For instance Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues,” a German immigrant artist captured “the lazy sway” of a singer at his piano. Cubist fragments kind the background of a cabaret and nighttime New York cityscape. That is the world of Winold Reiss, the place European modernism meets African American vernacular tradition. Reiss ruptured divisions between cultures and nations in addition to utilized and high quality artwork. His oeuvre encompassed work, ebook designs, posters, tapestries, and inside and architectural design. His abilities and vary are so spectacular that his relative absence from Twentieth-century American artwork historical past appears unaccountable. The 14 contributors — curators, artwork historians, artists, and cultural critics from each side of the Atlantic — to the eclectic anthology The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886-1953): (Trans) National Approaches to His Work provide compelling and provocative causes to rectify that omission. (His work may presently be seen in The Art of Winold Reiss: An Immigrant Modernist on the New York Historic Society Museum & Library.)
A chronology of the artist’s life and work follows a thorough introduction by editor Frank Mehring. Reiss emigrated from Germany to New York Metropolis in 1913, arriving because the Armory present shook the New York artwork world into modernist mode. His training in high quality and utilized arts, and his background within the Jugendstil design motion (which paralleled Artwork Nouveau), formed his inventive imaginative and prescient. His eclecticism, argue a number of contributors, has contributed to his relative absence in trendy artwork historical past. His work is tough to categorize, Julie Levin Caro states, partly as a result of American modernism targeted on easel portray in dialogue with France. The stigma hooked up to business artwork additionally blinded critics to his improvements.
Numerous essays discover Reiss’s design enterprise, his enduring affect on print tradition, his technical strategies, together with pastel and Conté crayon, and significantly his introduction of vibrant colour. “The American public wants color and demands it,” he stated of his good tableaus; it “makes the eye joyful and happy.” His color-saturated New York Metropolis: on the covers of the journal he based, Trendy Artwork Collector, on ebook jackets, posters, and within the interiors of innumerable motels, eating places, and residence buildings. As C. Ford Peatross recounts, any strolling New Yorker would have encountered his designs, many influenced by African American and Native American cultures and designs.
Reiss’s political dedication to ethnic range and portrayals of individuals of colour additionally marginalized him amongst historians creating the fashionable artwork canon. The place does an artist who crossed boundaries slot in?
Reiss’s dedication to range started in childhood. Julie Kennedy and different contributors stress the affect of his childhood, touring along with his artist father by the Black Forest and sketching peasants in conventional costume. Buffalo Invoice’s touring exhibits and Karl Might’s journey novels about American Indians formed his early enthusiasm for the United States. After his first foray to the Blackfeet reservation, he deserted dangerous stereotypes of Indigenous individuals; his portraits depicted people who wore western fits in addition to conventional costume. This intention to signify the person subjectivities, moderately than stereotypes, of individuals of colour edged him from the mainstream, writes Jeffrey C. Stewart. He describes how the artist “reinvented himself as the mirror of America.” Marginalized communities taught him “the codes of representation as to how they wanted to be seen.” From the Blackfeet reservation to Harlem, Reiss immersed himself on this planet of the individuals he represented, forming shut ties with many people.
The Harlem Renaissance echoes all through the ebook. Reiss grew to become buddies with Alain Locke by their collaboration on two groundbreaking publications: the 1925 Harlem situation of the progressive journal Survey Graphic, adopted by the legendary anthology The New Negro. Reiss contributed designs and portraits of the African American neighborhood in New York, as did his pupil, artist Aaron Douglas. Reiss’s portrait “Harlem Girl with Blanket” (c. 1925) depicts a younger Black lady draped with a brilliant yellow Indian blanket. The cultural combine, the lady’s reasonable options and pure coiffure, fused “into one complex visual statement of American identity,” each multifaceted and distinctly trendy.
