NARRATOR:

At the center of this painting a powerful, winged angel Gabriel stands astride both land and sea. Sent by God to summon the living and the dead to judgment, Gabriel holds the key to heaven in one hand and a trumpet in the other. At the sound of the trumpet, figures silhouetted against a ray of light and a bolt of lightning rise up to answer the call.

NANCY ANDERSON:

Aaron Douglas was looking at African art, at European modernism and combining elements of what he saw in both to create a stylized image for the African American experience in America. Evident in the painting are the flattened shapes, the eye of the figure of Gabriel, the waves, the concentric circles, and the shafts of light from above, all reflective of art deco and the fragmentation of cubism.

NARRATOR:

This painting is based on an illustration for God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, a book of poems written by James Weldon Johnson, which celebrated the passion and artistry of African American folk sermons. With this work, Douglas recast the biblical narrative and created an image as charismatic as the sermons celebrated in God’s Trombones.

Nancy Anderson, curator and head of American and British paintings.

NANCY ANDERSON:

James Weldon Johnson was a scholar and one of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s and extended until the Great Depression. It was a post–World War I effort to establish a new cultural image and community for African Americans.

NARRATOR:

Other leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including the writer and activist W. E. B. DuBois, encouraged Douglas’s artistic calling, with DuBois describing his images as daring, unconventional, and “wild with beauty.”