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The art lay-out of The New Negro, including cover design, decorative features and illustrations, represent the work of Winold Reiss, who has painstakingly collaborated in the project to give a graphic interpretation of Negro life, freshly conceived after its own patterns. Concretely in his portrait sketches, abstractly in his symbolic designs, he has aimed to portray the soul and spirit of a people. By the simple but rare process of not forcing an alien idiom upon nature, or a foreign convention upon a racial tradition, he has succeeded in revealing some of the rich and promising resources of Negro types, which await only upon serious artistic recognition to become both for the Negro artist and American art at large, one of the rich sources of novel material both for decorative and representative art.

Winold Reiss, whose studio is now in New York, is son of Fritz Reiss, the Bavarian landscape painter, pupil of Franz von Stuck, of Munich, and has become a master delineator of folk types and folk character by wide experience and definite specialization. With ever-ripening skill, he has studied and drawn the folk types of Sweden, Holland, of the Black Forest, and his own native Tyrol, and in America, the Black Foot Indians, the Pueblo people, the Mexicans, and now, the American Negro. His art owes its peculiar success as much to the philosophy of his approach as to his technical skill. He is a folk-lorist of the