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.
