Augusta Savage: Art and Erasure in the Harlem Renaissance

This video presents 10 famous artworks that have been permanently destroyed or lost throughout history, including Joan Miró's World Trade Center tapestry (destroyed in 9/11), Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural (destroyed by its patron), Gustav Klimt's collection (burned by SS troops), and works by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Da Vinci, demonstrating that even the most significant artistic creations can be irretrievably lost to war, terrorism, accidents, and human decisions.

Leonardo's unfinished Battle of Anghiari fresco in Florence was covered by Vasari fifty years later, and attempts to find traces beneath Vasari's paint remain inconclusive. The preparatory cartoon was reportedly seen in the 18th century at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, possibly destroyed, taken to France by Napoleon, or still hidden in Florence. Leonardo's remains were discovered in 1863 after his tomb was destroyed during revolutionary vandalism. An intact skeleton with a large skull and bent arm was found with a half-erased slab reading 'opus vinci'—the bones now rest in the castle of Amboise.

Britain's major galleries house world-class art collections, but over 80% of publicly owned artworks remain uncataloged in smaller institutions. The Art UK website catalogs over 200,000 paintings to illuminate these hidden treasures. The Glasgow portrait investigation exemplifies this quest: a mysterious portrait attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, donated by wealthy coach builder Archibald M'Lean in the 19th century. The investigation combines meticulous restoration, historical research, and scientific analysis—including X-rays revealing composition changes and material testing identifying problematic wax mixtures. This systematic approach transforms forgotten works into stories worthy of public appreciation. The portrait's subject, Elizabeth Lindley (1754-1792), began performing publicly at age 9, earning £10,000 by 1773 while financially enslaved to her father under the apprenticeship system. Her beauty attracted unwanted suitors, leading her to elope with penniless Richard Sheridan to France. Their marriage wasn't recognized in Britain, separating them while she secretly performed for her father's income. This tragic narrative reveals how women's autonomy was constrained by patriarchal society despite fame and wealth.

This video explores several anime series that were critically acclaimed during their original run but have been largely forgotten by both the industry and fans over time. The presenter argues that these forgotten works—such as 'Escuela de Detectives' (Detective School Q), 'Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water,' 'Arrested Development,' 'Orange,' and 'Super Bull'—deserve recognition for their quality storytelling, character development, and social commentary. The video suggests that despite having strong premises, engaging plots, and memorable characters, these series were overshadowed by newer releases and have faded from collective memory, representing a loss for anime culture.

This comprehensive segment demonstrates the multi-disciplinary approach to art authentication, combining traditional detective work with cutting-edge science. International art dealer Philip Mould and presenter Fiona Bruce investigate whether a mysterious painting might be a lost masterpiece by Victorian artist Edwin Landseer. The methodology involves examining physical evidence, researching historical archives at institutions like the Royal Academy and Tate, consulting scientific experts at the Cold Institute, and ultimately submitting findings to authoritative bodies. The journey reveals how paintings change hands for fortunes, how lost works resurface, and how science enables seeing beyond the human eye. Key discoveries include Landseer's companion pieces 'Time of War' and 'Time of Peace' exhibited in 1846 and presented to the nation in 1847, and the tragic 1928 Tate flood that submerged 226 paintings, with some deemed destroyed simply forgotten and rolled up in storage for decades.

Harlem Renaissance visual artists transformed Black identity through innovative styles. Aaron Douglas fused African motifs with modernist techniques using flat planes, angular transparency, and mystical space, exemplified in works like Noah's Ark and From Slavery Through Reconstruction. Augusta Savage faced immense personal struggle—from her father destroying her sculptures to being denied a Paris scholarship upon discovering her race—yet created powerful humanistic portraits challenging racist caricatures. Her unfinished masterpiece Lift Every Voice and Sing was destroyed due to funding shortages. Jacob Lawrence documented Black life through his 60-panel Migration of the Negro series, revealing that discrimination followed migrants Northward. His research revealed Black culture was never studied seriously in schools, driving his commitment to documenting African American history through art.

Augusta Savage was an artist during the Harlem Renaissance, born about 20 years after the Johnson brothers and about 40 miles south of Jacksonville, Florida. From an early age, she would take mud, clay, and anything she could get her hands on and shape it into farm animals and things. She was very talented and won almost every art contest within 50 miles of her hometown. In 1920, she went to New York and enrolled in Cooper Union College, finishing the 4-year program in three years. When she came out in 1923, it was the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. She immediately got commissions to do busts of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, and later one of James Weldon Johnson. She became director of the Harlem Community Arts Center. In 1937, she took a two-year leave of absence because she was given a commission to do a sculpture for the 1939 New York World's Fair. The fair committee changed the name to 'The Harp' because that's what it looked like. The sculpture was 16 feet high and was the most popular and most photographed piece of art at the fair.

