Whether it is called the fruit of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Negro Renaissance, or of the New Negro Movement, the art produced by African Americans in the interwar decades of the twentieth century has long fascinated audiences hungry for celebratory and affirming representations of and by blacks. Handsome genre portraits, poignant scenes of cities and rural landscapes, tough realist sculpture, and modernist tableaus are oft-exhibited and oft-reproduced subjects in the United States, and increasingly, abroad. James Van Der Zee’s studio photographs, Aaron Douglas’s Egyptian hieroglyph-meets-Art Deco paintings, and Palmer Hayden’s still-life Fetiche et Fleurs (1936) number among the most cited images, as they are creative and conceptual touchstones for present-day scholars working in the various disciplines of African American Studies and for many others who are similarly interested in the visual representation and creative imagination of modern, black America.

But what did such art mean to audiences who saw it during the era of its making? Distinction and Denial is a well-researched text that addresses this question by examining the reception of African American art of the 1920s and 1930s. The book does not visually reproduce any art, which might seem odd until we discern art-historian Mary Ann Calo’s commitment to the study of the period’s “verbal frame,” that is, its published exhibition reviews, omnibus and conceptualizing essays, and survey texts. Calo has mined primary texts of the interwar years—newspapers articles, the records of philanthropic patrons such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Harmon Foundation, and the papers of influential interlocutors Alain L. Locke and Holger C. Cahill—and has scrutinized key secondary sources that analyze twentieth-century American art and criticism, including the thoughtful PhD dissertations of Helen M. Shannon and Margaret Rose Vendryes (Shannon, Helen M., “From ‘African Savages’ to ‘Ancestral Legacy’: Race and Cultural Nationalism in the American Modernist Reception of African Art,” PhD diss, Columbia University, 1999; and, Vendryes, Margaret Rose, “Expression and Repression of Identity: Race, Religion, and Sexuality in the Art of American Sculptor Richmond Barthe,” PhD diss, Princeton University, 1997), and the Newark Museum’s richly rewarding exhibition catalogue of 1989, Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation. Like this under-utilized historiography, Calo’s book is critical of the common assumption that African American artists’ production—then and now—is “uniformly encoded with simple racial and ethnic essence” (vii). Making her opposition to this shibboleth unequivocal, Calo states her purpose right off: “This book seeks to undermine the authority of such simplistic generalizations through the explication of their historical origins in early-twentieth-century American art criticism” (vii). Her aim, she writes, is to “make a case for the erosion of separatist assumptions that characterize a good deal of scholarship on African American art” (viii).

Nonetheless, Distinction and Denial is hardly a “color-blind” approach to art history. Calo is attentive to early twentieth-century articulations about racial art and its centrality to the contemporaneous discourse of American art, and especially, the nationalist desideratum for new visual expression that was original and quite different from Europe’s. Citing published exhibition reviews, Calo points out that many white critics who decried the “failure of imagination” among white American artists of the 1920 and 1930s also believed that their black counterparts could rescue U.S. art from the doldrums (134). Indeed, both black and non-black commentators often stated that “Negro art” was “a distinctive contribution” to American culture. This “critical construct,” as Calo rightly calls it, was founded upon “a priori assumptions about amateurism, primitivism, authenticity, and racial uniqueness” (110). In Calo’s economical description, the expected “formal properties” of Negro art were based on “clichés about dynamic rhythm, vitality, and the use of bright color” (142).

Distinction and Denial consists of four chapters, and it is quite appropriate that half of the book is dedicated to close readings of Alain Locke’s foundational writings about and supportive efforts on behalf of African American artists. A Howard University philosophy professor who Calo asserts was “mainstream in many of his intellectual affinities,” Locke “had much in common with other American critics of the interwar decades” (61). Yet, as Calo demonstrates, Locke took on “a different job,” namely, “to historicize, analyze, and classify African American art and to position it in relation to both black experience and mainstream American culture” (61). In the book’s first chapter, entitled “Alain Locke and the Invention of ‘Negro Art,’” Calo considers Locke’s “contribution essays” of the 1920s and 1930s, which position African American artistic production as “a vital aspect of American cultural nationalism” (27). Widely used to describe art made by Africans and by the people of the African diaspora, Negro art, for Locke, was “not about authorship but rather idiomatic and sympathetic use of Negro materials” (43), according to Calo. In his 1925 essay, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” Locke named and praised dozens of modern artists—black and non-black—whose work evidenced the influence of African ritual sculpture or countered outlandishly racist stereotypes. Even so, Calo writes, Locke did not “always differentiate between the implications of a genuinely distinctive versus simply desirable treatment of Negro material” (46; emphasis in original). Instead, he broadly welcomed and encouraged the emergence of new visual modes that communicated, in his quoted words, “yet unexpressed human forms and feelings” (49). In the final chapter, “Advances (and Retreats) on the Art Front,” Calo notes that in the 1930s Locke “recognized that the conceptual formation known as ‘Negro art’ had become a trite commonplace demanding revaluation” (182) and advocated integrated exhibitions. Still, Locke was utterly pragmatic, organizing and promoting the Baltimore Museum of Art’s landmark 1939 show, “Contemporary Negro Art.” In that same year, which marked the end of a severe, decade-long, worldwide economic depression, Locke sagely concluded: “Art doesn’t die of labels, but only of neglect—for nobody’s art is nobody’s business” (188).

