Motley's detailed and vibrant works depict 20th century black culture, history, and nightlife, particularly scenes of Chicago.
Archibald J. Motley, Jr. was born on October 7, 1891 in New Orleans. His family moved north for better economic opportunity and eventually settled on Chicago’s South Side. As a child Motley showed great artistic promise, and he was fortunate enough to find a patron to send him to Chicago’s School of the Art Institute in 1914. One of Motley’s teachers there was American painter George Bellows, who offered Motley a solid foundation in the use of realistic painting technique.
Shades of Color
Motley’s marriage to his white high school girlfriend caused his new wife to be cut off from her family. Motley noted how both Caucasian and African-Americans reacted unfavorably to the marriage, and he focused his artistic vision on matters of race. He was fascinated by different classes of skin tones among African-Americans, not only in terms of the beauty and variety of palette, but in how these darker or lighter shades could affect how an individual was perceived. Motley himself was of Creole, Native American and African-American descent and would continue to use mixed race subjects in his work, such as The Octoroon Girl and Mulatress.
Motley’s approach of applying classical method to African-American subjects led to one of his first successes, a 1924 portrait of his grandmother entitled Mending Socks. Mending Socks shows not just an old woman darning away, but the unique elements of her life, such as being raised as a slave, married to a Native American, and the love of God and family that she holds dear. In 1928, Motley had a one-man show in New York, the first African-American artist to do so since the religious painter Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Paris and Bronzeville
Motley received a Guggenheim Fellowship soon after to study in Paris, where he was influenced by the French city’s love of art and the backdrop of the Jazz Age – much of which involved Motley’s African-American musical contemporaries playing in Parisian nightclubs. Motley’s 1929 painting Blues is a depiction of this jazz culture, and Motley would continue in this vein back in Chicago with his work Nightlife. Nightlife shows Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood after dark, with musicians and patrons at a club in top form, all illuminated by a vividly surreal violet light.
Motley was further inspired by Bronzeville and the black urban landscape, and he was intrigued by African myths and legends. During the Depression he produced a series of WPA murals that portrayed scenes from African-American history. His career held steady through the 1940s as he kept painting and winning acclaim, but following the death of his wife he experienced financial problems and was forced to take a job designing shower curtains for the Styletone Corporation in Chicago. A 1950s trip to Mexico to visit his novelist nephew Willard Motley inspired a fresh series of work, paintings of the Mexican landscape with a new infusion of bright colors.
Legacy
While Archibald Motley fell into a period of obscurity through the decades before his death in 1981, his art and vision began to be rediscovered shortly after. His work can be seen at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago Historical Society and The Ackland Art Museum. Also, the Penguin Classics version of African-American author Nella Larsen’s novel Passing – about 1920s New York and Chicago and how skin tone affects the fate of a mixed race woman – featured Motley’s 1925 portrait The Octoroon Girl on the front cover.
Sources
- Archibald Motley – Answers.com
- Archibald J. Motley, Jr.: Blues – Rhapsodies in Black, Art of The Harlem Renaissance
- Representing Race, Archibald J. Motley – Amy M. Mooney (Museum Studies, Journal of The Art Institute of Chicago)
- Mending Socks: Ackland Art Museum
- Area of Design – American Icon Archibald J. Motley, Jr.
