El Jaleo and Tongues (Holy Rollers)

      I have looked at Sargent's El Jaleo (1882) innumerable times at the Gardner Museum in Boston. For a time we owned a cheap reproduction (see my essay "Postcard Picassos"), so I have had even more exposure to it. I haven't looked closely at Archibald Motley Jr.'s Tongues (Holy Rollers) (1929), whose central figure in white, it is believed, may refer to Elder Lucy Smith, a famous Chicago faith healer -- even though the body type of Motley's dancer doesn't match Smith's hefty one. I took the above image of the painting at MoMA on our recent trip to NYC. I was attracted to it because of its revival theme, even though the depiction dates after the timeline of my current project, ​The Missionary Factory, which is 1808-1908. I intended to use it as a screensaver, so I could give it some scrutiny. As I was looking at it at MoMA, however, El Jaleo suddenly came to mind. In addition to the two white figures, there are also the complementary musicians. Did Motley do this consciously? Is it an homage?  Has anyone else noticed the compositional similarities? I wondered. AI instantly had the answer at least to my last question, delivering it blandly: "The two works are often compared for their dynamic portrayal of cultural and performance-based scenes, with Motley's work focusing on Black American spiritual experience and Sargent's on Spanish culture." Looking into it further, I discovered that art historian Valerie Mercer (pictured), curator and head of the General Motors Center for African American Art  at  the Detroit Institute of Arts, made the comparison in her catalog essay for the  exhibition "Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist," which I saw at the Whitney about ten years ago. I missed the likeness that time; not this time, probably because I had made a conscious effort to look more closely at fewer objects on my MoMA visit this time...