Cedric Dover’s American Negro Art, First Edition, 1960, From the Harlem Renaissance to Postwar Modernism

Cedric Dover Negro Art

First Edition

Cedric Dover’s survey of African American visual art from early portraiture through the postwar period, published in 1960 while the work of Black artists remained marginal within standard American art histories. Dover connects artistic production to slavery, emancipation, migration, industrial labor, the Harlem Renaissance, federal arts programs, and the growth of Black cultural institutions. Reproductions of works by Aaron Douglas, Charles White, Richmond Barthé, Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson, Hale Woodruff, Selma Burke, and others establish a lineage across painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and mural art.

Dover, Cedric. American Negro Art. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1960. First edition. 186 pages. 8vo. Hardcover in original brown cloth with silver spine lettering, extensively illustrated in black and white and color, no dust jacket. The volume opens with Charles White’s 1958 ink drawing based on the spiritual “One of a series of ink drawings based on the spirituals,” and includes Aaron Douglas’s The Negro Looks Ahead, Richmond Barthé’s sculpted head, Hubert Howard’s Show Girl, Jacob Lawrence’s Ambulance Call, and a color reproduction of Aaron Douglas’s A Harlem Matron. Dover’s text addresses the circumstances under which Black artists studied, exhibited, and found patronage, with sections including “Mulattoes and Atelier Art,” “For Aaron Douglas,” and “The Artists.” One illustrated spread reproduces Charles White’s mural sketch for the Harlem Hospital beside Douglas’s The Continuation of Life, while another places a photograph of industrial workers beside Hale Woodruff’s printmaking and William H. Johnson’s Aunt Alice.

Dover, an Anglo Indian writer and scholar who published extensively on race, anthropology, and modern art, presents African American art as a continuous field shaped by both formal experimentation and the political conditions governing Black life. His discussion of Harlem Renaissance circles, historically Black colleges, museum access, commercial galleries, and federal patronage records the institutional structures through which artists built careers despite segregation and restricted exhibition opportunities. The book’s period terminology, including its title and chapter language, records the vocabulary through which African American art was categorized by publishers and scholars at midcentury. Light shelf wear to binding; permanent marker block on title page, else clean and firmly bound. Overall very good condition. A substantial midcentury attempt to place African American artists within the history of American modernism through named works, institutions, movements, and individual careers.

Item #23666

Price: $225.00