Alain Locke and the Visual Arts by Kobena Mercer is an enthralling saga of ideas. The centerpiece of the book is a grand consideration of Locke’s The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art (1940), but along the way, Mercer explains the cultural theorist’s ideological battles of the 1920s with W. E. B. Du Bois (Locke counterstated Du Bois’s “all art is propaganda”) and the collector Albert C. Barnes (over African art). It is an indispensable addition to the proliferating scholarship on Locke (1885–1954) and, by extension, to American thought in the twentieth century, with potentially wide-ranging relevance to broader problems of the present. Locke’s composite model of culture still challenges prevailing trends. Mercer, a professor of art history at Bard College, profitably approaches Locke’s thinking from a cultural-studies angle.

Locke was a professor of philosophy at Howard whose expertise was on value, and although he is perhaps more closely associated with literature, he was just as involved with the visual arts. As an intellectual impresario of the Harlem Renaissance, he facilitated the distribution of both art forms to the general public, not least via his editorial work on the March 1925 number of Survey Graphic and the incomparably influential anthology based on that issue, The New Negro: An Interpretation. But Locke lived two and a half decades beyond his achievements of the 1920s. “Locke’s 1940s output is mostly neglected when he is celebrated only for his 1920s cultural