African American Art at Colby

Dust Jacket for The New Negro: An Interpretation, 1925
Printed paper mounted on board
9 x 13 in.
Winold Reiss Partnership

Cover of Opportunity Magazine, 1925
Printed paper mounted on board
9 x 12 in.
Winold Reiss Partnership

The Brown Madonna
Frontispiece illustration in a first-edition copy of
The New Negro: An Interpretation,
Alain Locke, editor, New York: Albert and Boni, 1925

Untitled (African Fantasy), c. 1925
Pastel on black paper
25 x 30 in.
Winold Reiss Partnership

Winold Reiss stands alone as the only white artist in this exhibition. Born in Germany and trained at the Kunstgewerbeschuke, or school of the applied arts, Reiss emigrated to the United States at the age of 27.  In New York, he accepted commissions to produce various types of art and became one of the pioneers of modern commercial and industrial design. Reiss’s contributions to the history of African American art include his illustrations for the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, as well as other African American publications, such as Opportunity Magazine, a journal produced by the Urban League. The New Negro served as the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance, an important black cultural movement by and about African Americans. With the help of Reiss’s illustrations, this text helped to define the Harlem Renaissance’s new thoughts on the roles of art and culture in the African American community.

Reiss’s covers for The New Negro and Opportunity Magazine and his pastel drawing Untitled (African Fantasy) embody the goal of the Harlem Renaissance to re-present the African American community through stylized images that celebrate the idea of an African legacy. Reiss’s cover illustrations, a combination of woodcuts and drawings, employ a simple palette of three bold colors and use repeated geometric designs to infuse each piece with a topical, Africanist sensibility.

In addition to his African-inspired work, Reiss created portraits in a realist style of prominent Renaissance leaders as well as contemporary citizens of Harlem. The Brown Madonna, which served as the frontispiece to The New Negro, although not a traditional portrait, portrays a Harlem woman and her baby in the guise of the Madonna and child. Reiss also created the unique font for the text of The New Negro.

Alain Locke commissioned Reiss to illustrate his manuscript because of their shared perception and vision of what the “New Negro” meant. Their ideology stems from Gottfried von Herder, a German philosopher, who wrote about the importance of understanding a culture through its “common” person, and that every race has something special to offer to the world. This ideology is given voice through Locke’s writing and Reiss’s ethnographic portrayals of African Americans, which depict the new, urban, culturally aware, and modern African American race.

—Ali Offer

For further reading:

Powell, Richard J.  Rhapsodies in Black:  The Art of the Harlem Renaissance.  Exh. Cat.  London and Los Angeles:  Hayward Gallery, Institute of International Visual Arts and the University of California Press, 1997. Print.

Stewart, Jeffrey C. To Color America. Portraits by Winold Reiss. Washington: Smithsonian, 1989. Print.

Website: Winold Reiss: Early Modernist in Twentieth-Century American Art and Design.