"Winold Reiss to Kara Walker: The Silhouette in Black American Art"

Leesa Rittelmann

State University of New York, College at Fredonia

Winold Reiss to Kara Walker: The Silhouette in Black American

Art

The Silhouette in Contemporary Black American Art

In Kara Walker’s 1994 installation Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War

as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and her Heart,

elegant silhouetted figures cavort across a spare, moonlit landscape in the ante-

bellum South. Immediate in their monumental scale and epic scope, Walker’s

life-sized cut paper installations remain historically distanced by their subject

matter and technique. Cloaked in the romantic melodrama of the best-selling

novel Gone with the Wind, this elaborate tableau seduces then confronts viewers

with what Walker describes as “the confluence of disgust and desire and volup-

tuousness that are all wrapped up in this bizarre construct of racism” (Garrels

and Alberro 3). In these ambiguous vignettes, otherwise refined characters

commit decidedly unrefined acts of defecation, decapitation and molestation.

For example, what at first appears to be a romantic encounter between a

southern belle and her gentleman caller (Fig. 14.1.) is upon second glance a

disturbingly eroticized scene. The tender romance signified by the heart-shaped

gap between the couple’s parted lips is made scandalous by an extra pair of legs

sprouting from beneath the woman’s skirt. Equally troubling is the angle and

proximity of the tip of the “gentleman’s” sword poised mere inches from the

backside of a small slave child who plucks a dead fowl from the banks of a

stream. As many scholars have noted, much of the strength of Walker’s work is

drawn from the ambiguity of her silhouetted forms which, like the mythic ante-

bellum melodramas they enact, conceal at least as much as they reveal (English;

Shaw). These carnivalesque cutouts outlining the physical and psychological

debris of American racism have earned Walker a MacArthur “genius” grant and

an international reputation. At the same time however, the critical obsession

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with Walker’s work has quite literally overshadowed the broader impact of the

silhouette’s function within modern and contemporary Black American art.

Fig. 14.1. Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between

the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (Detail), 1994

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Since the 1990s a cavalcade of cut, painted and photographed silhouettes

have figured in the work of dozens of artists who, like Walker, summon its re-

ductive economy of form to interrogate similarly reductive racial stereotypes.

Artists like Laylah Ali, Lorna Simpson, Kerry James Marshall and Michael Ray

Charles (to name but a few) have appropriated the pictorial idiom of the silhou-

ette to investigate the ways in which the Black American body has been literally

and metaphorically reduced to a mere shadow of its physical and historical

referent. In her 2001 work Untitled (Impedimenta), photographer Lorna

Simpson introduces messy racial complications into the otherwise pure

modernist grid put forth by artists like Piet Mondrian and reconfigured by con-

temporary photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher. In this work, Simpson

juxtaposes twenty-three subtly shifting silhouettes of a woman’s head and

shoulders with text denoting the way in which the Black body has been both

conspicuously absent as a productive subject and assertively present as a trans-

gressive, if anonymous, object within twentieth-century visual culture.1

Viewers

are afforded partial glimpses of the woman’s profile repeated within a grid re-

sembling film or photo booth strips. The purity of the grid’s unified, repetitive

structure is strategically interrupted by profiles that shift from left to right, by

the figure’s subtly altered pose, and by mattes that alternate between sentimen-

talizing ovals to more modern rectangles. More forceful visual interruptions in-

clude several profiles obscured by vellum overlay and the complete absence of a

subject in many of the squares. Where Mondrian and like-minded European

modernists sought a transcendent, transnational balance and harmony via the

grid format, Simpson’s inconsistent grid reveals the historical impossibility and

perhaps impracticality of this kind of utopianism for Black artists working in the

United States.

In much the same way that Black American artists Carrie Mae Weems and

Renee Cox have used the medium of photography to reveal its scientific

misapplication within modern anthropology, both Walker and Simpson quote

the instrumentalizing power of the silhouette in order to reveal its representa-

tional limits. Walker is compelled by the silhouetted form because it “says a lot

with very little information,” and notes:

[…] that’s also what the stereotype does. So I saw the silhouette and the

stereotype as linked. Of course, while the stereotype, or the emblem, can

communicate with a lot of people, and a lot of people can understand it, the

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other side is that it also reduces differences, reduces diversity to that

stereotype. (Garrels and Alberro 3)

Whereas Walker and Simpson consciously address the ways in which silhouettes

are implicated in the historical construction of racial stereotypes, the un-

modulated two-dimensionality of the work of artists like Marshall, Charles and

Ali is equally indebted to comics, American advertising and graphic novels.

