PAINTING MUSICAL CITY

Download or read book PAINTING MUSICAL CITY written by CASSIDY D and published by Smithsonian Books (DC). This book was released on 1997-01-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painting the Musical City explores the complicated relationship between African American culture and modernism, showing how white painters such as Dove and Davis evoked the dynamism of African American music but "painted out" its black practitioners. Aaron Douglas, in contrast, represented jazz and the jazz musician as the embodiment of both racial and national identity in his painting Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers, which juxtaposes the figure of a black saxophonist with the Statue of Liberty. By considering painters and composers together, by examining canonical modernists in relation to African American artists, and by showing how their images have resonated during the latter half of the century, Cassidy provides an enhanced reading of modernism, introducing themes of racial identity into the discussion of a distinctively American art.