foreword
Among the more notable developments in the art world in recent years has been the renewed fascination with modern and contemporary portraiture. Specifically, I’m thinking of the gutsy, innovative image-making by artists who choose portraiture as their primary form of self-expression, the ideal way to expand the boundaries of form, color, and technique. Today, artists like Amy Sherald, Elizabeth Peyton, Kehinde Wiley, and Luc Tuymans are bringing portraiture to the forefront of 21st-century art. And of course, these portraitists have their antecedents in such popular 20th-century figure painters as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Alice Neel, and others. But to fully explore the roots of modern portraiture over the last hundred years, those artists who most elevated the genre to the height of style and relevance, look to the 1920s with the work of Tamara de Lempicka in Paris and Winold Reiss in New York. Both artists valued a hard-edged, polished aesthetic, pared-down forms, distinctive color and a flair for Art Deco chic. It is no wonder that each is enjoying a revival of interest in what has become a new “heyday” for portraiture—de Lempicka with her first U.S. retrospective in San Francisco and Houston this year, and Reiss with an important exhibition at the New York Historical Society in 2022 and a revelatory role in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark Harlem Renaissance exhibition earlier this year.
Hirschl & Adler is proud to continue shining a spotlight on Winold Reiss whose work has played a vital role in this gallery’s programming over the past twenty years. In collaboration with the writer Hilton Als, the artist’s estate, and other private collectors, we have brought together more than
twenty rare portraits that exemplify the distinct subjects he focused on over his career: a pivotal trip through Mexico in 1920 that would shape his style and approach for all subsequent work; his unparalleled portrayals of both prominent and unknown African Americans in Harlem stemming from a groundbreaking project for Survey Graphic magazine in 1925; a fashion-forward coterie of young women, often his clients or students, on whom the artist lavished exuberant color and an eye for elongated form; and, finally, his lifelong fascination and reverence for the indigenous tribes of North America, particularly the Blackfeet of Montana and Canada.
Reiss brought a simplified, spare aesthetic to his subjects, marked by strong outlines, bold color, and a graphic emphasis on patterning. The resulting portraits appear timeless and fresh to today’s audiences. But Reiss’s work, particularly his focus on marginalized populations, contains an ingredient not previously seen in depictions of such groups: a deep and abiding humanism. Amid all the abstract daring of these portraits, the sitters’ faces appear realistic, strikingly delicate, clear, soulful. At a time of division and inequality in America, Reiss broke through the stereotyping of minorities, the poor, the foreign. Instead, he embraced and celebrated their “otherness” like none had before him. It is the unmistakable equality and dignity in these images that, when combined with his formal dynamism, makes Reiss’s portrayals a new kind of American portrait, the forerunner to those defining the current moment.
THOMAS B. PARKER Director
We met. I was the assistant in the art department of a weekly newspaper, then popular for its hip and ethical take on most things. This was in the early 1980s. He was a freelance art director who almost from the first wanted me to see the world. He was a brown man, about ten years older than my then twentysomething-year-old self, a self that was endlessly in search of male love, male approval—a teacher who would show me all the things of the world I did not know. He gave me a number of books I’d never heard of before, ranging from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) to Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925)—a world of 1920s and 1930s literature that he liked and admired because that was the era, at least sartorially speaking, he was most influenced by: he in his cravats and two-toned shoes, a beautiful boulevardier who loved his mother. We met, and there was a world of discovery between us, and there I was, knocked nearly senseless in the arms of male friendship, male love. I adored him.
He belonged to someone else. A number of women, in fact. I was his queer emotional mistress—not being with him completely, what a ridiculous notion, who among us belongs to anyone, let alone completely—but maybe I wanted to belong to him completely, I don’t know; I didn’t have that kind of language in my lexicon then: Me, mine. It was beyond me, because I had a mother who said Me and mine was not the thing, but being a member of the world, an emotional collective like the world she had created with six children and a father we could not reach, at least emotionally, was the point, and when I turn the pages of The New Negro now, when I take that book
from the shelf, I often see my beloved friend’s brown hands turning the pages, his glasses glinting with the excitement as he marveled over Reiss’s graphic clarity, the fierceness of his vision, his what I want to call controlled savagery, the latter word I claim based on Marianne Moore’s great 1921 poem, “New York”:
the savage’s romance, accreted where we need the space for commerce— the center of the wholesale fur trade, starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes… …it is not the plunder, it is the “accessibility to experience.”
