About

Even during his lifetime, and at the height of his career, the extraordinarily successful German American artist Winold Reiss (1886–1953) defied categorization. Steeped in the German arts-and-crafts tradition with its permeable boundaries between fine and applied arts, Reiss challenged the hierarchical world of American art and practiced a broad array of artistic disciplines with an excellence and fluency that few could rival.

Reiss arrived in New York in October 1913. His first few years in America were busy with illustration, graphic design, fabric design, furniture design, and interior …