Style combination · Pairs well
Bezalel School × Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
Both built a graphic language for a people's cultural renewal from ancestral ornament and biblical subjects in the 1920s; combine Bezalel's gilded frames with Aaron Douglas's flat silhouettes.
Mix them and make something Bezalel School Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Bezalel School Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
- Type from Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
- Colour from Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
- Form from Bezalel School
- Composition from Bezalel School
- Surface from Bezalel School
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
Light
Limelight, standing in for Aaron Douglas's hand-lettered Deco capitals on jackets and covers
Text · Bezalel School
The house style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, opened in Jerusalem by Boris Schatz in 1906 with E. M. Lilien and given its definitive form by Ze'ev Raban. It joined Jugendstil and Symbolism to Persian, Syrian and Islamic ornament, Yemenite silverwork and ancient Jewish coins to make a Jewish national art: biblical and Zionist scenes in symmetrical, ornament-packed frames, hand-drawn Hebrew letters as decoration, and jewel colours heightened with gold, on books, posters, carpets, metalwork and tiles until the school closed in 1929 (its designs lingered on objects into the 1950s).
Jost; Bezalel School used Bezalel workshop Hebrew display lettering, which combined Arabic-script forms with German Jugendstil writing and Ze'ev Raban's hand-drawn Hebrew letters, rendered in gold at the centre of an illustrated page
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art, with a counter-accent from Bezalel School. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Bezalel School Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
-
#efe5cfground · 36% -
#161210ink · 14% -
#e3782baccent · 18% -
#c9a03aaccent · 14% -
#a8322daccent · 10% -
#e9a3adaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe5cf;
--ink: #161210;
--accent-1: #e3782b;
--accent-2: #c9a03a;
--accent-3: #a8322d;
--accent-4: #e9a3ad;
--font-display: "Limelight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Bezalel School: Bezalel works quote Hebrew scripture and decorate ritual objects: do not crop, distort, mirror or print biblical verses, and above all the names of God, on throwaway items (such pages are customarily buried rather than discarded), and have any Hebrew read by a fluent reader. The style's figures cast Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews, who modelled for its students and worked as its silversmiths and stone carvers, as picturesque biblical types, and its programme was Zionist in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine; credit the artisans, avoid exoticising living communities, and do not present it as a neutral 'Holy Land' or regional style. It also built a Jewish national art in part from Arab and Islamic sources (Persian and Syrian metalwork, Damascene inlay, Moorish pattern, and Hebrew lettering that drew on Arabic script) in a land it shared with Palestinian Arabs, whom, like Yemenite Jews, its artists took as models for biblical figures: name those sources rather than presenting the motifs as purely Jewish, and treat pieces such as 'Come to Palestine' and the Zionist insignia as political documents, not neutral travel imagery.
Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art: Douglas built this idiom so that Black artists could picture Black history against minstrel caricature and white primitivist fantasy. Lifted as generic Jazz Age or 'tribal' decoration, the Egyptian profiles, mask-like eyes and black silhouettes can slide back into the stereotypes it answered, so use it to tell Black stories with Black artists and writers, and credit Douglas and the magazines (The Crisis, Opportunity) whose images you draw on.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Bezalel School
- Vienna Secession Contrasts · Both put pictures inside symmetrical ornamental frames, but Vienna squared the frame into grids and bars while Bezalel filled it with Middle Eastern filigree, carpet and metalwork motifs.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Contrasts · In the same decade Turkey replaced the Arabic script with Latin letters, while Bezalel made the revived Hebrew script its chief ornament; set them side by side to show two national answers to script.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · While Bezalel was gilding hand-drawn Hebrew letters inside ornamental frames, German modernists stripped ornament for sans-serif type and asymmetric layout; the two mark the poles of 1920s print.
- Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Tradition Pairs well · Bezalel took Moorish and Islamic geometric pattern for its borders and filigree; pair the two for frames whose star tilings and strapwork hold a figurative centre.
- Hebrew Poster Lettering & Early Israeli State Design Contrasts · The Jerusalem national art that came before it used the same menorah, ancient coins and hand-drawn Hebrew, but packed them into gilded, ornamental, biblical frames; the Tel Aviv studios reduced them to a single emblem on flat colour, and the emblem committee of 1949 deliberately left out overtly religious symbols.
- Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering Pairs well · Another national illumination of the 1900s–1920s, with hand-drawn national letters, jewel colours and gold inside heavy symmetrical frames; compare how each built a national art from ancient ornament.
- Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Contrasts · Two Jewish national arts of the same years with hand-drawn Hebrew letters: Bezalel's Zionist, biblical pictures in gilded symmetrical frames in Jerusalem, and the Kultur-Lige's secular Yiddish children's books in faceted avant-garde planes in Kyiv; never merge them into one 'Jewish style'.
- Mir iskusstva Book Art Pairs well · In the same years both used Art Nouveau's ornamental frame to build a national book art from older ornament; set Bilibin's folk borders beside Raban's filigree frames to compare two revivals, or combine their framed, lettered pages.
With Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · Both flatten the human figure, but Douglas's silhouettes are specific and historical where corporate Memphis is generic; study the difference before drawing people flat.
- WPA Silkscreen Posters Pairs well · Douglas's 1934 murals were New Deal commissions; pair his silhouettes with WPA screenprint layouts for civic, narrative posters.
- Afrofuturist Design Pairs well · Carry Douglas's Egyptian profiles and radiating light into a jewel-dark cosmos for a Black futurism that knows its own lineage.
- AfriCOBRA Pairs well · Aaron Douglas's flat silhouettes are an earlier Black self-portrait in print; set his stepped light and profiles beside AfriCOBRA's lettered colour to trace the line from the New Negro to Black Power.
- Woodland School (Legend Painting) Contrasts · Both set flat, stylised figures to spiritual and communal ends, but Aaron Douglas's Harlem graphics print hard-edged silhouettes in one to three flat colours, stepping their tone where concentric rings of light cross them among Deco angles, while Woodland painting closes many bright colours inside a continuous black contour and opens each body in x-ray.