“Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891–1981) was a bold and highly original modernist and one of the great visual chroniclers of twentieth-century American life…he also developed and elucidated his own archetypes of place and people in this country, albeit unapologetically based on African American subject matter. As the work on view in Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist eloquently attests…the artist created a far more daring visual language than many of his contemporaries, fusing vivid narrative with dizzying spatial distortion and jarring hues to produce striking settings for characters of diverse racial backgrounds and social classes.”
“Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” Until January 17, 2016
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, NYC
(Image:Archibald J. Motley, “Tongues (Holy Rollers)”, 1929)
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