What little critical discussion exists on Harlem Gallery (1965) has focused on the question of whether high modernist verse is appropriate to African American art. But Tolson's work is itself “about” modernism—and modernism's relation to African American culture; it is thus better read for its idea of an African American avant-garde than for the question of whether its technique is recognizably “modernist.” The poem's ideological commitment to modernism eventually involves the delegitimation of separatist populism, and Harlem Gallery achieves its argumentative (ideological) “certainty” largely by refusing to specify the historical and cultural position of the avant-garde it invokes—an avant-garde that had, by 1965, become part of the cultural lingua franca. In critical retrospect, however, Tolson's charged advocacy of modernism places him close and yet opposed to Houston Baker, whose Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance can be read as a postmodern, revisionary redefinition of what Tolson took African American modernism to be.