Mr Archibald Motley Jr via Mr Walter Mosley and Hollywood tales…

  • Archibald Motley Jr-Bronzeville At Night-Harlem Renaissance-Devil In A Blue Dress-1995 film-Oswald Mosley-Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity

    I have something of a soft-spot for the 1995 film adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil In A Blue Dress gumshoe (almost) origin story – it’s a beautiful stepping into another time and place (Los Angeles in the 1948 to be precise), a pixel perfect recreation of another time…

    …it was via the film that I came across the work of Archibald Motley Jr, who is considered to be a part of the Harlem Renaissance movement, which is a phrase used to describe a blooming of black cultural and related social activity from the end of the First World War until around the mid-1930s.

    Archibald Motley Jr-Harlem Renaissance-Devil In A Blue Dress-1995 film-Oswald Mosley-Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity-night scene

    Archibald Motley Jr’s Bronzeville At Night painting (see top of the page) is used as the backdrop to the opening titles/sequence of Devil In A Blue Dress and it along with some of his other work captures a sense of the spirit of black nightlife and shennanigans – a kind of culturally specific, vivid and vivaciousness counterpart to the quiet and still of Edward Hopper’s work.

    If the street life, bars and activity in Motley’s paintings aren’t speakeasies they sure as heck feel like they should be – something that is reflected in the film where one of the main nightlife dens is run as an unlicensed establishment by a former prohibition era bar owner who just found that he liked the speakeasy way of doing things after repealment and just kept on working like that…

    Archibald Motley Jr-Harlem Renaissance-Devil In A Blue Dress-1995 film-Oswald Mosley-Afterhours Sleaze and Dignity

    …and a different time and place but also representing/capturing of such things in both Motley’s paintings and Devil In A Blue Dress is something that although it may be geographically more than a hop, skip and a jump from similar places and times in say Soho back in the day and maybe more overtly expressive but in spirit they are but on the next street corner…

    Peruse Walter Mosley’s novel here, the film here and Mr Motley Jr here.

     

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