JAZZ AGE ILLUSTRATION AT THE DELAWARE ART MUSEUM

Nicholas Remisoff, cover for Vanity Fair, 1923

One of the most exciting and edifying exhibitions of illustration art this year is currently on display at the Delaware Art Museum.  The show, Jazz Age Illustration, surveys illustration from a period of American history that was crackling with energy-- an era of music and dance, of flappers and prohibition, of the new freedom and permissiveness that came with the automobile, of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary and visual stylings of Vanity Fair.  

From the "Club Hot-Cha" to the "Radium Club," cartoonist E. Simms Campbell's guide to the jazz hot spots of Harlem gives us a great snapshot of the vitality of the Harlem Renaissance 

McClelland Barclay

The show is an eye opener because it features not just the "usual suspects" of illustration-- the Leyendecker / Rockwell / Wyeth / Parrish crew that has already been accepted by the fine art world-- instead, it casts the net more widely, revealing a bounty of lesser known artists who were doing vibrant, creative, socially relevant work from 1919 through 1942 and who deserve our attention today.

James Harley Minter

Jay Jackson

I was especially pleased to see work by under-appreciated artists such as the evocative Douglas Duer... 

...or the excellent Winold Reiss:

I loved the art deco silhouettes of Witold Gordon, a new name to me:

For me, some of the most powerful work was not from the glossy pages of popular magazines such as Vogue or The Saturday Evening Post; it was unheralded art that the Museum discovered on pamphlets and other "low" printed matter that revealed the throbbing pulse of the jazz age:

Aaron Douglas, detail from book cover

The Delaware show is a robust reminder of the potency of illustration.  So many recent fine art trends have turned out to be withered limbs on the evolutionary tree of art-- self-indulgent, self-conscious, leading nowhere.  

Beginning with Warhol and Lichtenstein and continuing through the larcenous Richard Prince, we see modern fine artists borrowing from the popular arts in an effort to rejuvenate a desiccated artistic landscape.  Art critics were forced to invent an entire new vocabulary to justify the new world of "appropriation art."  They call it "re-contextualizing" or "sampling" or "augmentation."  Lawyers, too, were forced to come up with a new vocabulary to apply the copyright laws based on whether an imitative work has been sufficiently "transformative" of an original.  

That's one reason why the Jazz Age Illustration exhibition is so refreshing.  It reminds us of a primal period when musicians were inventing jazz and American artists dominated the world of illustration.  Jazz was the soundtrack to images of greater authenticity, energy and relevance than you're likely to see in the Museum of Modern Art today.