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Charles Henry Alston

Girl in a Red Dress

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SPECIAL EXHIBITION
Man Ray
Man Ray: When Objects Dream is the first exhibition to situate the rayograph, Man Ray’s signature accomplishment, in relation to his larger body of work of the 1910s and 1920s. Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 lenders, the exhibition will feature approximately 60 rayographs and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs—including some of the artist’s most iconic works—to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice.
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About the Artwork

Girl in a Red Dress, 1934. Charles Henry Alston. Oil on canvas. Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift and George A. Hearn Fund, 2021. © Estate of Charles Henry Alston.
Art historian Richard Powell describes Girl in a Red Dress as an exemplary portrayal of the "New Negro" woman who is "defiantly black, beautiful, and feminine, yet also unsettled, mysterious, and utterly modern." Alston, a foundational figure of the Harlem Renaissance, depicts the young woman in a way that embodies the artist’s synthesis of African aesthetics (in this case resonant with Fang reliquary busts) and modernist pictorial flatness in portrayals of African American subjects. Her graceful, elongated neck and sculpturally rendered face, combined with stylized modern attire and a contemplative gaze to the side, convey an enigmatic affect in which the unnamed sitter is seemingly oblivious to the viewer. Representations such as this one manifest the Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke’s exhortation that "art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid."

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Charles Henry Alston
Fashion
Figures
Portraits
Womens Portraits
Women
Harlem Renaissance
People
20th Century
American Art
African American Artists
Modernism
1930s
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© Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025
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