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.
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