continuous racial violence and oppression. 

The Harlem Renaissance was both cultural and activist in nature, and during the interwar period African Americans promoted political, economic and social agendas to benefit the national black community. This was realized through various political and social organizations founded by black activists and philosophers such as the United Negro Improvement Association (1911), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), and the Urban League (1918), all of which addressed racial and economic inequality through their respective magazines. Harlem became the symbolic center for cultural revitalization and was representative of developments across various American cities. 

 This was accompanied by a discourse on the psychological status of African Americans which W.E.B. Du Bois called “double-consciousness”, the dilemma of having two racial and ethnic identities at war. In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), he wrote “One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”. 

Augusta Savage defied gender roles and expectations to achieve her goals and improve her community. Born on February 29th, 1892, in Green Cove Springs, Florida, from a young age she taught herself to make figurines of people and animals from clay. In 1915 she moved with her family to West Palm Beach where she exhibited her works at the County Fair, earning a total of $175. Supported and encouraged by superintendent George Graham Currie and other community members, she moved to New York where she enrolled at The Cooper Union, and completed her degree in just three years. In 1923 she was denied a scholarship to the Fontainebleau School in Paris on account of her race, causing national uproar, recognition and support.

One of her earliest bronze figures, Green Apples, from ca. 1926 depicts a nude African American boy holding his stomach in discomfort (fig. 1). The child is depicted in an innocent, playful manner, grimacing probably as a result of eating too many apples as the title suggests. It was probably one of her first genre works, that moved away from her previous work of portrait busts. 

Her most widely recognized bust, Gamin, is another depiction of a young boy. It was modelled after her nephew Ellis Ford. In this portrait bust the sitter is remarkably detailed. Ford tilts his head slightly to the right in an inquisitive nature, lips closed and in a neutral expression (Fig 2). Elaine Hinnant writes that “refined characterization, naturalism, realism, genre, and progressivism came together in this piece . . . It is a magnificent example of the impact of urban life on African American boys at the beginning of the American Depression in 1929”. Hinnant explains that while it is a detailed portrait of a specific boy, viewers were also able to associate the bust with the specific experience of urban African American youth of the period. In 1929 Savage was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship to study in Paris and her work Gamin impressed the committee so much that they increased her award from $1,500 to $1,800. 

Fig. 3. Terpischore at Rest, c. 1929, plaster.https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c6e522d0-10eb-0136-328e-0523e682ec40

Fig. 3. Terpischore at Rest, c. 1929, plaster.

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c6e522d0-10eb-0136-328e-0523e682ec40

Arriving in Paris early September 1929, Savage immediately went to work refining her style and subject matter. One remarkable piece, Terpischore at Rest (or Reclining Figure), ca. 1929-30, demonstrates Savage’s immersion in Parisian life (Fig. 3). Theresa Leininger-Miller suggests that this work references Isadora Duncan, a popular a controversial dancer of the time that shocked audiences with her provocative dancing. Duncan wrote a book called The Art of the Dance in which she describes this reclining movement, named after the mythical Greek muse of dancing, Terpischore. Here the female figure sits poised with her right leg crossed over her left and her torso twisted, facing downwards. Jeffreen Hayes writes that “In Savage’s depiction, the body is partially exposed – the breasts. This may speak to the modesty expected of women at this time and perhaps to Savage’s uneasiness about representing the Black female body with the historical sexualization of Black women”. 

Savage returned to Harlem in 1932, having been unable retain the Rosenwald Fellowship for another year. She then focused on community activism and creating spaces for black expression and artistic development for the younger generations. She opened the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts on West 143rd street which over the course of its existence taught around 1,500 students, including William Artist, Ernest Crichlow, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis. In 1937 the WPA Federal Art Project established the Harlem Community Art Center on the foundation of her studio, appointing her as the founding director. 

In 1938 she was commissioned by the World’s Fair Commission to sculpt The Harp, a plaster sculpture featuring a group of children shaped like a harp celebrating the hymn written by James Weldon Johnson “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, affectionately known as the “Black National Anthem” (Fig. 4). Despite its enormous popularity among fairgoers she was not able to raise enough funds to have it cast in bronze and it was destroyed at the closing of the fair. On top of this, she lost her position as the director of the Harlem Community Art Center. In the early 1940s she moved to Saugerties in upstate New York where she remained for the rest of her life until shortly before her death in 1962.

Savage struggled throughout her career to create opportunities for herself to express black female subjectivity, and as a result created some of the most poignant and relevant works of art about the African American experience in the early twentieth century. She fought to create spaces for the next generation to continue fighting for civil rights, opportunities for expression and recognition in critical art discourses. While many scholars consider this to be her most important contribution, her own oeuvre demonstrates extraordinary technical skill, racial consciousness and active engagement with the critical discourses of her period, which should be recognized in the art historical canon. 

 

Bibliography 

Bearden, Romare and Henderson, Harry. A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. 

Calo, Mary Ann. “African American Art and Critical Discourse between World Wars.” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1999): 580-621. Accessed February 23, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042183.

Hinnant, Denise Ellaine. "Sculptor Augusta Savage: Her Art, Progressive Influences, and African-American Representation." Order No. 1418889, University of Louisville, 2003. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/sculptor-augusta-savage-her-art-progressive/docview/305321010/se-2?accountid=8312. 

Hayes, Jeffreen M. Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman. London: Giles, 2018. 

Leininger-Miller, Theresa. “Une Femme Sculpteur Noire: Augusta Savage in Paris, 1929-1931.” In New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.  

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (put that in italics) (Chicago, 1903), 17

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