“Humor Ill-Advised, If Not Altogether Tasteless?”

Chapter 4 examines the ways in which caricature and stereotype informed articulations of African Americans in early twentieth-century art and visual culture. Although many artists embraced stereotypical figuration during this period for immediate readability, the appearance of caricatured figuration in the work of Motley and many of his contemporaries raises questions about the weight of historical representations of blackness within the collective mind. This chapter considers the use of caricature in relation to modernist forms of distortion and exaggeration, the persistence and relative acceptance of racial stereotype in visual culture—particularly as a satirical device—and the various subjectivities that come to play in defining methods of representation as acceptable or harmful. While emphasizing the variety of opinions constituting affirmative portrayals of blackness, a debate that played out in literature as well as art, this chapter explores how representations of black identity continued to rely on stereotype despite the discourse of racial reinvention.