From Transnational to Trans-African:
The Circulation of Culture in the Work of Winold Reiss and Romare Bearden Jeffrey C. Stewart
In a talk entitled “Looking Backward to Look Forward: Winold Reiss in Context,” at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2011, I outlined a cultural ethics of transnationalism in art by looking at the career of Winold Reiss, a German immigrant artist who came to the United States in 1913 and made the bodies and cultures of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and immigrant Americans the centerpieces of his uniquely American art practice. There I explored how Reiss, as a transnational artist, made the conscious effort to embed himself in communities of people of color in early twentieth-century America, becoming one of the few transnational artists from Europe to embrace non-whites as quintessentially American. In this paper, I want to build on those insights to consider what effect being in conversation with several spatially segregated racial and ethnic communities had on Reiss’s aesthetic, and how this resulting aesthetic circulated among different paintings, illustrations, and designs that he created from 1919 to 1940.
Utilizing the African principles of design that Robert Farris Thompson outlined in his book, African Art in Motion, we can see the motifs, figures, visual tropes, and “attitudes” in Reiss’s portraits as a kind of transnational and transcultural performativity whereby dance, music, and architectural design structure his visual representations of racial subjects. I want to suggest that Reiss’s work dialogues with design and representational strategies in the work of Romare Bearden, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, exposed himself to various art traditions, including the Mexican muralist movement, ancient Greek art, and especially African art. In a sense, both are transnational artists. Ideas from various traditions circulated in Bearden’s art and came to shape his collages of the 1960s—works that embodied the culture and distinct spatial imaginary of Black people in New York and Pittsburgh at the time. I want to put these artists’ oeuvres in conversation with one another to suggest how they used aesthetic traditions to create a kind of performance of culture that might be called “trans-African.”
