Winold Reiss

Louis W. Hill, St. Paul, Minnesota
By descent in the family to the estate of the present owner, his daughter, 1948

Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum, American Indian Portraits: Winold Reiss, November 4-25, 1928, no. 23
New York City, Squibb Building Art Galleries, January 10-February 1, 1935

H. V. Kaltenborn, American Indian Portraits: Winold Reiss, Worcester, 1928, p. 11, illustrated
Hackebeil's Illustrierte Zeitung, Berlin, Germany, November 14, 1929
Ann Thorson Walton, John Canfield Ewers, Royal B. Hassrick, After the Buffalo Were Gone: The Louis Warren Hill, Sr., Collection of Indian Art, St. Paul, 1985, p. 27, fig. 18, illustrated

Mixed media on board. The surface is in generally good condition, with minor foxing in upper left background, scattered scuffs and scratches; especially scratches in lower right quadrant, possibly due to broken glass. A crease at left edge lower . For a conservators report prepared by Alvarez Fine Art Services please contact the department.
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German-born artist Winold Reiss first visited Browning, Montana, near the eastern entrance of Glacier National Park and home to the Blackfeet Nation, in 1919.  This trip West, financed by his successful interior design work in New York City, represented the fulfillment of his childhood dreams, inspired in part by the stories of James Fenimore Cooper, and his original purpose for traveling to the United States in 1913 (Jeffrey Stewart, To Color America; Portraits by Winold Reiss, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 33).  The portraits Reiss completed on this expedition garnered widespread praise in a solo-exhibition held upon his return to New York and the entire group was purchased by noted Montana collector Dr. Philip Cole.  Reiss, however, was itching to return West; “…I can’t stand it any longer; I feel I must break away – get among the Indians again, live with them in their simple way and study and paint them.” (ibid., p. 38)

In 1925 Reiss’s brother, Hans, hoping to help fulfill Winold’s need to return West, wrote to Louis W. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, requesting that he sponsor a return trip for the artist to Montana (Walton, Ewers, and Hassrick, After the Buffalo Were Gone: The Louis Warren Hill, Sr., Collection of Indian Art, St. Paul, 1985, p. 27).  Louis Hill, the son of venture capitalist James J. Hill who founded the transcontinental Great Northern Railway, had contributed to the creation of Glacier under the National Park Service by lobbying Congress in 1910 (ibid., p. 72).  As Stewart writes, “…Winold Reiss and Louis Hill were a natural match.  Both had grown up reading romantic novels of the West and regarded the Indians as noble, friendly, and honorable. Both were also Indian enthusiasts, amateur anthropologists, and collectors” (ibid, p. 73).

In 1927, at the invitation of Hill, Reiss returned to Montana and completed many of his most celebrated paintings of the Blackfeet Indian Nation.  Mike Little Dog is a product of Reiss’ triumphant return and exhibits his characteristic working process and graphic style.  The vibrant, flat, tempera costume detail of Mike Little Dog displays the painter’s masterfully decorative style, an outgrowth of his German education under Franz von Stuck at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich during the late Jugendstil, the German aesthetic movement linked with the French Art Nouveau.  This accuracy in detail exhibits the artist’s commitment to anthropological documentation.  In the background of the painting Reiss has cleverly rendered pictographs that both imitate the Blackfeet war record canvases that hung in Glacier hotels and directly reference the sitter’s personal history (ibid., p. 29).  The bold, flat, swaths of tempera in Mike Little Dog’s dress are designed to convey the Indian’s spirit and strength of character.  Their juxtaposition with the subtle modeling in his pastel skin tones reveals the painters own empathetic feeling towards his sitter, one of the best known Indian characters in Glacier (Fig. 1).

Hill purchased Mike Little Dog, along with all of Reiss’s other 1927 Blackfeet portraits, and sent them on a travelling exhibition to major museums throughout the United States (ibid., p. 27).  The paintings, including Mike Little Dog, were used in promotional calendars for Great Northern Railways, highlighting the Glacier stop on their “Route of the Empire Maker” from Minneapolis/St. Paul to the Pacific Northwest.  Eventually, Reiss’s aesthetic style became virtually synonymous with Great Northern and Glacier; “Reiss designed the interiors of train cars as well as providing the Indian portraits that were the central focus of the cars.  His portraits adorned playing cards, postcards, and train menus, and eventually 49 of the portraits were compiled in a commemorative volume issued in 1935 by Great Northern Railway in recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Glacier National Park….His interpretative use of Indian geometric patterns translated perfectly into the geometric métier of Art Deco current in the 1930s.  The prints from this book proved so popular that they were issued in two spate portfolios and distributed by mail to thousands of school children, as well as to other collectors, until 1960” (ibid., p. 29).  Furthermore, thanks in part to Hill, “…it was the Blackfeet portraits of Reiss…that served to bond in the public mind Blackfeet Indians with Glacier Park.” (ibid., p. 28)

The wide-eyed young man that had fist travelled to Montana, all the way from Germany, could not have imagined that paintings like Mike Little Dog would become not only a cornerstone in the nationally successful marketing campaign of the Great Northern Railway Company, but more importantly, profound anthropological documentations that are cherished as celebrations of the Blackfeet Indians of Northern Montana. “Reiss came to America to record the passing of America’s racial types, but instead he witnessed and documented their rebirth.  In this sense, his portraits remain one of the few comprehensive records we have of the vitality of multicultural America in the early twentieth century.” (Jeffrey Stewart, Winold Reiss; An Illustrated Checklist of His Portraits, Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 9)