By Heather Campbell Coyle
176 pages, hardcover, $50
Published by Yale University Press
yalebooks.yale.edu/books

Between World War I and II, the Jazz Age was in full swing. The genre arrived with African Americans who traveled from the rural South to urban areas across the United States as the Great Migration affected social and cultural conventions as race, youth and gender norms shifted. Illustrations were in demand, and publishing grew to spread the word. By author Heather Campbell Coyle, Jazz Age Illustration surveys the art of newspapers, books and magazines produced between 1919 and 1942 and exhibited at the Delaware Art Museum.

The museum was founded with art from revered illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle, whose students Frank Schoonover and N. C. Wyeth have work in this collection. Campbell Coyle, the museum’s curator of American art, chose a broad range of styles to showcase the era. The artistry is evident from the tension in Wyeth’s assertive painting of boys in a fistfight to the meticulous brushwork of sheer, shiny and embroidered dress fabrics by C. Coles Phillips. Publishing’s expansion also benefited women of color, like Mabel Betsy Hill, whose linoleum-cut prints added warmth and texture to historical tales.

The Jazz Age gave Black illustrators more opportunities, while African art, music and dance were often maligned by critics. Contributor Colette Gaiter’s essay “Authenticity/Assimilation/Appropriation” discusses the generic racial depictions that Black illustrators such as Aaron Douglas disdained. Jazz Age Illustration represents a time of dramatic transitions within the arts before photography eclipsed hand-drawn imagery and new styles in visual culture were both rejected and embraced. —Ruth Hagopian ca