Baldwin at 100

And the Harlem Renaissance at the Met

Last week I shared some thoughts on art I’d seen this month; this week I saw the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In its honor I’m posting this excerpt about James Baldwin from my memoir about my father’s art career. 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth; here I reread “Notes of a Native Son.”

Beauford Delaney, portrait of James Baldwin (ca. 1945-50). Estate of Beauford Delaney and Derek L. Spratley; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC.

In 1955, midway through my father’s most successful decade as an artist, James Baldwin published “Notes of a Native Son.” In it, he grieves his father’s death, more than ten years earlier.  Grieving may be the wrong word, though, because the essay is full of his hatred and rage— at his father and his country, the America then going through a cataclysmic confrontation with its racist history. His father had been an angry man, and Baldwin’s essay expresses all that emotion with all the writerly skill at his disposal.

“On the twenty-ninth of July,¹ in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born.” These are the first two sentences of the essay, two simple assertions of numerical and chronological facts, in order of appearance. And yet, they are astonishing. How could death and birth come in this order? Baldwin emphasizes this with repetition and variation: both sentences begin with “on the,” but end with “died” versus “born.” Note the symmetrical placement of “father” and “child.” Observe the symmetrical use of comma clauses to divide each simple sentence into thirds. It’s a marvel of economy and craft.

“[Baldwin] uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing.”—Langston Hughes (1958)

Biographies and life stories are sometimes called “cradle to grave” and chronological sequence is the easiest for readers to follow. But every story has its own internal logic and that may not be sequential. Here, Baldwin merges emotional and chronological order, to astonishing effect. For me, this opening inspires the same vertiginous confusion as the family photograph I discussed in another post. My grandfather took a snapshot of my grandmother in 1909, when she was fourteen years old, describing her in the later caption as his “bride-to-be.” How can the future have already happened in the past? That’s the stumbling block in Baldwin’s opening too. Where are we in time? It’s as if normal human emotion has dissolved into some chaotic landscape where past, present, and future intermingle.

Or maybe it’s the opposite—strong emotion suspends time. It is Baldwin’s hatred and rage, under the surface of all that beautifully crafted prose, that explode boundaries between generations and categories. Emotion brings us back to E. M. Forster’s definition of “plot”: ‘the king died, then the queen died of grief.’ “Grief” ends Forster’s sentence, but it belongs in the middle, the cause between the two deaths, before and after.

For Baldwin, it’s the passing of time that allows him to process his feelings for his father, first when he leaves home as a teenager and returns to his father’s deathbed, then again in the years after his father’s passing, as he struggles against everyday racism in America. As he grows up, and widens his perspective, his father’s bitterness (the word he uses over and over) is more comprehensible to him. He uses the artist’s tools of point of view and scale to see his father from different angles.

Baldwin gradually feels (and writes) his way toward understanding, and some kind of resolution, though it is carefully balanced in the beautifully written last lines. Shifting from the third-person “one” to “I,” he urges acceptance without complacency in the face of injustices. Finally, he accepts the grief and loss he suppressed in the opening:

“This intimation made my heart heavy, and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”²

Again, he dissolves the “now” of emotion into a past and future filled with conditional verbs. With his father’s face, he longs for presence.

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The Met’s show includes an early portrait of Baldwin by his friend Beauford Delaney³. Delaney was a wonderful artist who, like Baldwin, was Black and queer and overflowing with talent. Both men relocated from the United States to France at midcentury. Delaney made many portraits of Baldwin but I love the one I’ve reproduced above the best— the psychedelic colors are so explosive and the radiating lines from Baldwin make him jump off the canvas. You get the clear sense of Baldwin’s vivid genius— but also Delaney’s. Delaney is able to represent Baldwin from different angles, just as Baldwin represents his father in words.

The Met show conveys the vibrancy and versatility of the loosely-labelled “Harlem Renaissance” but I didn’t love it, overall. It was too big, like many museum shows these days, which meant that I couldn’t really process all the work. And the organization felt stodgy, with thematic sections like “Nightlife” and “Family and Society” that seemed generic. Expanding the geographic scope to include Caribbean artists made sense, but the section on transatlantic modernism felt forced and defensive: does African-American art have to intersect with European modernists to matter? What are Matisse and Picasso doing here? I wished, too, that instead of focusing so heavily on the “canonical” arts of literature, painting, and sculpture, it paid more attention to the crafts and folklore that Harlem Renaissance artists like Zora Neale Hurston studied and honored in their work.

I also expected the show to reckon with its own predecessor, a 1969 exhibit called “Harlem on My Mind” that surveyed Harlem arts through news clippings, without including any art. That show was heavily criticized—at the time and since—but this show never explicitly confronts that history.⁴

Reckoning. That’s what Baldwin was doing in his essay—with his father, his country, and his own past. That’s what I expected from the exhibit. It’s a high bar.

Please share, like, comment, as usual… and I’d be interested in any thoughts on the show, for those of you who may have seen it. I do recommend it as a convenient way to see lots of this extraordinary work in one place. Go soon, though, if you can. It closes on July 28th.

1. Coincidentally, we are almost at this anniversary now, which is very close to my own father’s death date— on July 30th.

2. I have quoted this passage in another post but the context is different. So be it.

3. Delaney is woefully under-recognized, as this New York Times review of a gallery exhibit leads with. That Chelsea show, which was one of the first I saw in 2021 when re-entering the world after the pandemic, was memorable— in part for restarting art dates with a dear friend and in part for the sheer gobsmacking impact of Delaney’s portraits and abstractions, both.

4. Some of the reviews, like this one in the New York Times, make that comparison explicit, but the Met itself missed an opportunity to be transparent and reflective about its own curation practices. To be fair, the Met does reckon with that history in this blog post, about a different exhibit. [NOTE can I footnote my footnotes? I see that all of my citations point to the New York Times…. That’s not good research methodology and shows how hard it is to resist the established institutions of culture and canon formation. I am rushing this out and just flag the problem for now.]