New Negro Artists in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s

“In the very process of being transplanted,” wrote Alain Locke in 1925, “the Negro is ­becoming transformed.” ¹ Although Locke was speaking of the Great Migration in the early twentieth century when some four hundred thousand African Americans left the rural South for the urban North in search of greater opportunities, ² his words also ring true for the African American painters and sculptors who launched their careers in cities such as New York, between the world wars; there they were transformed into New Negro artists—black modernists. ³