From Transnational to Transafrican: Winold Reiss and Romare Bearden

In this article I explore some of the hidden resonances, the "anomalous intimacies," to borrow Stephanie Smallwood's term, that exist within art history and trouble the conventional ways in which we practice a kind of segregated spatiality when we discuss artists and their relationship to American social history.¹ I also problematize our usual understanding of transnationalism as an arc of freedom that occurs for those who migrate internationally, leave their homeland for another place, and represent, reputedly, a kind of global cosmopolitanism. Instead of becoming free-floating subjects, the transnational artist often identifies with a particular subject position in that new place. In looking at the transmigration of European artists in the 1930s and into the 1950s, what we see are people coming, not as cosmopolitans, but as refugees who embrace, perhaps understandably, the freedom that a certain kind of whiteness provides them in the United States. That leads me to think that transnationalism needs to be rethought, not so much as a new kind of cosmopolitanism, but as a process of detachment and reattachment to the spatial and racial politics of national imaginaries. That brings me to Winold Reiss (1886–1953).

Romare H. Bearden, Of the Blues: At the Savoy, 1974. Collage of various papers with paint, ink, and graphite on fiberboard. 48 x 36 in. Collection of Raymond J. McGuire Art. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York

Winold Reiss, Oberammergau Christ, 1922. Pastel and conté on Bristol paper, 28 1/2 x 19 3/4 in.

Courtesy Reiss Archives. © Reiss Estate

Winold Reiss, Dr. York W. Bailey, 1927. Pastel on Whatman board, 30 x 22 in.

Courtesy Reiss Archives. © Reiss Estate

Having written on Reiss, a German artist who came to the United States in 1913, and thinking of him now in terms of these musings on transnationalism, I begin with this question: What made it possible for him to come to the United States and become invested in and identified with communities of color that European immigrant artists, before and after, usually avoid?² What allowed him to connect with often segregated and oppressed American communities and nations and to find among the discursively dismissed the inspiration for his most transformative work? In answering these questions, I draw on some of the lessons given by Robert Farris Thompson in his magisterial work African Art in Motion of how fundamentally interdisciplinary West African expressive brilliance is and how its key concepts traverse as they inform the visual arts, music, and dance.³

I also want to trouble the way in which we call these concepts "African" by charting the relationship between transnationalism and what I am calling "TransAfrican" as a movement of expressive culture through and out of the African continent. I suggest that by calling some of these processes TransAfrican, we open up transnationalism and break out of the typically segregated way in art history that transnational is often reserved for Europeans or European intellectual migrations and transform, potentially, how we see "African-descended" artists. Such a shift allows us, for example, to see Romare Bearden (1911–1988) as a kind of transnational artist and thinker in the way he reaches out to traditions that African American artists in the 1930s were not that interested in or were not told to pursue. Those include the Greek traditions and the Egyptian traditions, the latter often separated from considerations of "African" traditions that African American artists should consider, and the Mexican mural traditions. Bearden was a transnational thinker in the way he crossed the boundaries, the intellectual and discursive lines often felt by and experienced by African American artists; then, he came back in the 1960s to reclaim West African aesthetic traditions and put those various traditions together in a way that was quite unique. Anyone who really studies his work, especially his collages of the 1960s, becomes a transnational, because to understand them you have to go into...