Archibald John Motley Jr., Bronzeville at Night

0:00:06.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art looking at a painting by Archibald John Motley Jr., and it’s called Bronzeville at Night. It was painted soon after the Second World War in 1949.

0:00:19.0 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: What we have here is the heterogeneous array of people that inhabited Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, which was, during the previous decades, one of the foremost centers of Black cultural life.

0:00:32.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s filled with people, and we’re at an intersection with cars, with buses, with all kinds of different people of different ages, with different pursuits in life. And it’s so interesting that the artist has chosen night rather than day. Nocturnes are often, in the history of art, poetic and quiet, but this is full of life. It’s full of music. It’s full of noise and movement.

0:00:57.2 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: It’s a very audible painting, and the choice of an intersection is very deliberate. The work seems to be depicting this hectic energy. However, Motley organized the composition in a very thoughtful and deliberate way. He had been a student of the old masters at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in Paris, where he studied for a year under the auspices of a Guggenheim Fellowship. And here what you have is figures that are organized almost as in a frieze. You have a foreground, a middle ground, and a background. In this foreground, you have what could be described as the centerpiece of the painting, a couple, very well-dressed, going for a night in the town, flanked by a child eating a treat of some sort. And even further to the right, you have this character with a kind of downtrodden gait, downcast posture, hands in his pockets, shirt sleeves rolled up.

0:01:54.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s interesting how the artist has constructed this frieze with the figures in the center, the stars of the composition. The light is on them. They are almost on the stage that is the street. And then as the light begins to soften towards the bottom left and right edges of the canvas, we actually have to sort of seek out those additional figures.

0:02:15.1 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: You have figures that are standing in the shadows. Bronzeville at Night is kind of the culmination of Archibald John Motley Jr.’s pursuit of the depiction of light. And we have to think about the turn of the 20th century as a moment where gas light begins to be substituted by electrical light, and then you have this nightscape and this amazing contrast of lights, perhaps a moonlit scene. But then you also have the artificial light that shines from the interiors of the building. You have neon signage. You also have a street lamp.

0:02:51.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: Look at the standing stop lights, for example. We are at a red light. We could even perhaps be a bit high up in a truck or a bus, looking at the scene before us, waiting for that light to change as the pedestrians and the cars move in front of us. But if you look closely, you don’t just see the red glow of the light that’s facing us, but you also see this lovely, soft green that is allowing the cross traffic to move. And look at that incredible glow of the bottom of those three lights, both in the stop light that’s just before us on the right, and the one that’s across the street on the left. And then there’s the pure white light of the street lamp, which is both illuminating this scene, but it’s also almost opaque in its light. It’s actually veiling the things behind it in its brightness. And so the artist is allowing for kind of a wonderful attention to the qualities of light and to the light functioning as a kind of star in the painting itself, but also this really intense color, these intense blues that fill the entire canvas, these bright sharp areas of red, those little bits of green. These colors drive home in a sense, the kaleidoscope, that is the city at night.

0:04:00.1 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: Motley does not actually paint a horizon, but simply allows the street to dissolve into the night sky, so that this bus seems to be just ascending into the stars. And the figure to the left does not look like it’s standing on the street but is almost floating.

0:04:15.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: You have large windows in the upper right foreground. They become much smaller in the frame house just beyond. And then you can see apartment buildings where the windows become even smaller. There are still little points of light, but now those are stars. And so we’ve gone from the physical reality to something that is slightly more magical.

0:04:34.0 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: And this actually recalls the fact that by 1949, The Stroll in Bronzeville was not really the kind of thriving urban center of Black wealth and dynamic social culture, but it had already been suffering from decades of neglect, of redlining, of social and housing policies that have impacted detrimentally the area. It’s almost as if in this, his last depiction of Bronzeville, Motley’s not so much depicting a real place as depicting a place that is in his memory. And I think that this kind of background points us in that direction.

This work at Art Bridges

Oral history interview with Archibald Motley

Richard J. Powell, editor, Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, exhibition catalogue (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

1945–80 in the United States, an introduction