Aaron Douglas's 'Aspects of Negro Life' series depicts African migration from Africa through slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and modern Northward migration. His style combined German folk art, cubism, and Art Deco, creating layered silhouettes and angular forms. Concentric circles highlighted important elements. Augustus Savage, who moved to New York in 1921, established an Arts education center and became the first director of the Harlem Community Arts Center. Her sculpture 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' (1939) for the New York World's Fair symbolized spirituals and hymns, featuring 12 stylized singing children arranged in a harp shape. The sculpture was destroyed after the fair because Savage could not afford permanent casting.

Between the wars in New York City, African American visual arts flourished with the same vigor as drama, music, and literature. Harlem became the nexus of a visual arts movement during the 1920s and 1930s, with effects felt across the country and around the world. For the first time in history, the interests of patrons, dealers, and curators were sparked by African American art. The Harmon Foundation, founded in 1922, awarded prizes to African Americans for achievement in the visual arts. The concept of the 'New Negro' was characterized by philosopher Alain Locke in 1925 as someone with renewed self-respect and self-dependence whose persona found voice in the arts. Survey Graphic magazine became the manifesto of the era, selling over 5,000 copies in 1925. Many Harlem Renaissance artists studied abroad, particularly in Paris, where a counterpart to the New Negro movement known as Negritude was forming. They incorporated elements of modernist movements such as German Expressionism and Cubism, which itself was inspired by African sculpture. The Harlem Renaissance may be considered one of the first truly international art movements to take root on American soil. Palmer Hayden, winner of the Harmon Foundation's gold medal prize for art in 1926, spent 10 years in the armed services during which time he enrolled in a drawing correspondence course. Upon his discharge in 1920, he pursued further art study at Columbia University and the Boothbay Commonwealth Art Colony in Maine. After winning the Harmon medal and a $4,000 prize for an impressionistic marine painting, Hayden traveled to Paris where he lived, studied, and exhibited for five years from 1927 to 1932. Aaron Douglas, the artist most closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, developed a unique method of painting that combined accessible narrative imagery with a complex compositional substructure of geometric abstraction. He honored W.E.B. Du Bois's mandate that black artists should depict only ennobling self-imagery. His most famous mural sequence, 'Aspects of Negro Life,' was produced under the auspices of the WPA and installed at the Schomburg Center in Harlem in 1934. The large-scale oil composition comprises a chronological record of four critical moments in African American history. William H. Johnson came to New York from South Carolina in 1918, taking classes at the National Academy of Design and spending summers at the Cape Cod School of Art. After studying with George Luks in 1926, he relocated to Paris in 1926. In 1930, Johnson entered his work in the Harmon Foundation annual exhibit and was awarded a gold medal for painting. Sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, a 1918 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, formed a consequential relationship with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who financed her first trip to Europe in 1922, where she remained for 10 years. Toward the end of her stay in Paris, Prophet began to cultivate her US reputation by sending her works to the 1930 Harmon Foundation exhibit and winning a $250 prize. Returning to the US in 1934 at the invitation of Atlanta University president John Hope, Prophet joined the art faculty at Spelman College. Sculptor Augusta Savage came to New York in the 1920s as part of the Great Migration. After study at Cooper Union and a stay in Europe in the late 1920s, she returned to New York in 1932 to establish her Studio of Arts and Crafts. With aid from the WPA, the studio eventually evolved into the Harlem Community Arts Center, which provided art instruction to some fifteen hundred constituents and was a model WPA facility visited by Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. Among Savage's students were Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and William Artis, who would go on to become renowned artists. In 1939, Savage was offered a professional commission by the organizers of the New York World's Fair to create her sculpture 'Lift Every Voice and Sing.' Unfortunately, at the close of the fair, Savage did not have the funds to store or to cast the 16-foot sculpture in bronze, and it was subsequently bulldozed. The last major showing of Savage's work and her attempts to further her career were unsuccessful. Her later career offers an uncanny parallel to that of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. The arrested professional progress of both women after the 1930s was due in large part to the cessation of the Harmon exhibitions and to the 1943 demise of the WPA Federal Art Project. The unparalleled opportunities afforded to black artists during this period were fleeting. As congressional budgets were cut or discontinued, as abstract expressionism began to replace social realism and other narrative art forms, and as socialist sentiments gave way to more conservative values, the opportunities for black artists diminished. Savage's genius survived however in the art of one of her most prodigious students, Jacob Lawrence. His famed Migration Series became the object of a bidding war in the late 1930s between the Phillips Collection in Washington DC and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Today, half of the 40 paintings reside in each museum. Lawrence's work is epitomized by images of Harlem and of black heroes and heroism. The aims and images of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance continue to hold sway over African American artists. Joyce Scott engages racial themes, in particular her abiding interest in watermelon as an index of black stereotyping. Faith Ringgold's 'Jazz Pictures' encapsulate her own cultural memory of the Harlem Renaissance and its booming jazz scene. Other contemporary artists choose to reify Elaine Locke's insistence during the Harlem Renaissance that African American artists look to the art of their ancestors for inspiration. Willie Cole used found bicycle parts to create an homage to the sacred Chihuahua or antelope of the Bamana people of Mali. Allison Tsar's 'Dying Slave' refers to the art historical past with its pose, extrapolating from Michelangelo's Renaissance sculpture of the same name, but anchoring the solar plexus of her roughly hewn dying slave is the Congo derived in Kizi cavity used by African sculptors and priests as a receptacle for curative and preternatural substances. Allison Tsar's aperture is a shallow crater that denotes injury, suffering, and transcendence—a confluence of vulnerable interior and protective exterior. She covers this sculpture's chest with hammered metal so that he seems protected from his own death. Wrist shackles corroborate the work's title, but the splendid physical bulk and vigor of the figure belie its implications. It's no longer the image of imminent death and slavery. While Michelangelo's sculpture signifies a neoplatonic enslavement expressed in physical form, Tsar's captive though bound, bodily exudes spiritual and even physical sovereignty, indicative of the tenets of the Harlem Renaissance. Many Harlem Renaissance artists have faded into obscurity, but their legacy has not. The black painters and sculptors of the 1920s and 1930s constitute a remarkable group of talents who overcame a variety of barriers and obstacles to achieve a lofty goal—that of reconstituting the

