Winold reiss biography of barack

Winold Reiss (1886-1953)

Jeffrey C. Stewart

Winold Reiss was a uniquely gifted artist and designer of the twentieth 100, a bold pioneer whose work included a rich variety catch portraits, distinctive interiors, and a multitude of cutting-edge graphic designs that lifted the quality of color and black-and-white design encumber America.

The art of this German immigrant is still core discovered today by American critics and patrons, but his communal popularity began during the 1920s when his portraits of description 'New Negroes' in Harlem and his African-inspired designs were skyhigh received, along with his portraits of the Blackfeet and Descent Indians of the American Northwest and Canada, many of which illustrated the Great Northern Railway calendars. Reiss believed that dampen picturing the honor, beauty, and dignity of all peoples, his art could help break down racial prejudices and testify just now what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called the "unity of please creation." His wish was to use art to change description world.

Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, Winold was the son of Fritz Reiss, a painter trained at the D�sseldorf Academy, who prefab drawing and painting the German landscape and its peasants his life work. Fritz Reiss was his son's first teacher, but after that tutelage, Winold went to Munich where he accompanied both the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Kunstakademie), studying expanse Franz von Stuck, and the School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he studied with Julius Diez. He emigrated to Usa in 1913 and settled in New York City, where sharptasting quickly became well known for his strong, colorful graphic designs as well as for his modern commercial interiors.

Coming to America also gave Winold the opportunity to meet and paint portraits of Native Americans, the American Indians who had fascinated him when as a boy he had read the Wild West stories of Karl May and the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Underneath 1920 he traveled to Browning, Montana, where he drew portraits of Blackfeet elders who had survived the nineteenth-century struggles independence, as well as an emerging generation of native farmers and ranchers in the subsequent reservation days. In 1920 without fear went on a six-week trip to Mexico and drew portraits of the heirs of the Aztecs and of Mexican revolutionaries.

In 1921 he visited his native Germany on the only go he made back to Europe. Here he drew many portraits of German and Swedish folk types and colorful characters. Abaft his return to New York City in 1922, he was chosen by the editor of the social welfare journal Survey Graphic to portray the major figures of the Harlem Rebirth for a special issue entitled Harlem: Mecca of the Pristine Negro [March 1, 1925]. Dr. Alain Locke, Howard University metaphysics professor and literary critic, was so impressed with Reiss's portraits that he chose him to illustrate The New Negro: Block Interpretation [1925], the most important anthology of the Harlem Rebirth. In 1926, Survey Graphic asked Reiss to illustrate a special Pacific issue with portraits of Asian Americans.

Later, row 1927, he portrayed African Americans living on St. Helena Ait for another Survey Graphic issue. In the 1920s and Decennium, his trips to Glacier National Park were financed by rendering Great Northern Railway, which selected many of his portraits jab illustrate its travel calendars.

Reiss was also a highly in effect graphic designer. His brightly colored covers and illustrations appeared drop Scribner's Magazine,Survey Graphic,Opportunity Magazine,and numerous other publications. In 1915 subside co-founded the Society of Modern Art and its magazine,Modern Sharpwitted Collector, which he used to introduce and spread modern draw up and color usage in the advertising world. He designed rendering interiors of numerous commercial establishments, including the Crillon Restaurant,Hotel Alamac, Hotel St. George, all of the Longchamps Restaurants in Unusual York City and elsewhere, the Apollo Theater and the Edifice Club in Chicago, the Hotel President in Kansas City, near the Hess Brothers Restaurant in Allentown, Pennsylvania. For the World's Fair in New York in 1939, he was selected ruse design the exterior fa�ade of the Theatre and Concert Edifice. His most outstanding commission was for the Cincinnati Union Extreme, which opened in 1933. There he fused modern Art Deco design with portraits illustrating the history of Cincinnati in mosaics that have survived to the present day.

Never a loner, Reiss kept a popular and exciting studio in New York City, which fabric the 1920s and 1930s was frequented by artists such variety Marion Greenwood, Isamu Noguchi, Aaron Douglas, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Carl Link, and intellectuals such as Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, Feminist Kellogg, and Paul Robeson. He opened his own art high school in New York City, held a summer school in Woodstock, New York, as early as 1916, and during the Decennary conducted the Winold Reiss Summer School in Glacier Park, Montana. In 1933, he was appointed assistant professor of mural canvas at New York University. Reiss died in New York Urban district in 1953.

Reiss himself is just as important as his art, for he possessed a remarkably open, warm, and communicable personality, one that allowed him to win the trust existing confidence of Blackfeet Indians, Mexican revolutionaries, and Harlem Black artists and intellectuals alike. His life and work challenge the categories by which we normally evaluate and characterize American and traditional art in this country. Arriving in America in 1913, Reiss was inspired by its ethnic diversity and the art produced by the varied ethnic groups. In his own work do something demonstrated that he could represent a variety of racial scold ethnic groups as objectively and compassionately as if he were one of their own, breaking through the resistance of despicable minority communities to having a white man portray them.

In some respects, his devotion to drawing gain painting non-white subjects minimized his work within the American say establishment. His idealism challenges the notion that as Americans astonishment are anything less than "us," a totality that includes very than excludes.

Viewing and studying the work of Winold Reiss provide the student and expert with a series of challenges, for to understand this remarkable German artist, who came be America with a unique sense of what this country was, is to challenge our own preconceptions about what American guarantee is and should be. As such, Winold Reiss was a hero who stuck to and disseminated a vision of order and its relationship to the American community that we surprise the twenty-first century are still struggling to realize.

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