To illustrate Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” the German immigrant artist captured the singer’s “lazy rocking” behind his piano. Cubist fragments form the background of the cabaret and the nighttime cityscape of New York. This is the world of Winold Reiss, where European modernism meets African American folk culture. Reiss broke down the divisions between cultures and nations and applied and fine arts. His oeuvre included paintings, book designs, posters, tapestries and interior design and architectural design. His skills and range are so impressive that his relative absence from 20th-century American art history seems incomprehensible. The 14 authors – curators, art historians, artists and cultural critics from both sides of the Atlantic – for the eclectic anthology Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886-1953): (Trans)national approaches to his work offer compelling and provocative reasons. to correct this omission. (His work is also currently on view in The Art of Winold Reiss: An Immigrant Modernist at the New York Historical 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 in 1913, arriving just as the Armory exhibition was shaking the New York art world into modernist mode. His education in fine and applied arts and his background in the Jugendstil design movement (which paralleled Art Nouveau) shaped his artistic vision. His eclecticism, many authors argue, has contributed to his relative absence from modern art history. His work is difficult to categorize, states Julie Levin Caro, partly because American modernism focused on easel painting in dialogue with France. The stigma of commercial art also blinded critics to his innovations.
Various essays explore Reiss’ design activity, his lasting influence on print culture, his technical methods, including pastel and Conté crayon, and especially his introduction of vibrant colors. “The American public wants color and demands it,” he said of his brilliant tableaus; “makes the eye happy and happy”. His colorful New York City: on the covers of the Modern Art Collector magazine he founded, on book covers, posters and inside countless hotels, restaurants and apartment buildings. As C. Ford Peatross recounts, any New Yorker walking around would come across his designs, many influenced by African American and Native American cultures and designs.
Reiss’s political commitment to ethnic diversity and the depiction of people of color also marginalized him among the historians creating the canon of modern art. Where does an artist who crossed borders belong?
Reiss’ commitment to diversity began in childhood. Julie Kennedy and other authors emphasize the influence of his childhood, when he traveled with his artist father in the Black Forest and drew peasants in traditional costume. Buffalo Bill’s traveling shows and Karl May’s American Indian adventure novels shaped his early fascination with the United States. After his first trek to the Blackfeet reservation, he abandoned harmful stereotypes about Native Americans; his portraits depicted individuals wearing Western dress and traditional clothing. This intention to represent the individual subjectivities, rather than stereotypes, of black people distanced him from the mainstream, writes Jeffrey C. Stewart. He describes how the artist “reinvented himself as a mirror of America.” Marginalized communities taught him “the code of representing how they want to be seen.” From the Blackfeet reservation to Harlem, Reiss immersed himself in the world of the people he represented and formed close bonds with many individuals.
The Harlem Renaissance resonates throughout the book. Reiss befriended Alain Locke through their collaboration on two seminal publications: the 1925 Harlem issue of the progressive journal Survey Graphic, followed by the legendary anthology The New Negro. Reiss contributed models and portraits of the African-American community in New York, as did his student, artist Aaron Douglas. Reiss’s portrait “Harlem Girl with Blanket” (c. 1925) shows a young black woman draped in a bright yellow Indian blanket. The cultural mix, the girl’s realistic features and natural hairstyle blended “into one complex visual statement of American identity,” both multifaceted and distinctly modern.
Sydelle Rubin-Dienstfrey explores Reiss’s portraits amid changing concepts of race in the early 20th century. Another German immigrant, the anthropologist Franz Boas, challenged prevailing beliefs about racial hierarchies. His theories of cultural relativity and racial equality influenced Reiss, along with the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Rubin-Dienstfrey describes both as “ethnographic” because of their concentrated observations of daily life in Harlem. Reiss painted workers, teachers, and other professionals, as well as major figures of the Renaissance, including Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Reiss’ portraits of people of color were selectively accepted by the public. While a 1920 exhibition of his Blackfeet paintings sold out, no New York gallery exhibited his Harlem portraits, his son Tjark lamented. That hasn’t deterred Reiss from his lifelong commitment to human diversity. Jeffrey C. Stewart calls him “an exile from whiteness.”
Julie Levin Caro explores how Reiss’s pedagogy challenged the status quo in the art schools he founded in New York, Woodstock, and near the Blackfeet reservation. His legendary Greenwich Village studio/school was a center where people of different races and genders sketched nude models together, something forbidden in established art schools. As Patricia Hills suggests, Reiss hoped for a more democratic America; its basis would be empathy, both in art and in society. Visual art, music and dance were mixed in the studio. One student recalled Paul Robeson singing and playing the piano during class. Jens Barnieck explores Reiss’s portraits of the dancers Isadora Duncan and the modernist composer and theosophist Danet Rudhyar. Reiss shared some of Rudhyar’s spiritual beliefs, though not publicly. Nevertheless, the Theosophist had a eulogy at his funeral.
The book avoids hagiography by asking questions. Did Reiss’ portraits of the Blackfeet create an alternative, albeit more respectful, stereotype, asks Jochen Wierich. How did Reiss balance the needs of financial sponsors such as the Great Northern Railway with his own political and aesthetic agenda? Several authors consider how Reiss’s work may inadvertently support a view of Native and African American life and art as more “authentic” or spiritually evolved.
In 1942, Reiss collaborated again with Alain Locke and Survey Graphic editor Paul Kellogg to publish Color: Unfinished Business of Democracy. He created concentric facial profiles of five racial/ethnic groups for the cover. He juxtaposed the profiles with images of the world’s continents to visualize the hope he, Kellogg, and Locke shared: that transnational, modernist art could challenge the divisions between cultures and communities, and between the enjoined ideals of American democracy and our failure to achieve them . . This goal did not bypass the messiness of cultural exchanges, interactions and sometimes confrontations. This anthology explores how fully Reiss captured the complexity suggested on the cover of the Survey Graphic.
Each essay highlights Reiss as a pioneer with current relevance. Peatross suggests Reiss as “the proto-Warhol, for he made the folk heroic and ennobled the ordinary.” In contrast to Warhol’s fascination with mass production and equality, Reiss celebrated difference.
Few of Reiss’s architectural and interior designs survive, except for his 1933 Art Deco mosaic murals created for the Cincinnati Union Terminal. This collection addresses this gap with spectacular reproductions of his art from interiors to portraits. The book is an essential guide to understanding modernism in a racially inclusive, transnational context that brings an extraordinary artist into its fold.
The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886-1953): (Trans)national Approaches to His Work, edited by Frank Mehring (2022), is published by Deutscher Kunstverlag and is available online and in bookstores.
The Art of Winold Reiss: An Immigrant Modernist Continues at the New York Historic Society Museum & Library (170 Central Park West, Upper West Side, Manhattan) until October 9. The exhibition was curated by Marilyn Satin Kushner, Curator of Prints, Photography and Architectural Collections, and Debra Schmidt Bach, Curator of Decorative Arts and Special Exhibitions, with contributions from Wendy Nalani E. Ikemoto, Senior Curator of American Art.
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Joanne B. Mulcahy is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Her books are Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz and Writing Abroad: A Guide for Travelers (with Peter Chilson). It is currently…