It was that accessibility of experience that my friend showed me, and when he opened the world of The New Negro to me, I could see not only the energy of the words making new worlds, I could feel Reiss’s subjects becoming themselves—and the artist becoming himself—as he painted and drew writers and thinkers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to Countee Cullen: poets and artists we now think of
Two Harlem Girls
1925
Pastel on Whatman board
39 ½ x 30 inches
as being part of the Harlem Renaissance, but when you see a Reiss painting of any of its stars, what you see is the subject sitting with their self and not belonging to any “movement” at all. Looking at Reiss in the context of Locke and then in subsequent catalogues and shows, I felt a sense of relief—relief for his clarity, his standing away from editorializing or commenting on what he saw other than his interest, his lack of sentimentality when it came to a Blackness and femaleness that was not his own. It was clear—looking at his extraordinary portraits in The New Negro and elsewhere, including the recent The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Met—that his work was based on liking the look of something, of someone, and wanting to celebrate it through the magic of pencil, pastel, and paint. When my friend and I looked at and read The New Negro , we were lifted by the spirit of collaboration that infuses the book, which started with this: In 1924, the philosopher and scholar Alain Locke (1885–1954) was approached by the editor of Survey Graphic , an influential magazine that featured new talent, to put together an issue that was devoted to young Black artists who were thinking and working at a ferocious and interesting pace. Known to one another as habitués of Harlem, the poet Langston Hughes, writer Zora Neale Hurston, novelist Jessie Fauset, among others, were the creators the Harvard-trained philosopher was drawn to. Indeed, he considered them the exemplars of a new era in art and literature—an epoch that belonged, Locke felt, to the “New Negro.”
The term “New Negro” was not new. In the 1890s it was used to refer to a generation of Blacks who were born after slavery. In 1901 Booker T. Washington used the term for his 1901 book about the ascent of the new, economically self-sufficient Negro. But when Locke used The New Negro as the title for the book that grew out of his work on Survey Graphic , the phrase took on a new meaning. For Locke, the “New Negro” was about aesthetics—about finding new forms of self-expresion to describe Black lives.
Portrait of Robert Nathaniel Dett c. 1925
Pastel on Whatman board 20 x 15 ⅛ inches
Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays, Locke’s book The New Negro has become a hallmark not only for Harlem Renaissance scholars, but a sourcebook for those writers and editors with an interest in the work of early masters, including Jean Toomer (The New Negro was published two years after his groundbreaking Cane), sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, whose work on Blacks in the workplace and economic equality helped change our government’s views on labor, and so on. And then, of course, there was Locke’s writing, too. In his seminal essay “The New Negro,” Locke describes Negro “self-determination” when it comes to telling his or her own story. No longer would Black people be subject to the white gaze, so to speak; the New Negro had their own story to tell.
Locke was born to make this book. An only child, he was born in Philadelphia and raised by parents who were prominent members of the city’s prominent “free” families. (His father was one of the first Black employees of the U.S. Postal Service.) Brilliant and skilled in languages, he graduated from Harvard in 1907, and was the first Black to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford. After studying philosophy in Berlin, Locke became a professor at Howard University until he retired in 1954. (He died the same year.)
He was also queer.
Indeed, part of the impetus behind producing The New Negro was to be closer to poet Countee Cullen, with whom he had a brief dalliance, and maverick Langston Hughes, with whom Locke had a difficult emotional relationship.
In a sense, The New Negro can be read as a distinctly queer text, one in which all that can’t be spoken directly about desire is nevertheless found in a number of contributions, including queer writer Bruce Nugent’s “Sahdji,” about the African woman as diva, and Countee Cullen’s “Tableau,” about male miscegenation. Also included is Gardner Anne Spencer’s poem about looking at a Black woman—thus removing the figure from the “white” gaze.
But was Reiss’s gaze “white,” or based on empathy, interest, and brilliance?
