| Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art@quot; in America Subjects: Modernism (Art) -- United States; Painting American -- 20th century; Johnson Malvin Gray 1896–1934 -- Criticism and interpretation; Kuniyoshi Yasuo 1889–1953 -- Criticism and interpretation; Weber Max 1881–1961 -- Criticism and interpretation; Art; 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. Jacqueline Francis is a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts. |