Blues

Artist Information

Archibald Motley was a bold and highly original modernist and one of the great visual chroniclers of twentieth-century American life. He first came to prominence in the 1920s during the early days of the Harlem Renaissance. He became one of the first black artists to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His training there was academic, rigorously focused on the human figure and steeped in European tradition. Motley’s sophisticated understanding of art history is especially apparent in his sympathetic portraits, but it was a history that he challenged and advanced with his raucous scenes of everyday urban life.