Sydelle Rubin-Dienstfrey explores Reiss’s portraits amid the early Twentieth century’s shifting ideas of race. One other German immigrant, anthropologist Franz Boas, had challenged a prevalent perception in racial hierarchies. His theories of cultural relativity and racial equality influenced Reiss, together with Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Rubin-Dienstfrey describes each as “ethnographic” for his or her concentrated observations of each day life in Harlem. Reiss painted staff, lecturers, and different professionals but in addition the most important figures of the Renaissance, amongst them Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
The public selectively embraced Reiss’s portraits of individuals of colour. Whereas a 1920 present of his Blackfeet pictures bought out, no New York gallery would exhibit his Harlem portraits, his son Tjark lamented. That didn’t deter Reiss from his lifelong dedication to the variety of individuals. Jeffrey C. Stewart calls him an “exile from whiteness.”
Julie Levin Caro explores how Reiss’s pedagogy challenged the established order within the artwork faculties he established in New York Metropolis, Woodstock, and close to the Blackfeet reservation. His legendary Greenwich Village studio/faculty was a hub the place individuals of various races and genders sketched nude fashions collectively, a follow prohibited in established artwork faculties. As Patricia Hills proposes, Reiss hoped for a extra democratic America; its foundation could be empathy, in artwork in addition to society. Visible artwork, music, and dance combined within the studio. One pupil recalled that Paul Robeson sang and performed the piano throughout class. Jens Barnieck explores Reiss’s portraits of Isadora Duncan’s dancers and of modernist composer and theosophist Dane Rudhyar. Reiss shared a few of Rudhyar’s non secular beliefs, although not publicly. Nonetheless, a theosophist gave the eulogy at his funeral.
The ebook avoids hagiography by elevating questions. Did Reiss’s Blackfeet portraits create another, albeit extra respectful, stereotype, asks Jochen Wierich. How did Reiss steadiness the wants of economic sponsors just like the Nice Northern Railway along with his political and aesthetic agenda? A number of contributors ponder how Reiss’s work would possibly inadvertently assist a view of Indigenous and African American life and artwork as extra “authentic” or spiritually advanced.
In 1942, Reiss once more collaborated with Alain Locke and Survey Graphic editor Paul Kellogg on the problem Coloration: Unfinished Enterprise of Democracy. He created concentric facial profiles of 5 racial/ethnic teams for the duvet. He linked the profiles to pictures of the world’s continents to visualise the hope he, Kellogg, and Locke shared: that a transnational, modernist artwork might problem divisions between cultures and communities, and between the professed beliefs of American democracy and our failure to attain them. That purpose didn’t bypass the messiness of cultural exchanges, interactions, and generally, confrontations. This anthology explores how totally Reiss captured the complexities recommended in that Survey Graphic cowl.
Every essay highlights Reiss as a pioneer with present significance. Peatross suggests Reiss as a “proto Warhol, in that he made the popular heroic and ennobled the ordinary.” In distinction to Warhol’s fascination with mass manufacturing and sameness, nevertheless, Reiss celebrated distinction.
Few of Reiss’s architectural and inside designs have survived, aside from his 1933 Artwork Deco mosaic murals created for the Cincinnati Union Terminal. This assortment addresses that lacuna with spectacular reproductions of his artwork from interiors to portraits. The ebook is an important information for understanding modernism in a racially inclusive, transnational context, one which brings a unprecedented artist into its fold.
The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886-1953): (Trans) National Approaches to His Work edited by Frank Mehring (2022) is revealed by Deutscher Kunstverlag and is out there on-line and in bookstores.
The Art of Winold Reiss: An Immigrant Modernist continues on the New York Historic Society Museum & Library (170 Central Park West, Higher West Aspect, Manhattan) by October 9. The exhibition was curated by Marilyn Satin Kushner, curator of prints, images, and architectural collections, and Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of ornamental arts and particular exhibitions, with contributions from Wendy Nalani E. Ikemoto, senior curator of American artwork.