Katherine [Kathryn] Hamill
29 ¾ x 21 ¾
Born in southern Germany, Winold Reiss (1886–1953) was raised in an atmosphere where art was always a part of the conversation: his father, Fritz Reiss, was a landscape painter with an interest in the underclass; Winold’s older brother, Hans, was also an artist. Always attracted to difference, the artist, who emigrated to the States in 1913, landed first in New York; his wife and son joined him five months later. Working as a graphic designer, among other pursuits, he believed—no doubt influenced by his father, who seems to have inspired his wonderful belief in the imagination—that the artist was a kind of reporter, and it was part of the job to find the worlds that resonated for you. In New York, Reiss was more or less taken up by other German expatriates, and he found that the clean, utilitarian line that characterized Wiener Werkstätte had an influence on his eye, which was always clear and direct. (The movement, founded in 1903 by artists Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser among others, encouraged the production of objects with a utilitarian design; Wiener Werkstätte went on to influence Art Deco and the Bauhaus movement.) In 1920 Reiss, the eternal wanderer, finally got to the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana, and stayed out west for two months. Unlike a number of artists who want to do a quick “hit and run” in worlds not their own, Reiss often stayed put—the better to understand what he was looking at. In two pastel pieces in the current show— Indian Man from Mexico and Mexican Girl , both from 1920—Reiss doesn’t make these indigenous
people “heroic”; he is interested in the heroism that goes into being, the will to adorn the corporeal self and make a kind of self-presentation for the Other’s eye. We are all Others to people not ourselves, and Reiss’s forceful graphic sense carries with it a psychological acuity about his subjects and their grounded, lyrical being. He’s not drawn to his subjects because they’re Indian, or women, or Black; he’s interested in their astonishing beauty, their will to be present to the experience of being looked at. Other than their skin color, is there much of a difference between that girl in her colorful headdress and Katherine (Kathryn) Hamill , 1930? One could say that in the former, the subject—who does not look at Reiss—has an interior life that is not predicated on being looked at, while Hamill is, to some degree, if not on guard around the male gaze, at least aware of it. The vivid red she stands in front of, and is outlined by, feels like the appropriate backdrop to that woman who, despite her assertiveness, has something fragile going on about the eyes. One gets the sense that Reiss was maybe spending a considerable amount of time looking at her soul even before he raised his brush; most writers work this way, seemingly not doing anything at all at first, listening to people chat amiably, having a drink, and so on, and then something happens, the work happens, and then you see, as in the portrait of Hamill, something happening. A woman who lives in or is trapped or defined by modernism. Her manicure, the Pieta-like folding of the hands, her black cloche that helps us look at the contours of her strong face—she is herself, and one gets the sense, too, given the extraordinary detail in his paintings, that Reiss was always waiting for his subjects to be themselves. He was ruthless in the way that great portraitists have to be; there is no art anywhere without this insistence, the demand for the truth of the stories told by Reiss’s art. In his pictures Reiss is also interested in the social language of his sitters—who they are vis-à-vis their class, background, culture, and so on. Painted a year after Katherine (Kathryn) Hamill , Rosalee Sondheimer I, 1931, is elegance personified. With her dark hair pulled back,
Girl 1920
Conté crayon and colored pencil on paper
19 ⅞ x 14 ⅞ inches
the blackness of her garment—a long flowing black dress with openings in the sleeves—only amplifies the blackness of her eyes, eyebrows, and lack of ornamentation. Indeed, the only ornamentation are her rouged lips, the red of her fingernails in what I have taken to calling a “Reiss hand”—that appendage that says so much about repose, beauty, and the natural conclusion of line in other works, such as the astounding Two Harlem Girls . In that 1925 piece, the artist makes a dual portrait in pastel on Whatman board of two young women who remind one of Bellocq’s figures from Storyville. The geometry of their hair is interrupted on the figure to the left, while the other woman stares directly at us, at the artist, with a sense of weariness or complicity. She is sitting for Reiss because the sitting has been agreed upon, but where is she otherwise? The strength of this double portrait is in our not knowing. Not knowing why the straps on these women’s slips are down or falling, why one woman is more disheveled than the other. And yet still there is the beautiful composure—the relaxed elegance—of their slightly individually clasped hands, as if they’ve held dreams for a long time and just let them go. Who are they? What do they want from us? What does any one of us want from the experience of being looked at and loved? When my friend showed me Reiss’s work, I understood something I had never quite understood before: being observed and recorded as oneself is an honor few portraitists ever manage, and that’s how Reiss paid his beloved subjects back: by not making up anything time and history and place had not already made of them and the lives held in the palm of their hands.
Mixed media on watercolor board
29 ⅞ x 21 ½ inches
Young Woman Holding Flower c. 1927
Mixed media on board
30 x 21 ¾ inches
Nicke II
1931
Pastel on watercolor board
30 ⅛ x 21 5 ⁄ 8 inches
Natokiochkome (Howling Twice)
1937
Mixed media on paper
29 x 21 inches
Runs Over His Enemy
1943
Pastel and tempera on paper
30 x 22 inches
Harlem Girl with Blanket c. 1925
Conté crayon and pastel on illustration board
29 ¾ x 20 inches
Long Time River Woman (Blackfoot Maiden)
Mixed media on paper
29 ½ x 21 ¼ inches
Mixed media on paper
29 x 20 inches
Mixed media on watercolor paper
17 ⅞ x 18 inches
Elizabeth Finger Design
Eric W. Baumgartner
The Studley Press
Natokiochkome
(Howling Twice) (detail)
1937
Mixed media on paper
29 x 21 inches
frontis
Black Prophet 1925
Conté crayon and pastel on Whatman board
30 x 22 inches
© 2025 Hirschl & Adler Galleries
ISBN 978-1-937941-28-4
H&A