Harlem Experiment

TRICKY TOM IS AT IT AGAIN read one of the placards waved by 40 or so pickets in front of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week. They were protesting Director Thomas P. F. Hoving's choice of material for "Harlem On My Mind," an exhibition devoted to "the cultural capital of Black America, 1900-1968." The show contained no paintings by black artists -- or, for that matter, by white artists. Organized by Allon Schoener, Visual Arts Di rector of the N. Y. State Council on the Arts and a white man, with Negro Audio Engineer Donald Harper and Negro Photographer Reginald McGhee, it filled 14 of the Met's galleries with 600 photographic blowups and slides, plus videotapes and recordings.

Even before it opened, "Harlem On My Mind"* had drawn brickbats. John Canaday, the New York Times's senior art critic, declared that he would not review the show. "Apparently," he sniffed, it had "no art." Mayor John Lindsay charged that an essay by a 17-year-old Harlem schoolgirl, reprinted in the catalogue and containing a remarkably mature discussion of anti-Semitism among Negroes, was "racist." Apparently as a result of his charges, 60 guests invited to the opening canceled out.

Saddest of all, perhaps, an unidentified vandal slipped into the Met's European-paintings gallery and scratched a small H into the corners of ten paintings (none was seriously damaged). "An act by a very sick individual," said Hoving. He was hardly fazed, however, by the complaints about the show. "From time to time, a great institution must do something highly experimental," he observed. "It is necessary to keep alive and thinking."

Whether "art" or not, the show is marvelously evocative and dramatically presented. The first galleries, filled with old pictures and resounding to taped melodies of spirituals and ragtime, depict Harlem as it was in the early years of the century: a prosperous white neighborhood. By 1905, Negroes from the South had begun to trickle in--living then, as now, in appallingly overcrowded quarters. In those far-off days, as recorded by James Vanderzee, a gifted but little-known Harlem photographer who is now 82, Negroes did their best to look more respectable than whites, genteelly taking tea in beauty parlors and marching soberly straw-hatted in parades.

During the 1920s, when many welfare agencies refused to care for Negroes, Harlem's struggling middle classes looked after their own sick, poor and aged. They also sponsored a "Black Renaissance," led by W.E.B. Du Bois and his magazine, Crisis.

Harlem's overwhelming musical impact on the jazz age is conveyed by a room where pictures of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Bessie Smith are flashed onto eight screens, while loudspeakers boom their music.

For the 1930s, the mood is set by a winding passage lined with photographs of hungry men. "Last Hired, First Fired" was the rule for Negro workers in the Depression. Yet "Harlem On My Mind" leaves the viewer feeling more alive, aware, and deeply sympathetic to his fellow man--which is, after all, what art is supposed to do.

*Financed by a $225,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

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