Winold Reiss (September 16, 1886 – August 23, 1953) was a German-born American artist and graphic designer. He was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1913 he immigrated to the United States, where he was able to follow his interest in Native Americans. In 1920 he went West for the first time, working for a lengthy period on the Blackfeet Reservation. Over the years Reiss painted more than 250 works depicting Native Americans. These paintings by Reiss became known more widely beginning in the 1920 and to the 1950s, when the Great Northern Railway commissioned Reiss to do paintings of the Blackfeet which were then distributed widely as lithographed reproductions on Great Northern calendars.
Early life and education
Reiss was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1886, the second son of Fritz Reiss (1857–1914) and his wife. He grew up surrounded by art, as his father was a well-known Schwarzwald landscape artist and portrait painter. In his early years, Reiss traveled within Germany with his father, who studied peasants of particular types that he wanted to draw or paint. This helped form many of Reiss's ideas about subject matter for portraiture. His older brother Hans Reiss (painter) also became an artist, working as a sculptor and also immigrated to the United States. Reiss studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in München under Franz von Stuck where he met his future wife, Englishwoman Henrietta Lüthy.
Career
In October 1913, Winold Reiss boarded the SS Imperator and immigrated to America against the will of his parents. Like many Europeans he had been captivated by stories and images of Native Americans. He was excited to think he might be able to paint them. His philosophy was that an artist must travel to find the most interesting subjects; influenced by his father and his own curiosity, he drew subjects from many peoples and walks of life.
Reiss first had clients among the ethnic Germans in New York and worked as a commercial designer.
His designs for the Busy Lady Baking Company on 3620 Broadway (at 149th Street), and one at 4230 Broadway in 1915, were influenced by the designs of Josef Hoffmann and the Vienna Secession, which he had seen a decade before. The lightness of style, use of grids, and gilded and highly colored panels refer more to the Wiener Werkstätte of Vienna than the Jugendstil of Munich.
In 1915, he was lecturing before the Art Students League. With Oskar Wentz, he founded a publication, Modern Art Collector but it had to fold in 1917 for political reasons.
In January 1920, he finally got to go to the West, and spent months on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, painting 36 portraits of tribal members. He made relationships that he kept for the rest of his life, and returned to the West to paint Native Americans.He made more than 250 paintings of Native Americans, especially the Blackfeet of Montana.
In 1921, Reiss returned once to Germany for a visit, but settled again in New York City in 1922, where he opened an art school.
Reiss illustrated Alain Locke's historic 1925 anthology The New Negro, an important book about African American culture at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. These included drawings of such key figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlie Johnson (bandleader), and Elise Johnson McDougald.
Reprintings of the book, however, have dropped Reiss’s name from the title page and deleted the portfolio of portraits he contributed to the original edition.The changes were documented in 2001 by scholar George Bornstein. George Hutchinson builds on Bornstein’s research to speculate that this may be because of the controversy surrounding the portraits, which depict some of these distinguished African American figures with notably dark skins and features that may suggest caricature, though others are brown or of light complexion. Reiss was a white artist, and so subsequent editors may have felt his work shouldn’t have been included. The effect of the deletion is to suggest that the Harlem Renaissance was a mono racial movement rather than a cosmopolitan one, in which people of various colors and ethnicities participated. In 1925, Reiss offered free tuition to the young Aaron Douglas, who had just arrived in Harlem. Reiss persuaded Locke to let Douglas contribute illustrations to the second edition of The New Negro.