Stylogenyin the style of Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art

Pictorial & machine age · 1925–1940 · North America

Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art

Also known as New Negro graphics, Aaron Douglas style, Harlem Renaissance book and magazine art

The illustration, cover and jacket art of the New Negro movement, set by Aaron Douglas after he moved to Harlem in 1925 and studied with Winold Reiss. Flat, hard-edged silhouettes of Black figures, with Egyptian-profile heads and mask-like eyes, stand among skyscrapers, palms, pyramids and radiating shafts of light. Art Deco geometry fuses with African sculpture to picture Black history, faith and modern urban life with dignity.

Make something in this styleGet advice in this styleMix it with another style

A black, angular figure with braided hair faces right while holding a purple book against their chest, surrounded by purple sun rays, factory buildings, smokestacks, and a tall leafy stalk on a golden-yellow background. The word “RENEWAL” spans the top, and a decorative strip of two birds, a sun, and zigzags runs along the bottom.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

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.

01

How it works

  • Render figures as flat, hard-edged silhouettes: head in Egyptian profile, torso frontal, eyes slanted like a Dan mask.
  • Fuse African signs (masks, pyramids, palms, foliage) with Deco geometry, skyscrapers and smokestacks on one flat picture plane.
  • Print in one to three flat colours, often black on a bright orange, pink or yellow ground, and hand-letter the titles.
  • Radiate concentric circles or shafts of light from a focal point, stepping the tone of every figure the bands cross.
  • Picture Black history, faith, labour and music as a dignified modern narrative, never as minstrel caricature.

Harlem, New York City: The Crisis (NAACP), Opportunity (National Urban League), Fire!! and Harlem, and New York publishers such as Knopf and Viking

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Luxurious & glamorous, Ironic & self-aware, Comic & cartoon, Gloss & highlights, Straight photography, Collage & layering

Palette

  • #161210
  • #e3782b
  • #e9a3ad
  • #5d4a86
  • #d6b44a
  • #efe5cf

Typefaces

  • Aaron Douglas's hand-lettered Deco capitals on jackets and covers

  • C. B. Falls's gothic title lettering for God's Trombones

    1927

Known for

  • Aaron Douglas, covers and drawings for Opportunity (1925–27) and The Crisis

    1925–29

  • Aaron Douglas, cover and drawings for Fire!!

    November 1926

  • Aaron Douglas, illustrations for James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones

    Viking, 1927

  • Aaron Douglas, jackets for Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew (Knopf, 1927) and Claude McKay's Home to Harlem

  • Winold Reiss, decorations and portraits for Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro

    1925

  • Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life murals

    1934; Schomburg Center, New York Public Library

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

Rule out a choice, read the prompt, or blend in another style: take this brief to Mix styles.

04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleHarlem Renaissance Graphic Art1925–1940 · North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/node/2149
  2. https://www.aiga.org/membership-community/aiga-awards/2018-aiga-medalist-aaron-douglas

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.