Such diverse influences notwithstanding, these artists employ flat, reductive,

crisply delineated figures in order to explore the history of the visual representa-

tion of race in the United States. In Ali’s Greenhead series, for example,

cartoonish amputees, prisoners, police and ecclesiastical figures move anxiously

from one spare blue frame to the next. Just as traditional silhouettes offer

enticing details of ultimately unknowable subjects, Ali’s vignettes offer a pain-

fully partial glimpse of armed civil conflict in a morbid cartoon culture shot-

through with violent undertones. Charles’ work strikes a similarly disturbing

chord in its visual references to the coons, pickaninnies, minstrels and plantation

mammies that saturated twentieth-century American advertising and pop cul-

ture. Though much of the controversy surrounding Charles’ work has focused

upon his incendiary subject matter, his abstract commercial style is no less a

factor in the production of meaning. The jarring visual assault of works like

1995 Forever Free – Now Playing, for instance, would be arguably less effec-

tive had the artist rendered the dancing minstrels in a more illusionistic, aca-

demic style. Charles’ facile reduction of the visual stereotype of the “out of

control” Black body with arms and legs akimbo is accentuated by his reduction

of the faces to flat black forms punctuated by exaggerated plump-lipped, white-

toothed grins. Although he refers more directly to the history of racial stereo-

typing in American advertising than to the function of the silhouette in his work,

Charles nevertheless relies upon the reductive formal conventions of each to

categorize, type and diminish the individuality of his subjects.

In contradistinction to Ali and Charles, Kerry James Marshall favors the

silhouetted form for its ability to emphasize blackness in a more collective, ar-

guably positive manner. Marshall’s 1994-95 untitled Garden series, for

example, depicts clean-cut, young urban Blacks in epic cityscapes of urban

housing projects that include the word “Garden” in their name (Altgeld Gardens,

Rockwell Gardens, Wentworth Gardens, etc.). The disparity between the edenic

names of the projects and their impoverished reality as spaces that demarcate the

marginalization and decay of Black urban culture is heightened by the matte

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blackness and formality of Marshall’s figures. Though they are not silhouettes in

the strictest sense (there is some subtle three-dimensional modeling in the faces

and black-and-white clothing), the figures’ rich black tones, outlines and poses

function in a manner visually similar to that of traditional silhouettes. Of his de-

velopment of the “unequivocally black, emphatically black figure,” Marshall

explains that he flattens, darkens and minimizes their forms to heighten their

rhetorical function and notes that he is “very conscious” of the resistance to ex-

treme representations of blackness within the Black community. His reduction

of the “complex variations of tone to a rhetorical dimension” of blackness,

Marshall argues, recalls more familiar negative stereotyping but “is never

laughable.” The difficulty, as he explains it, was to

[…] make them as flat as I possibly could, while maintaining a sense of

dimension. That was the challenge: I was trying to see how solidly I could

make those figures resonate without putting a lot of definition into them. I

tried to figure out a way to construct the silhouette of the silhouette.

(Marshall 90)

In surveying the history of modern and contemporary Black American art, it be-

comes clear that the flatly rendered, silhouetted black body has proven a versa-

tile visual trope. And while the reductive visual economy of the silhouette has

not been exclusively employed by American artists of color (Matisse’s late cut-

outs come to mind), its appropriation as a critical tool used to investigate the

contours of racial discrimination is a discernable tradition within Black

American art. Though its formal and symbolic functions shift dramatically from

one artist to the next, the tradition of reducing the human form to a shadowy

contour has proven to be one of the more identifiable and persistent aesthetic

legacies of Black American art.

Racism, Physiognomy and the Silhouette in the Unites States

What the work of these contemporary artists emphasizes is the way in which the

silhouette has been strangely mired in the complex intersection between race

and representation since the eighteenth century. Named for Louis XV’s former

French Minister of Finance Etienne d’Silhouette, these black paper cut outs may

have originated in France but their widespread popularity in the United States

can be directly attributed to Swiss and German craftsmen whose Scherenschnitte

designs graced many Victorian Valentines and mantels. In a rare example of

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trickle-up aesthetics, lower-class enthusiasts popularized the German

Scherenschnitte scenes by filling albums with profiles of friends and family.

These profiles and landscapes quickly became a trend among America’s upper

class elite who commissioned more elaborate designs to be imprinted on porce-

lain dinnerware or carved from thin slices of ivory.

