Modernist
Winold REISS (1886–1953)
Japanese Girl, about 1926
Pastel on Whatman board, 15 1/8 x 14 5/8 in.
Signed (at lower right): WINOLD / REISS
EX COLL.: the artist; to his estate, 1953 until the present
By the 1920s, the successful Japanese New York middle class had begun to leave the city for suburbs in Westchester and Long Island. Reiss’s portraits of Asian Americans reflect a logical continuation of his interest in the sympathetic portrayal of members of marginalized populations, intended as a visual corrective for groups traditionally represented graphically by negative caricatures. In Japanese Girl Reiss paints an attractive young woman whose distinctive Dutch Boy haircut occupies a comfortable middle ground between the 1920s hairstyle made all the rage by Hollywood film stars and the natural inclination of straight, dark Japanese hair. Thus, Japanese Girl is familiar, assimilated, but also true to her own ethnicity. She wears a striped blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a popular garment for girls in the 1920s suggesting that the wearer might be a student. Looking directly at the viewer, the subject of Japanese Girl presents herself as pleasant, forthright, and intelligent, while unmistakably ethnic. She is a worthy addition to Reiss’s catalogue of the multifaceted variety of cultural and racial types, all reflecting the essential “feeling of equality that lived in me.”
