Exhibit Celebrates a Lifelong Fascination With Diversity of Race

Like many Germans of his generation, Winold Reiss was obsessed by race. But while his classmates would wage world war in the name of the “master race,” Reiss gloried in human variety and spent his life painting portraits that celebrated the individuality and ethnicity of humankind.

Reiss (1886-1953) left Germany for the United States in 1913, on the eve of World War I. Here he expected to find the noble American Indian, brave frontiersmen and stoic cowboys who had fascinated him in the romances of James Fenimore Cooper and the Wild West novels of Karl May. It was some years before he found his first live American Indian--on the sidewalks of New York--but by the time a stroke cut him down 40 years later, Reiss had roamed all of North America portraying our peoples.

Over 100 of Reiss’ matchless, yet largely neglected paintings of men and women of every shade and hue have just gone on exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Shown in all their pride and dignity are aging Indian veterans of the Plains Wars, young men and women of the Harlem Renaissance, Mexican revolutionaries, Asian immigrants, the whole rich stew of cultures and traditions that saves the American melting pot from blandness.

Ironies abound in Reiss’ life. It took an immigrant to appreciate and record the likenesses of some of the last American Indians who had lived free in this land. It took a white man to illustrate “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” the March, 1925, special issue of Survey Graphic magazine, which is regarded as perhaps the most important turning point in African-American consciousness since the Emancipation Proclamation. And American patriot though he was, Reiss as an ethnic German was snubbed, harassed and hounded during and after both world wars.

But his energy and irrepressibility usually saw him through. When he first went West in 1919, Reiss walked up to the first American Indian he saw on the street in Browning, Mont., whopped him heartily on the back and said “How.”

The man’s name was Turtle, a Blackfoot also known as Angry Bull. It is a measure of Reiss’ good luck that he lived to see another sunset, for Angry Bull, then in the prime of life, was a renowned hunter who once had wrestled a bear and won. Amused by the brash young dude, Angry Bull soon was sitting for his portrait, and the two became lifelong friends.

Subsidized by the Great Northern Railway, which used his paintings to promote its western resorts, Reiss spent many summers among the Blackfeet. He painted at the prodigious pace of nearly a portrait a day; when he was adopted into the tribe, they called him Beaver Child. Yet Reiss produced work that was consistently well-conceived and meticulously executed, except for a certain weakness in the rendering of hands such as has plagued many another fine artist.

Had it not been for Reiss and his son, who interviewed each sitter and kept splendid notes, all we would know about many of these people is the music of their names: Separated Spear Woman, Heavy Shield, Home Gun, Julia Wades-in-the-Water, Calvin Last Star, Singing for Nothing, Floyd Middle Rider, Clumsy Woman, Joseph Swims Under, Arrow Top, Bad Marriage, Chewing Black Bones. . . .