As for its divisive effect upon American race relations, it is important to

note that the silhouette’s cultural impact extended beyond aesthetics into the

realm of the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of physiognomy. Hailed as a key

indicator of a sitter’s social, intellectual and moral character, the instrumental

application of cut profiles was popularized by Swiss-German theorist Johann

Caspar Lavater whose now infamous 1775 treatise “Essays on Physiognomy,

Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind” was written to

identify “the moral code inscribed in the human form” (Colbert 2). Lavater’s

treatise was translated into seven languages, reprinted in nine editions by the

mid-nineteenth century and included dozens of cut profiles made with a me-

chanical device known as a physiognotrace. Because the resulting profiles were

an indexical representation of a shadow traced by a machine, Lavater’s shades

were regarded as “the truest representation that can be given of man” and the

most “immediate expression of nature, such as not the ablest painter is capable

of drawing by hand” (Lavater 187-88). Thus, Lavater’s silhouettes enjoyed a

scientific status (later transferred to photography) as a more faithful likeness of

their subjects than their painted or sculpted counterparts. Like the photograph,

the silhouette was endowed with an evidentiary authority unavailable to the tra-

ditional fine arts.

The notion that a subject’s outline revealed otherwise hidden essential

truths about a sitter’s intelligence and worth is precisely why this medium re-

mains so significant to shifting notions of racial identity in the United States.

According to Lavater, the process of erasing “distracting” three-dimensional

facial features led viewers to a higher visual truth regarding the subject’s moral

and intellectual countenance. The Victorian craze for silhouettes in the United

States resulted in the production of what photo-theorist Alan Sekula has de-

scribed as dueling portrait archives that separated a newly emergent white bour-

geoisie from the non-white “dangerous” classes. In an essay outlining the class

and racial discrimination implicit in the development of nineteenth-century

image archives, Sekula analyzed the cultural impact of popular photographic al-

bums of “illustrious” Americans and juxtaposed these compendiums with what

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he refers to as a “shadow” archive of so-called degenerate types compiled to as-

sist police in the physiognomic analysis and apprehension of criminals (Sekula

347). These competing archives, he argued, illustrate the extreme honorific and

repressive functions of modern portraiture.

Fig. 14.2. Johan Caspar Lavater, “Men of Known Excellence,” in Essays on Physiognomy for

the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, 1884

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Although photographic illustrations of physiognomic principles would

reach a far wider audience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,

Lavater’s techniques for reading silhouettes must be credited with sparking the

broad public enthusiasm for analyzing a sitter’s moral and intellectual capacity

from his/her representative portrait. To cite but one example from Lavater’s

treatise, let us consider a grouping of fourteen male profiles analyzed by the

author, of which four are described as “men of known excellence” (Fig. 14.2.).

After evaluating figures one through ten for positive traits like “the love of

order” and “artless eloquence” as well as for flaws such as “timidity” and

possessing a forehead “too perpendicular for a productive mind,” Lavater re-

veals that sitters eleven through fourteen possess clearly superior physiognomies

and, therefore, greater inherent worth.2 He then proceeds to chastise those

viewer-readers who “hesitate[d] over 14” for failing to consider the subject’s

elegant forehead which Lavater arbitrarily describes as possessing an arch with

“more capacity than 12 and 13” and an upper outline whose “understanding and

exquisite penetration cannot be overlooked” (qtd. in Megroz 127).

If Lavater’s gallery of educated, white, European, male sitters easily

demonstrated their presumed “noble countenance,” then what are we to make of

the handful of extant images profiling nineteenth-century American Blacks? To

be sure, their relative absence as subjects in the visual and political sense offers

some indication of their cultural status as “objects” to be possessed and con-

trolled. That said, even without Lavater’s brand of pseudo-scientific textual in-

terpretation, images like the 1796 silhouette of a Connecticut slave named

“Flora” reiterate her status as a non-person or possession. As art historian

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has noted, Flora’s profile is one of the most

“enigmatic and suggestive of the brutality of slavery and blank darkness that the

black body inhabited” produced in the antebellum era (Seeing the Unspeakable

22). Stripped first of her culture, given name, freedom and human dignity, the

silhouette further strips the subject of her individual interiority and reduces her

to a spiky-haired commodity “sold by Margaret Dwight of Milford in the

County of New Haven in Connecticut to Asa Benjamin of Stratford in Fairfield

County, Connecticut, for the sum of twenty-five pounds Sterling” (ibid.). In this

profile, text and image work together in a manner very different from Lavater’s

pairings but with equally powerful implications regarding the non-white sitter’s

relative status and worth.

