The Charleston Renaissance is a period between World Wars I and II in which the city of Charleston, South Carolina, experienced a boom in the arts as artists, writers, architects, and historical preservationists came together to improve and represent their city. [1] [2] The Charleston Renaissance was related to the larger interwar artistic movement known as the Southern Renaissance and is credited with helping to spur the city's tourist industry. [3]
In the Antebellum era, Charleston was one of the ten largest cities in America. The Civil War destroyed the city's prosperity, and the economic after-effects lingered through the Reconstruction era into the early 20th century. Beginning around World War I, however, the city experienced a renaissance in the arts as the local art community worked on bettering their city and representing it in various media. [1] [2] The Charleston Renaissance contributed to the rise of such art institutions as the Gibbes Museum of Art (which grew out of the Carolina Art Association's gallery) and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. [3] It lasted through the Great Depression until World War II. [4]
Writers associated with the movement include DuBose Heyward (author of the book on which the opera Porgy and Bess was based), John Bennett (author of the first scholarly work on the Gullah language), novelists Josephine Pinckney and Julia Peterkin, poets Hervey Allen, Helen von Kolnitz Hyer, and Beatrice Ravenel, and playwright Dorothy Heyward.
On the institutional front, Laura Bragg became the first woman to run a publicly funded art museum in America when she became the director of the Charleston Museum. [5]
The Charleston Renaissance is most closely associated with the visual arts, however. The four leading artists of the movement are Alfred Hutty, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Elizabeth O'Neill Verner. [1] Of these, Smith and Verner were Charleston natives, while Taylor hailed from elsewhere in the state and Hutty came from New York. [1] Other visual artists considered part of the movement include Edwin Harleston, Anne Taylor Nash, and William Posey Silva. [3] Visiting artists such as Ellen Day Hale, Gabrielle D. Clements, Edward Hopper, and Childe Hassam are sometimes included in the group. [6]
The Charleston Renaissance artists' oil paintings, watercolors, and prints documented Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry around the city through sometimes romanticized landscapes, architectural studies, and scenes of daily life past and present. The artists specialized in prints, including woodblocks and etchings, which sold more readily to tourists and other visitors than paintings did and which helped to spread the imagery of the movement throughout the country. [6] Local artists collectively bought a press and—influenced in part by visiting artists Hale and Clements—formed the Charleston Etchers' Club to promote printmaking as a medium. [6]
Smith, Verner, and others also banded together to champion preservation of the city's remaining historic buildings. The Preservation Society of Charleston was formed in the 1920s, and in 1928 the city's first "historic house" museum was founded. [6] In 1931, the city gained its first historic district, which placed zoning restrictions on all historic structures in the lower part of the Charleston peninsula. [6]
In 1998, the Greenville County Museum of Art mounted a large exhibition, "The Charleston Renaissance," which then traveled to museums in Columbia, Charleston, and Augusta (Georgia) over the next three years. [4]
The Gibbes Museum of Art, formerly known as the Gibbes Art Gallery, is an art museum in Charleston, South Carolina. Established as the Carolina Art Association in 1858, the museum moved into a new Beaux Arts building at 135 Meeting Street, in the Charleston Historic District, in 1905. The Gibbes houses a premier collection of over 10,000 works of fine art, principally American works, many with a connection to Charleston or the South.
Elizabeth O'Neill Verner was an artist, author, lecturer, and preservationist who was one of the leaders of the Charleston Renaissance. She has been called "the best-known woman artist of South Carolina of the twentieth century."
Josephine Lyons Scott Pinckney was a novelist and poet in the literary revival of the American South after World War I. Her first best-selling novel was the social comedy, Three O'clock Dinner (1945).
John Bennett was an American author who is best known for the children's books that he wrote and illustrated. Some of them are anthologies of stories based on black folk tales, especially those drawn from the Gullah culture. He is considered to be a leading figure of the Charleston Renaissance.
The Heyward-Washington House is a historic house museum at 87 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Built in 1772, it was home to Thomas Heyward, Jr., a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence, and was where George Washington stayed during his 1791 visit to the city. It is now owned and operated by the Charleston Museum. Furnished for the late 18th century, the house includes a collection of Charleston-made furniture. Other structures include the carriage shed and 1740s kitchen building.
David Burns Hyer was an American architect who practiced in Charleston, South Carolina and Orlando, Florida during the first half of the twentieth century, designing civic buildings in the Neoclassical Revival and Mediterranean Revival styles.
Rebecca Brewton Motte (1737–1815) was a plantation owner in South Carolina and townhouse owner in its chief city of Charleston. She was known as a patriot in the American Revolution, supplying continental forces with food and supplies for five years. By the end of the war, she had become one of the wealthiest individuals in the state, having inherited property from both her older brother Miles Brewton, who was lost at sea in 1775, and her husband Jacob Motte, who died in 1780.
James West Fraser is an American artist. One of the leading artists in the representational/En Plein Air tradition, Fraser has built his career on richly painted, atmospheric vistas of cities, coasts, and the landscape.
Helen von Kolnitz Hyer was an American poet. She was named by Governor John C. West as the second South Carolina Poet Laureate from 1974 to 1983.
William M. Halsey (1915–1999) was an influential abstract artist in the American Southeast, particularly in his home state of South Carolina. He was represented by the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City (1948–53). His mural studies for the Baltimore Hebrew Congregational Temple were included in Synagogue Art Today at the Jewish Museum, New York City (1952). His work was included in the annual International Exhibition of Watercolors, the Art Institute of Chicago. He had work in the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings (1953). A mid-career retrospective was held at the Greenville County Museum of Art in 1972 and then traveled to the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Florence Museum, Florence, South Carolina.
Alice Ravenel Huger Smith was an American painter and printmaker. She was one of the leading figures in the so-called Charleston Renaissance, along with Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Alfred Hutty, and Anna Heyward Taylor.
Anna Heyward Taylor was a painter and printmaker who is considered one of the leading artists of the Charleston Renaissance.
Alfred Heber Hutty was a 20th-century American artist who is considered one of the leading figures of the Charleston Renaissance. His oeuvre ranges from impressionist landscape paintings to detailed drawings and prints of life in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He was active in local arts organizations, helping to found both an art school and an etchers' club.
Edwin Augustus Harleston was an American artist and founding president of the Charleston, South Carolina, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was excluded from the whites-only artistic movement known as the Charleston Renaissance.
Beatrice Witte Ravenel was an American poet associated with the Charleston Renaissance in South Carolina.
Laura Mary Bragg was an American museum director who became the first woman to run a publicly funded art museum in America when she was named the director of the Charleston Museum in 1920. She later directed the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts and advised on the reorganization of the Valentine Museum in Virginia. She is also known for developing a widely copied form of traveling museum exhibition for schools called a "Bragg Box."
William (Billy) Posey Silva, habitually cited as William Silva (1859–1948), was an early 20th century American painter noted for atmospheric landscapes painted in a lyrical impressionist style. His work is associated with the Charleston Renaissance and with the art colony in Carmel, California, where he lived for thirty-six years.
The Southern States Art League, originally called the All-Southern Art Association, was formed in the 1920s to draw attention to artists from the southern United States. A number of its early members were closely associated with the Charleston Renaissance, and it has been credited with helping to establish the South as "a viable art center and formidable force in the realm of American culture."
Anne Taylor Nash (1884–1968) was an American painter, largely of portraits.
Edward "Ned" I.R. Jennings was an artist of the Charleston Renaissance era, one of the first abstract artists in the city.