Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Born in Karlsruhe in 1886, Winold Riess began his artistic career under the instruction of his father, the landscape painter Fritz Reiss. He continued his education with the esteemed painter and sculptor Franz von Stuck at the Royal Academy in Munich, and then worked with the equally notable poster designer Juliez Diez at the School of Applied Arts. Reiss was one of a handful of European-trained artists who, in the early part of the twentieth century, introduced new approaches to fine art through his unorthodox inclusion of graphic arts, textile design, and strikingly bold color.

In 1913, Reiss immigrated to the United States, fascinated by the heroic tales of the WildWest and American Indians in novel like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Reiss, in love with the dynamism and adventure of travel, spent many years of his adult life traversing the North American continent in pursuit of these indigenous populations, and other minority communities, as models for his paintings and drawings. Already well known in New York as a pioneer in graphic design and interior decoration, Reiss combined his aptitude for applied arts with a unique interest in capturing the individuality of people from diverse backgrounds.

Inspired by a successful trip to Browning, Montana, where he had produced approximately thirty-six portraits of the Blackfeet Indians in 1919, Reiss subsequently set out for a journey through Pacific Mexico to experience and depict the lives of southwestern Indians. The pastel drawings made during this trip evidence the artist’s ethnographic interest in documenting people and their material culture, and reflect his humanistic concern for sympathetic representations of individual personalities.

Indian from Tlaquepaque depicts a man from the central region of the Mexican state of Jalisco. Characteristic of his early portraits, Reiss juxtaposes the Indian's carefully modeled, three-dimensional face with an outline of his body. The flattened, schematically rendered torso is emblematic of both the artist’s limited working time and his desire to emphasize the subject’s facial features. Wearing a blue, collared button-down over a bright fuchsia t-shirt, the Indian stares sadly into the distance. His pensive, somber eyes and the heavy creases of his skin intimate the hardships of his life. The detail with which Reiss treats the man’s furrowed brow, graying beard and the leathery texture of his sun-drenched skin endows the representation with a great deal of verisimilitude. Moreover, Reiss added a yellow glow to the contours of the man’s form; this device, frequently employed in the artist’s portraiture, functioned to mitigate the harsh contrast between the colorful figure and the blankness of the setting and to endow the sitter with a self-generative radiance.

An amazing draughtsman and colorist, Reiss’s portraits have the power to visually capture the essence of a person’s soul and to elicit a sympathetic response from the viewer. Indian from Tlaquepaque, through its realistic yet compassionate depiction of the subject, honors the strength of human character and attests to the artist’s own ideal of authenticity and belief in the beauty of traditional cultures.