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The Silhouette in the Harlem Renaissance

Despite its reduction of the fully dimensional human form to a shadowy outline

(or perhaps because of it), the silhouette has proven a deceptively simple formal

device that is rich in implied social and racial meaning. Its transformation of a

complex three-dimensional subject into a unified two-dimensional form

functions in much the same manner that racial stereotypes reduce otherwise

complex subjects and social anxieties into facile caricatures. Initially employed

to reinforce Enlightenment concepts such as absence/presence, black/white,

positive/negative, and moral/immoral, in the hands of African Americans artists

like Walker, Simpson and Ali, the silhouetted form has proven equally useful in

dismantling these same binary constructs. Because they came of age at the

height of postmodernist cultural critiques, it is easy to see why contemporary

Black American artists have been attracted to the silhouette’s deconstructive

possibilities. What is more difficult to understand, however, is the attraction

early twentieth-century Black artists demonstrated to a form of representation

that was used to denigrate the racial traits of a universalized Black

physiognomy.3 It is important to note that the silhouette technique was popular

with Black American artists long before Walker made her first exacting cut of

the paper. Indeed, most of the artists discussed in the introduction to this paper

invariably cite the influence of pioneering Harlem Renaissance artists like Jacob

Lawrence, William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden and Aaron Douglas – artists

who consciously employed the reductive outlines of the silhouette to depict the

historical struggles of Black America in a direct, legible and modern style.

Some, like Lawrence and Johnson developed a primitivized, arguably folkish

approach to rendering the human form that belied the influence of Art Nouveau

design and African art.4 Others, like Bearden and Douglas, created more care-

fully articulated figures that were nevertheless reductive in their abstract two-

dimensionality. In works like his 1934 WPA mural series Aspects of Negro Life,

Douglas situated flatly rendered figures within radiating, cubist-inspired,

modernist landscapes. The complexity of these compositions distinguished

Douglas from other Harlem Renaissance artists, as did his ability to convey

spiritual oppression and uplift through an impressive economy of formal means.

Because the silhouette remains such a dominant form within Black American art

today, it is tempting to assert that Douglas’ appropriation of the silhouetted

figure launched one of Black art’s truly “authentic” formal traditions. As re-

cently as 2004, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw described the silhouetted figure as a

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formal choice that “speaks to the legacy of subject matter and style within the

African American artistic tradition,” and signifies “the blackness of [its] artistic

predecessors” (Seeing the Unspeakable 27). And as Shaw notes, art historian

Richard J. Powell made a similar assertion in his unpublished “African

American Genealogy of Walker’s Work” by arguing that her silhouettes are

“indebted to the collage techniques pioneered by Romare Bearden and Aaron

Douglas” (ibid).5

I have no quarrel with Shaw’s promotion of the silhouette as one of the

more enduring and identifiable stylistic “legacies” within Black American artis-

tic production. Its transformation from a formal technique employed to demon-

strate the supposed inferiority of the Black body to one that articulates and

challenges the visual construction of racism in the United States demonstrates

the silhouette’s continued importance within Black American art. But what are

historians to do with the fact that Douglas was quick to credit the development

of his style to his teacher Winold Reiss – a white German émigré who intro-

duced many young Harlem artists to the clean lines and simplified forms of the

Jugendstil aesthetic? Reiss not only encouraged Douglas to explore the abstract

forms of modern European and African art but as art historian Amy Kirschke

has argued, he was an immigrant “no doubt familiar with the German folk art

technique of Scherenschnitte” so evident in Douglas’ black and white composi-

tions (28). Other scholars, like artist Howardena Pindell have likewise noted that

the silhouette technique adopted by Walker (and others) utilizes forms “made of

black cut paper similar to the traditional Swiss-German technique called

‘scherenschnitte,’ which was brought to the United States by the Pennsylvania-

Dutch in the 18th century” (Pindell). Even a cursory examination of Reiss’

graphic interpretations of 1920s Harlem reveals the impact he had on Douglas’

burgeoning style. Although there are important differences in their styles

(particularly after 1927), images like Reiss’ 1925 Interpretations of Harlem Jazz