It is an interesting fact that the Great Depression years were witness to increased numbers of exhibiting African American artists, to greater interest in and publicity about their achievements, and to the establishment of more opportunities for artistic training and art-related employment for American cultural producers across the board. Chapter 2, “Institutional Contexts,” is a dedicated examination of the individual, private, and government entities that propelled this phenomenon: the New York Public Library, the Chicago Women’s Club, the Harmon Foundation, the Primitive African Art Center, the Harlem Art Workshop, the Harlem Community Art Center, and the Federal Art Project. (Unsurprisingly, Locke, who counseled many of these groups and participated in their programs, appears in this discussion as well.) Just as valuable is Calo’s careful documentation of these institutions’ significant activities, agendas, and funding of African American art in the Depression era. Among the complex issues that Calo clearly explains are the politics around the New York Urban League’s and the Carnegie Corporation’s support for art schools led by expressionist painter Cloyd L. Boykin and realist sculptor Augusta C. Savage in Greenwich Village and Harlem, respectively; the Harlem Art Guild’s challenges to the Harmon Foundation’s sociological approach to promoting African American artists and “Negro Art” shows; and the local activism that established the Harlem Community Art Center, an undertaking generally credited to the Federal Art Project.

Chapter 3, “Framing the African American Artist,” is the longest section of Distinction and Denial. Calo does important work here by first establishing that while there were extremely capable and erudite commentators on art in the interwar period—among them Locke, art-historian Meyer Schapiro, artists Stuart Davis and James A. Porter—“a good deal of art writing in America before World War II was a mixed bag of journalism and editorial commentary . . . written by individuals with very little background in the visual arts” (111). Calo adds that when most writers turned their attentions to African American art, they “often leaned on typologies structured around the musical and literary expression with which they were more familiar” (111). She quotes from a 1929 New York World story on St. Kitts-born painter Ronald Joseph that illustrates critics’ level of engagement with black artists and their work: “He has few of the traits that the world likes to associate with the Harlem Negro. He is not particularly fun-loving . . . he doesn’t dance well” (127). “Friends of the Negro” (as they were once called) made matters worse by treating African American art as simply a curious and marvelous atavistic outcome. The Harmon Foundation, Calo argues, “actually reinforced traditional inequalities of race and power by constructing the black artist as a distinct category, which then was driven into the margins as the Negro vogue dissipated” at the end of the 1930s (146). The public cries for a distinctly American art that was purged of European influences (including modernist experiments in abstraction) were directed at all artists working in the United States in the interwar period. Yet Calo finds that “for the African American artist, accepting or rejecting the foreign was advised to preserve blackness, not to affirm Americanness” (152).

If, as Calo declares in Distinction and Denial, “African American visual art in the early twentieth century was inextricable from the doctrines of racial uplift, mass public education, and progressive social reform that motivated its supporters to seek an audience” (62–63), the pressing question is: What is the situation in the early twenty-first century? Art-historian Darby English’s grim diagnosis, delivered in his breathtakingly ambitious book, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), is dead-on:

It is an unfortunate fact that in this country, black artists’ work seldom serves as the basis of rigorous, object-based debate. Instead, it almost uniformly generalized, endlessly summoned to prove its representativeness (or defend its lack of same) and contracted to show-and-tell on behalf of an abstract and unchanging ”culture of origin.” For all this, the art gains little purchase on the larger social, cultural, historical, and aesthetic formations to which it nevertheless directs itself with increasing purchase. And in the long term, it runs the risk of moving beyond serious thought and debate. Viewed in this way, the given and necessary character of black art—as a framework for understanding what black artists do—emerges as a problem in itself. (7)

The good news is that English not only identifies this stubborn avoidance of honestly considered, critical interpretation of work by artists who are black, but also takes up the task of trying to do such a thing in his thorough engagement with the art of Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, William Pope.L, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson. Both Calo’s and English’s books encourage us to see art and its makers, to turn a corner at last, and to move toward surprising encounters with the visible and the necessary acknowledgement of the multiplicity of creative practices, the imbrications of subjectivities, and the interdependency of all our identity positions.