Emigrants in Harlem: New perspectives on Miguel Covarrubias and Winold Reiss

This dissertation argues that Mexican native Miguel Covarrubias (1904--1957) and German-born Winold Reiss (1886--1953)---two artists heretofore overlooked due to their identities as non-Black "emigrants" from outside the United States---were vital contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. New Negro promoters deemed these artists' ethnographic inclinations and fusion of modern art and figurative traditions as essential for constructing a forward-looking African American identity.;Chapter one presents a theoretical lens through which the Harlem works of Covarrubias and Reiss are viewed simultaneously as ethnographic and modern. Rigorous fieldwork methodologies espoused by Franz Boas and Bronislaw Mahnowski and reinterpreted by recent theorists James Clifford and Clifford Geertz have resulted in an ethnography that extends to artists as ethnographic fieldworkers. The chapter also explores Covarrubias's and Reiss's early twentieth-century modernity as defined by Alain Locke, Albert Barnes, Paul Guillaume, Robert Coady, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Arthur Jerome Eddy.;The second chapter traces stylistic and ethnographic influences that derive from the artists' respective homelands. Reiss's German influences may include the Neue Sachlichkeit and Jugendstil movements, the ethnographic theories of Leo Frobenius, and admiration for African art among European modernists. Mexico's indigenismo and graphic traditions initiated Covarrubias's exploration of folk cultures and native forms of representation.;Chapter three establishes Reiss's centrality in the New Negro Movement and examines his contributions to Opportunity, Survey Graphic, The New Negro, and the 135th Street library art gallery. This chapter analyzes Reiss's "representative" portraits, type studies, and "imaginatives," and demonstrates the artist's intention to illustrate every facet of the New Negro---its intelligentsia, diversity, and modernity. Chapter four examines Covarrubias's caricatures of blacks in the contexts of Vanity Fair's exaltation of the celebrity, the artist's fluency in modernism, and Mexican vacilada. Analyses of Covarrubias's more serious portraits and Harlem scenes in Negro Drawings (1927) and other publications demonstrate the artist's continuing ethnographic proclivities.;The final chapter addresses the reception of Covarrubias's and Reiss's Harlem works by both black and non-black viewers. The diverse opinions about the works as well as the artists' self-perceptions of their participation in the Harlem Renaissance are interpreted in light of their respective identities as outsiders.