(Fig. 14.3.) and Douglas’ 1926 Untitled (Emperor Jones) (Fig. 14.4.) bear an

uncanny formal resemblance. Throughout his life and letters, Douglas

repeatedly expressed his deep respect for and gratitude towards Reiss, who in-

troduced the young artist not only to the silhouette technique but also to Dan

Ivory coast sculpture and the Art Deco design theories of the German and

Austrian avant-garde. In one of many letters praising Reiss’ work and tutelage,

Douglas noted that Reiss’ portraits “were among the very first representations of

contemporary Negro peoples executed with sympathy, dignity, enthusiasm and

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understanding” (qtd. in Stewart 123). Recounting his own stylistic shift from

academic realism to abstract modernist subjects influenced by African motifs,

Douglas recalled:

[Reiss’] impatience as he sought to urge me beyond my doubts and fears

that seemed to loom large in the presence of the terrifying specters moving

beneath the surface of every African masque and fetish. At last I began lit-

tle by little to get the point and to take a few halting, timorous steps forward

into (what was for me) the unknown. (qtd. in Rubin 279)

Reiss advised Douglas to identify himself as a Black artist and to consider,

“what kind of picture, what kind of world does a black artist see and transcribe,

must be responsible for transcribing” (ibid. 280). Art historian Sydney Idelle

Rubin has also argued that although Reiss’ verist portrait style clearly influenced

Douglas’ work (see for example Douglas’ Nov. 1926 cover for The Crisis) the

young Douglas was “perhaps more indebted to Reiss for initiating his explora-

tion of Afro-Deco motifs and introducing him to modernist styles” (282). A

comparison of Douglas’ early academic style to the later “African Modernist”

work for which he is best known makes clear that his approach to art making

was deeply influenced by the Cubist, Jugendstil, Egyptian, and African art Reiss

encouraged him to study. As Rubin asserts in her 2002 study, Reiss “pioneered

an Africanist approach that became identified with the Harlem Renaissance” and

in turn, “passed the torch to Douglas” (285).

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Fig. 14.3. Winold Reiss, Interpretation of Harlem Jazz, c. 1925

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Fig. 14.4. Aaron Douglas, Defiance (from “The Emperor Jones” series), c. 1926

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Winold Reiss and “The New Negro”

Born in Karlsruhe, Reiss immigrated to New York in 1913 fueled by a desire to

study and depict the kind of indigenous Americans romanticized in the novels of

James Fenimore Cooper but arrived long after America’s native peoples had

been corralled like cattle onto government reservations. Nevertheless, his arrival

in the States coincided with two historically significant events crucial to the

formation of his reputation as a leading artist and teacher. The first was the 1913

exhibition of abstract modern European art known as the “Armory Show” that

sent shock-waves through American audiences from New York to Chicago in

the same year that Reiss was unpacking his art supplies from the Munich

Academy. The second predominant event in Reiss’ early career was the post-

migration cultural boom in New York’s Black neighborhood of Harlem. A

skilled portraitist equally well versed in academic realism and art nouveau ab-

straction, Reiss was hungry to document what he viewed to be America’s

“authentic” (however romanticized) ethnographies. He was therefore particu-

larly well suited to lend visual form to the intellectual and cultural theories of

the “New Negro” developing in Harlem in the early twenties.

Reiss’ aesthetic contributions to the Harlem Renaissance specifically and

the New Negro movement more broadly were facilitated by leading Harlem

Renaissance intellectuals like Charles S. Johnson, Director of Research for the

National Urban League and founder of the journal Opportunity: A Journal of

Negro Life. Johnson supported Reiss’ work, granted him dozens of commissions

and introduced him to his young protégé Douglas. Reiss’ central importance in

Harlem at this time is further evident in the number of prestigious clients who

sat for him including Countee Cullen, W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, to

name but a few. Reiss’ role as an artist who gave visual form to the burgeoning

theory of the New Negro is perhaps best evidenced by the artwork he created for

the 1925 special edition of the journal The Survey Graphic, including the cover

illustration, graphic border designs and a series of verist pastel portraits

depicting “Harlem Types.” That a Caucasian German immigrant had been

charged with illustrating the “soul” and character of the New Negro was an

irony not lost on many readers, who complained that Reiss’ portraits of

Harlem’s social and professional types across the economic spectrum denigrated

the hard-won prestige of its emergent upper middle class. These criticisms came

primarily from members of the Black upper middle class who were concerned

that Reiss’ subjects were too dark, disheveled, and “Africanized.” One image,

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titled Two Public School Teachers (Fig. 14.5.), drew particularly indignant re-

sponses from Harlem’s more conservative citizens and prompted one viewer to

proclaim that he would be afraid of these women should he encounter them on

the street. But the movement’s primary theorist Alain Locke welcomed Reiss’

contributions to The Survey Graphic and vociferously defended the artist,

explaining:

There were a few competent Negro artists available at this time, but in all

frankness, it must be recorded that they were not only victims of the

academy tradition but of lily-whitism. In defensive reaction to Nordic

color prejudice they either avoided Negro types or gave them in

Nordicized transcriptions to off-set what they genuinely felt to be a pre-

vailing over-emphasis of racial traits. Really they often shared the blind-

ness of the Caucasian eye and saw little or no beauty where there was

beauty of another kind. (Locke, Negro Art 359)

Locke further demonstrated his support for Reiss by commissioning the artist to

illustrate his 1925 book The New Negro, which is widely regarded as the

founding document of the New Negro movement. Of Reiss’s work for the The

Survey Graphic and the book-length New Negro anthology, Locke noted:

Concretely in his portrait sketches, abstractly in his symbolic designs, he

has aimed to portray the soul and spirit of a people. By the simple but rare

process of not forcing an alien idiom upon nature, or a foreign convention

upon a racial tradition, he has succeeded in revealing some of the rich and

promising resources of Negro types, which await only open serious artis-

tic recognition to become both for the Negro artist and American art at

large, one of the rich sources of novel material both for decorative and

representative art. (Locke, “To Certain of Our Philistines” 155)

The contemporary criticism of Reiss’ work is curious in so far as his portraits

were relatively sympathetic compared to the derogatory racial caricatures of

Blacks featured in fine art and commercial images to that point. Compared with

the stereotypical Plantation Mammy, for example, Reiss’ Two Public

Schoolteachers and his portrait of Harlem educator Elise Johnson MacDougald

were sensitive portrayals of educated, productive citizens.

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Fig. 14.5. Winold Reiss, Two Public School Teachers, 1925

While the controversy surrounding Reiss’ portraits was less about his

status as a white European than it was about disputes within Harlem’s Black

community over who would best represent the New Negro, it did call attention

to attendant disputes regarding the appropriate degree of collaboration between

black and white intellectuals at the helm of the movement. Dependency upon

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white patronage (and, one could argue, the kind of mentorship Reiss offered

Douglas) fostered increasing resentment within Harlem’s artistic and intellectual

elite. Even Reiss became uncomfortable with his role in the movement, con-

fessing to Johnson’s secretary Ethel Ray that he felt the African “decorations

and pictures” he produced for the The Survey Graphic issue should be “done by

a Negro” (qtd. in Rubin 286).

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Redux)

Despite the fact that Reiss’ contributions to the Harlem Renaissance were

clearly lauded by his contemporaries and are afforded at least passing mention in

most major art historical surveys of the period, his role as an innovator of the

Renaissance’s visual style continues to receive uneven treatment in existing art

historical literature. More often than not, Reiss is characterized by his role as

Douglas’ teacher rather than as an independent innovator of New Negro por-

traiture and the graphic style now referred to as “African Modernism.” Given

the fact that Reiss came under fire for his New Negro typology and that he him-

self felt that the kind of work he was doing should “be done by a Negro,” it is

easy to see how his role in the movement is often downplayed from “aesthetic

innovator” to “educator.” And it is certainly true that Douglas ultimately

developed a mature style distinct from that of his mentor. But as Locke noted on

several occasions, Reiss was indeed a stylistic innovator of the Harlem

Renaissance in that the early 1920s lacked Black artists who focused on dis-

tinctly Black subjects, were well-versed in European avant-garde abstraction,

and/or were unaffected by what Locke described as “lily-whitism.” What does it

mean then, when contemporary Black artists who employ the silhouette tech-

nique refer to Douglas or Bearden or Lawrence’s work as their inspiration rather

than Reiss’? What is really at stake when art historians tracing the legacy of the

silhouette in Black American art today disregard the white European influences

that so many Black Harlem artists went to Europe to study in the late twenties

and early thirties? And what are the art historical implications of the removal of