Augusta Savage, who faced persecution from her father for creating clay figures, won a Cooper Union scholarship ahead of 142 men and completed the four-year degree in just three years. Her sculptures depicted black people in dignified, realistic portraits challenging conventional stereotypes. Despite being accepted to the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France, the American selection committee revoked the offer when they discovered she was black. Her portrait bust of her nephew earned her a Paris fellowship. Upon returning, she set up a successful studio in Harlem and advocated for black artists in Government funding projects, leading to the creation of the Harlem Community Art Center where she became the first director. Hale Woodruff, who studied in Paris between 1927-1931 and became an apprentice under Diego Rivera in Mexico, created influential murals including the Amistad Mutiny mural at Talladega College. His six-panel mural cycle 'Interchange: The Art of the Negro' at Clark Atlanta University takes viewers on a visual journey through black contributions throughout history. Lois Mailou Jones, who studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, transformed her style and later served as cultural ambassador to Africa, traveling to 11 African countries over two years.

Restitution enables contemporary artists to be inspired by returned heritage. When Benin returned its treasures, artists created contemporary works based on the 26 Abomey treasures. This demonstrates how restitution creates a circulation, dialogue, and mutual understanding. It allows for the creation of new art that connects heritage to contemporary expression while reaching global audiences. Universalism in museums can coexist with restitution. Objects that arrived through exchange, gifts, or proper circulation can remain in northern museums while dialogue continues. The goal is to build museums in Africa with conservators, artists, and networks while maintaining pieces in northern museums when they arrived under appropriate conditions. This avoids the trap of completely removing objects from northern collections.

Archiving contemporary art differs fundamentally from museum preservation because archives document the ephemeral, process-oriented nature of modern artistic practice, requiring archivists to make subjective selections that capture not just artworks but also the context, correspondence, and personal artifacts that reveal an artist's life and creative process; this archival work serves as a bridge between the present and future, preserving cultural memory while acknowledging that contemporary art resists traditional preservation methods due to its inherent transience and the ongoing evolution of artistic practice.

The instructor provides contemporary examples to demonstrate the continuity of art restitution issues: the return of Maori heads to New Zealand, the return of Korean manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale de France to South Korea (originally seized during a French punitive expedition in the mid-19th century), and the return of archaeological pieces from Machu Picchu by Yale University to Peru. These examples show that the issues discussed in 1815 remain relevant today. The instructor also shows how restitutions are often accompanied by elaborate ceremonies and performances that serve political purposes, including the 1948 exhibition in Munich of artworks returned to Germany by the Americans, where ticket sales supported war orphans.

In the 21st century, contemporary artists have developed a fourth moment of archival practice, utilizing archives not merely for historical documentation but as active tools to explain social histories, engage with political issues, and explore the relationship between present, future, and past; this practice involves a fundamental paradox where the passionate drive to preserve everything conflicts with the inherent necessity of selective forgetting, creating a dialectical tension between memory and amnesia in the archival process.

Contemporary artists increasingly engage deeply with archives to reclaim and celebrate overlooked histories. The artist researched the Green Book directory, discovering the creative endeavor of Victor and Alma Green who compiled data through their segregated postal worker network to help Black travelers navigate segregation. The artist created exhibitions honoring their design and achievement. Similarly, examining Patrick Kelly's archive revealed mood boards and personal notes that informed new bodies of work, demonstrating how archival research informs contemporary artistic practice.