"Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices. Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures--and expected to find the residue of the minority artist's heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has ramifications for the present. Jacqueline Francis is a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts"--Provided by publisher
"A comparative history of New York expressionist painters Malvin Gray Johnson (1896-1934), Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1893-1953), and Max Weber (1881-1961)"--Provided by publisher
Introduction -- The meanings of modernism -- Making race in American religious painting -- Type/face/mask: racial portraiture -- The race of landscape -- Conclusion
Publisher:
University Press of Mississippi, Jackson
Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also...
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Kommunikations-, Informations- und Medienzentrum der Universität Hohenheim
Inter-library loan:
No loan of volumes, only paper copies will be sent
Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier. Including seventy-two black and white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to th
Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; CHAPTER ONE: Harlem and the Renaissance: 1920-1940; CHAPTER TWO: Lifting as She Climbed: Mary Edmonia Lewis, Representing and Representative; CHAPTER THREE: Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethiopia and the America's Making Exposition of 1921; CHAPTER FOUR: Laura Wheeler Waring and the Women Illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance; CHAPTER FIVE: May Howard Jackson, Beulah Ecton Woodard, and Selma Burke; CHAPTER SIX: Modern Dancers and African Amazons: Augusta Savage's Daring Sculptures of Women, 1929-1930
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Wide-Ranging Significance of Loïs Mailou JonesCHAPTER EIGHT: Elizabeth Catlett: Inheriting the Legacy; List of Contributors; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z