Reiss’ commissioned illustrations (initially reproduced at great cost in color)

from the most recent reprint of Locke’s The New Negro with no explanation

offered by the editor or publishers?6

Surely part of scholarly discomfort in acknowledging Reiss’ contributions

to the Harlem Renaissance and influence on abstract Black American art is that

his tutelage of Douglas (including the two-year scholarship Reiss granted the

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young artist) smacks of the kind of paternalistic, infantilizing, Pygmalion-like

narrative that contemporary art historians and scholars of African American

history have worked so hard to overturn. It likewise calls up the issue of Black

artists’ dependence upon white patronage, which Locke labored to overcome. At

the same time however, Locke recognized white patronage, mentorship and

collaboration as an unfortunate necessity to the success of the New Negro cul-

tural movement. And as historian George Hutchinson demonstrated nearly

fifteen years ago in his book The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, the

historical suppression of the rich interracial intellectual and artistic crosscurrents

during this time is a scholarly offense that has as much to do with present divi-

sions in African American and Ethnographic Studies as it does with what

Hutchinson describes as the “cultural racism” of the 1920s and thirties. This

kind of selective scholarship continues to privilege racialized meta-narratives

over a sustained, critical analysis of art’s often complicated intersection with

discourses of power and systems of visual commerce. Is it any more appropriate

to diminish Reiss’ contributions because he was Caucasian than, as has been the

practice in much of art history, to ignore the contributions of Black artists be-

cause of their skin color?

Included here, omitted there, what the uneven historical treatment of

Reiss’ influence on the Harlem Renaissance suggests is a powerful residual de-

sire to continue to write the history of Black Art in America as a racially pure

stylistic continuum – a desire that ironically mimics mainstream art history’s

devotion to Greenbergian modernism prior to the emergence of postmodern

theory in the last decades of the twentieth century.7 This is not to diminish the

importance of more recent postmodern, post-Greenberg investigations of subal-

ternity and the need for racially diverse authorial voices in the visual arts. As

Lavater’s instrumentalizing silhouettes demonstrate, the power dynamic be-

tween the speaking subject and depicted object is necessarily imbalanced and

frequently burdened with racist ideology. It is precisely this kind of questioning

of mainstream representational strategies that lends such power to the work of

contemporary Black artists Walker, Simpson and Marshall, among others. But

one wonders what alternative costs are incurred in the art historical race to con-

struct a racially pure stylistic canon of Black American art. The tendency by

some scholars to downplay the interracial exchange between Harlem

Renaissance artists and intellectuals functions, I argue, in a manner not unlike

the silhouette in its original manifestation – it reduces an otherwise rich and

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complicated era of artistic and intellectual growth to a tidy delineation of black

versus white historical space. Perhaps if art historians attempt to render the his-

tory of the Harlem Renaissance beyond the confines of its racially determined

contours, we can begin to appreciate its aesthetic legacy and cultural complexity

in its full historical dimension.

1 In an interview with Thelma Golden, Simpson explained that the Impedimenta text is com-

prised of titles of paintings from 1790 to 1970 and films from 1910 to the 1970s that depicted

the presence of Africans or African Americans “either in the background or at the forefront.”

Simpson further remarked that the titles seemed “highly loaded” and spoke to the way “they

saw their subject, or the invisibility of their subject.” “Interview: Thelma Golden in

Conversation with Lorna Simpson,” Golden et al., Lorna Simpson, 21. 2 Lavater identifies sitters eleven through fourteen as Mendelsohn, Spalding, Rochow, and

Nicholai, respectively. 3 Outside of the few representations of Blacks by white silhouettists, silhouette production or

“cutting” as it was previously known, proved a viable trade for at least one nineteenth-century

Black cutter, Moses Williams. Despite his evident facility with the physiognotrace and

scissors, Moses was a professional technician less concerned with the silhouette as an ideo-

logical tool in the investigation of racial stereotyping than as a tool with which he might earn

a living. A slave of nineteenth-century artist and collector Charles Wilson Peale, Williams

purchased his emancipation from Peale with earnings from his silhouette commissions. For an

excellent article on Williams’ life and work, see Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw’s essay “Moses

Williams, Cutter of Profiles: Silhouettes and African American Identity in the Early

Republic,” in Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, et al., eds., Portraits of a People. 4 The haunting specter of the silhouette was an occasional theme in Black American literature

as well. For example, Lawrence illustrated a poem by Langston Hughes titled “Silhouette”

that refers to a lynching wherein the roadside tree from which the man was hanged is visible

in the “dark of the moon.” It reads: “They’ve hung a black man / To a roadside tree / In the

dark of the moon / For the world to see / How Dixie protects / Its white womanhood. /

