Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist

Richard J. Powell

2014

Duke University Press

Featuring more than 140 color illustrations, this catalogue edited by art historian and exhibition curator Richard J. Powell accompanied the first full-scale survey of the work of Archibald Motley, displayed at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art.

Motley was an American painter, master colorist, and radical interpreter of urban culture. Among 20th-century American artists, Motley is surely one of the most important and, paradoxically, also one of the most enigmatic. His brilliant yet idiosyncratic paintings—simultaneously expressionist and social realist—have captured worldwide attention with their rainbow-hued, syncopated compositions. The exhibition included the artist's depictions of African American life in early 20th-century Chicago, as well as his portraits and archetypes, portrayals of African American life in Jazz Age Paris, and renderings of 1950s Mexico.