ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
WASHINGTON, DC---When the National Gallery of Art opened to the public in
1941, the nucleus of its collection consisted of 126 paintings and 26 sculptures given by Andrew Mellon—from
Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation to
Raphael’s Alba Madonna. One of the museum's most recent acquisitions (
May 2015) is
The Judgement Day by
Aaron Douglas (1899 – 1979), an African American artist who lived in Harlem during the mid- 1920s.
The Judgment Day, is the final painting in the series of eight, and is the first work by Douglas to enter the collection. At the center of the composition a powerful black Gabriel stands astride earth and sea. With trumpet call, the archangel summons the nations of the earth to judgment. Recasting both the biblical narrative and the visual vocabulary of art deco and synthetic cubism, Douglas created an image as racially impassioned as the sermons of the black preachers celebrated in God’s Trombones.