Southern gentle lady, / Do not swoon. / They’ve just hung a black man / in the dark of the

moon.” (Hughes 55) 5 Shaw refers here to Powell’s opening remarks at the panel “African American Imprint on

American Arts and Letters” at the 30th anniversary celebration of the founding of the

Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, 8 April 2000. 6 The removal of all but Reiss’ graphic border designs from the current edition of The New

Negro fundamentally altered Locke’s original vision of the interaction between text and

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Leesa Rittelmann

image. In his book Negro Art: Past and Present, Locke lamented that due to the “expensive

process of color reproduction,” he could not include more drawings by Reiss and described

the German artist’s contributions as “a great and effective revelation not only of the range but

the expressiveness of Negro types” (51). In the preface to the 1968 edition of Locke’s The

New Negro, Robert Hayden described Reiss’ original and Douglas’ newly-added illustrations

as “one of the most exciting and unusual features” of the book that added “considerably to the

total effect of the volume as testimonial to Negro beauty, dignity, and creativity” (xii). 7 An extremely influential mid-century art historian, Clement Greenberg championed the

post-war abstraction of American artists like Jackson Pollock as representing the “logical”

culmination of the modern avant-garde’s search for purity of form and medium divorced from

historical relations. To be fair, Greenberg’s celebration of American abstraction can be seen

as a radical and necessary response to fascism’s condemnation of abstract art as “degenerate”

in the late thirties. But the advent of the Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, Pop, and Post-

modern Art movements in the latter half of the twentieth century ultimately revealed the in-

herent biases of any approach that presumed a wholly autonomous agency on the part of the

artist. Because its narrow teleology proved woefully inadequate to the subsequent concerns of

postmodern art and theory, “Greenbergian Modernism” has come to be regarded as a para-

digmatic example of the ways in which western art history has worked to exclude artists and

artworks that fall outside of a designated methodology or canon.

Works Cited

Ali, Laylah. Laylah Ali. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003.

Colbert, Charles. A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in

America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.

English, Darby. “This is Not about the Past: Silhouettes in the Work of Kara

Walker.” Narratives of a Negress. Ed. Ian Barry et. al. MIT Press, 2003:

140-67.

Garrels, Gary, and Alexander Alberro. Kara Walker: Upon My Many Masters –

An Outline. Exhibition brochure. San Francisco: The San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art, California, 1997.

Golden, Thelma, et al. Lorna Simpson. London: Phaidon, 2002.

Gray, Richard T. About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to

Auschwitz. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004.

Hughes, Langston. One-Way Ticket. New York: Knopf, 1949.

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Hutchison, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge:

Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1995.

Kirschke, Amy. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1995.

Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy for the Promotion of the

Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Trans. Thomas Holcroft. 4th ed.

London, [c. 1884].

Locke, Alain. Negro Art: Past and Present. Washington, D.C.: Associates in

Negro Folk Education, 1936.

---. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

---. “To Certain of Our Philistines.” Opportunity 3 (May 1925): 155-56.

Marshall, Kerry James. Kerry James Marshall. New York: Harry N. Abrams,

2000.

Mégroz, RL. Profile Art through the Ages: A Study of the Use and Significance

of Profile and Silhouette from the Stone Age to Puppet Films. New York:

Philosophical Library, Inc., 1949.

Pindell, Howardena. “Diaspora/Realities/Strategies.” N.Paradoxa. 7 August

1998: 36pars. 29 Aug. 2006 <http://web.ukonline.co.uk./n.paradoxa/

pindell/html>.

Rubin, Sydelle Iris. Emigrants in Harlem: New Perspectives on Miguel

Covarrubias and Winold Reiss. Diss. Boston University, 2002.

Sekula, Alan. “The Body and the Archive.” The Contest of Meaning: Critical

Histories of Photography. Ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge: MIT Press,

1989. 342-89.

Shaw, Gwendolyn Dubois, et al., eds. Portraits of a People: Picturing African

Americans in the Nineteenth Century. Andover: Addison Gallery of

American Art, 2006.

Shaw, Gwendolyn Dubois. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker.

Duke UP, 2004.

Stewart, Jeffrey C. To Color America – Portraits by Winold Reiss. With an

Essay by John C. Ewers. Washington City: Smithsonian Institution Press

for the National Portrait Gallery, 1989.

---. Winold Reiss, An Illustrated Checklist of his Portraits. Washington City:

Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1990.

The Survey Graphic. Harlem Number. Vol. VI.6 (March 1925).

"Winold Reiss to Kara Walker: The Silhouette in Black American Art"

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