Return To The Jazz Age At Delaware Art Museum

Gatsby, champagne from coupe glasses, speakeasys, juke joints, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, swing dancing, the Harlem Renaissance , celebrity gangsters, Art Deco–everything was new and sexy and slim and curved and elongated and a little, or a lot, dangerous. The Jazz Age has always been an alluring era in American mythology.

Following World War I, America was feeling itself as a world power for the first time. Chest puffed out. Strong. Righteous.

Regular people had a little money to spend on a good time. Society was modernizing: cars and planes and radio and movies. The 1920 census revealed that more Americans were living in urban areas than outside of them for the first time.

Images fed citizens through an explosion of magazines were outrageously aspirational. Everyone was young and thin and beautiful and glamorous and dancing and drinking and shopping and having fun.

The Delaware Art Museum returns visitors to the 1920s during " Jazz Age Illustration ," the first major exhibition to survey the art of popular illustration in the United States between 1919 and 1942. Drawing from DelArt's extraordinary illustration collection and showcasing loans from museums, libraries, and private collectors, the exhibition features more than 120 works of art.

"The Jazz Age was an era of change, encompassing financial boom and bust, women voting, Prohibition, the popularization of psychoanalysis, the Harlem Renaissance, and changing norms about how young men and women interacted socially and sexually," DelArt's Curator of American Art and exhibition curator Heather Campbell Coyle told Forbes.com. "At the heart of it all was a population shift. To escape racial violence and Jim Crow laws, African Americans had been relocating from the rural South to cities since the late 19th century in the movement known as the Great Migration. Young people were moving away from home, working in new industries, and spending more time with each other than with their families."

From South to North. From farm to city.

An unprecedented abundance of available printed mass media envisioned an ideal modern life. A new popular visual culture emerged after the Great War both reflecting and contributing to the period's cultural vibrancy and dramatic social changes.

"Due to increased advertising and changes in printing technology, magazines really proliferated in the teens. Niche magazines—from the literary to the sleazy—were launched," Campbell Coyle explains. "With advertising money to subsidize printing costs, magazines became larger and much more heavily illustrated."

These are the works on view in "Jazz Age Illustration," artists reflecting the rise of jazz musicians, flappers, and film stars. Black and white. The Harlem Renaissance, a New Negro Movement that extended beyond New York to Chicago and Detroit and St. Louis.

Magazines and newspapers dedicated to African American audiences flourished. They employed extraordinary fine artists like Aaron Douglas and Loïs Mailou Jones, same as the mainstream white publications had illustrations from Stuart Davis and Norman Rockwell.

The exhibition includes original paintings and drawings appearing in "Vogue," "Vanity Fair" and "The Saturday Evening Post," and in books by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alain Locke.

Illustrations Reveal Racial Divide

For all the Jazz Age progressivism, mainstream America was only willing to go so far. Incrementalism has always defined social progress here.

"Illustration reflected changes in fashion and lifestyle, but much of it also remained reassuringly familiar," Campbell Coyle said. "s and magazine covers featured beautiful women, often in domestic settings. They might be wearing loose dresses and sporting bobbed hair—they might even be drawn in an Art Deco style—but most of the women on magazine covers weren't all that different from the Gibson girls of the previous generation ."

Demure. Subservient. Monied.

White.

"The illustrations also capture a nation divided by race," Campbell Coyle said. "At this time, mass-market magazines targeted white audiences. African Americans were rarely pictured, and when they were, they were caricatured and/or placed in positions of service. This bias in print culture necessitated the rise of the Black press, which published art and writing by and for African Americans."

No matter what societal progress America makes, anti-Black racism is never far from the surface. The 1920s were preceded by the Red Summer of 1919 , a nationwide wave of white supremacist violence spurred in large part by Black servicemen returning from Europe wanting a degree of the equality at home they experienced in France. White America wasn't having it.

The 1920s saw the Ku Klux Klan's popularity swell around the United States – not just in the South . Progress–change–people moving to cities, sexual freedom, an emerging Black middle class, was met by conservative backlash 100 years ago as surely as it has been today . Gatsby in a slick suit occupies one side of America's 1920s coin representing the Jazz Age and modernization, the other side features a KKK grand dragon in a white hood with a burning cross using violence and intimidation in an attempt to drag the nation backward.

Remarkable echoes to contemporary America .

"Individual portraits were particularly important in the Harlem Renaissance as artists fought prevailing stereotypes and racist caricatures," Campbell Coyle said. "Many African American artists, including Aaron Douglas and Laura Wheeler Waring, incorporated Egyptian motifs—but this was also an era of Egyptomania generally, with the discovery of King Tut's Tomb in 1922. Douglas fused African motifs and modernism into his own signature style, which Richard Powell has called Afro-Deco."

The Music Stops

The party ended on October 29, 1929. The stock market crashed. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the misery of the 1930s. There's nothing glamorous about a bread line. Nor a Dust Bowl . Ecological ruin brought on by unsustainable farming practices and drought across the Great Plains visited hunger and suffering to rural and urban America alike.

In mass media, the camera replaced the pencil.

"In the 1930s, photography began to eclipse illustration," Campbell Coyle said. "Although photomechanical printing had existed for decades, magazines found that photographic covers sold better than illustrated ones in the later 1930s."

A new era required a new recording. Aspirations of fabulous parties with flowing champagne, dancing and music from the 20s gave way to aspirations of a square meal and work in the 30s. No drawing could capture this hunger the way Dorothea Lange's gritty, documentary-style photography could.

"Jazz Age Illustration" can be seen through January 26, 2025.

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