A New Renaissance

The Met's tremendous exhibition of Black art redefines modernism.

- JERRY SALTZ

THE FIRST THING you're likely to read about the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibition dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance is that it's a long-overdue atonement for past sins. Specifically, 1969's "Harlem on My Mind," the museum's first survey of African American culture, which included photographs of Black people and no other art at all-as if the people themselves were curiosities on display. Denise Murrell, curator of "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism," is keenly aware of the "stupefying, clueless racism" of that earlier fiasco, as she told the New York Times. Boasting more than 150 paintings, sculptures, and photographs by mostly Black artists, the current show dances on the old show's grave. 

But there is more going on here than a mere righting of historical wrongs. The clue is in the second half of the show's name"Transatlantic Modernism"-which gestures at the scope of its ambition. The Harlem Renaissance largely took place in the 1920s and '30s, just when modernism was reaching the zenith of its influence across art, literature, and music. Yet these two periods of heady artistic activity have been walled off from each other in the collective memory, the Black portion of the story having gone mostly ignored. The Met's show about Harlem suggests that we have gotten modernism-the big bang of 20th-century art-all wrong and that it was wilder and even more radical than we had known.