HUGHES'S POSTCARDS
Langston Hughes's collected postcards reveal his position as a tourist and consumer of art, while reinforcing the notion of the visual medium producing objects of culture that Hughes was drawn to with his work and beyond. Found in the archives of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Langston Hughes collected numerous postcards from across the United States and abroad. Their subjects are just as a broad as his travels; however, those below highlight the variety and diversity of depictions and representations of the Black community. As you will see - the subjects of these postcards range from laborers in Kentucky to royalty in Africa, from laughing and jovial to weakened and tired, and from children to adults. These subjects exemplify Hughes's words in his poem "Negro."
In this poem he writes: "I've been a slave," "I've been a worker," "I've been a singer," "I've been a victim," "I am a Negro."
Find the full poem under the Poems tab above.
All images courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Permission granted by Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
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What do these postcards reveal?
In these personal samples of art, we see how Hughes compiled his own art collection that has its roots in artists and depictions from Ethiopia to Spain to Kentucky: the art of the world could be held in his hands.
Furthermore, we see how broad the representations that Hughes collected are. While some of these postcards may not seem to illuminate such representation - on second glance these pieces raise compelling points for consideration and reflection. For example, A Cage and Its Bird leads us to almost automatically think of Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the metaphor of African Americans as caged birds signing for freedom. Additionally, we can also see how these postcards present problems: Eastman Johnson's piece is labeled as Old Kentucky Home, when it is actually titled Negro Life at the South. This title change inverts the focus of the piece to the home. What impacts does this have on the viewer? How does the representation of African Americans seem lessened due to this? Or how does this paint African Americans as integral to the space of the home in Kentucky?
It is also important to consider the role of gender: how does the representation and depiction of African American and African women compare to that of men? While these postcards provide only a very concise and compact collection of an expansive world's worth of art - these pieces show the women to be especially stoic, especially the Cast Bronze Head of a Girl. Similarly and of great significance, the statue of Our Lady of Montserrat, or la Mare de Déu de Montserrat, is referred to as La Moreneta, The Dark Little One, and known as one of the Black Madonnas ("Catholic Tradition"). Therefore, Hughes held in possession a Black Holy Mother. What do these grand, royal, exuberant and holy depictions reveal of Hughes's perspective on the Black woman?
These collected portraits and depictions from around the world seem to align with Hughes's poem "My People."
My People
Langston Hughes
The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
These postcards also make one question the psychology behind them: what does this palm-sized gallery of postcards left unset reveal of Hughes? Or even more broadly: what can we discern through the dissemination of art through postcards?
In considering the genre of postcards, Bornstein addresses how printed literature is housed universally: “If the ‘Mona Lisa’ is in the Louvre, King Lear is on pages all over the world” (56). Yet, what of printed art? Hughes had his own museum that could fit in the palm of his hand: pieces situated in the Louvre were as close to him as Harlem was. Similarly, Hughes’s own work was found all over the world, and read by millions in America were through newspapers and magazines (Miller). Yet, is the effect of postcards comparable to that of his writing found in printed media?
While I cannot accurately speak to the dissemination patterns and trends of postcards, we can see and consider that through these postcards Hughes was able to compile relics and artifacts denoting his travels and experiences. Furthermore, from these postcards we see that nearly all come from art or cultural museums, and a significant majority come from abroad, as seen in the map below. Therefore, this is a unique compilation of art in that the average American was unlikely to have access to these pieces, let alone the affordances to become in possession of them due to travel expenses, the cost of admittance to such museums, and then the cost of the postcards in themselves. But fascinatingly, we see Hughes as an art and cultural collector through these postcards. He was able to possess and own a museum of his own in an America where he could not often afford to live off of the very art he produced himself. Therefore, the postcards present a paradox: a starving artist and writer owning some of the grandest art in the world in a 5.8” x 4.1” form.
LANGSTON HUGHES AS TOURIST
Below you can find a map tracing where these postcards came from and where Langston Hughes might have collected them. Through this map we can better visualize and reflect on Hughes's role as a world-traveler; an attribute integral to his life's work.
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