The Jazz Age. Social liberation. Excess. Glamour. For roughly two rollicking decades, new ideas in music, dance, and fashion instigated a seismic shift in American culture. Business was booming, the Harlem Renaissance was swinging, and cities were springing to life. All the while, popular magazines were capturing—and promoting—the anything-goes spirit in era-defining illustrations that appeared on their covers and in their editorial and advertising.
An impressive selection—from Jay Paul Jackson’s lively watercolors of Etta Moten Barnett to John Held Jr.’s book cover for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tales of the Jazz Age”—is on view in “Jazz Age Illustration,” an exhibition opening October 5 at the Delaware Art Museum (DelArt).
“We have broadly defined the Jazz Age from 1919 to 1942 to reflect what was happening in magazines and to tell a broader story of original illustrations,” says curator Heather Campbell Coyle. “The ’20s is a great place to start. The war ends and the economy explodes. National corporations are getting bigger, and by the ’20s, they want to advertise in magazines because that’s the best way to reach people across the U.S. It’s an exciting time in publishing and a great time to be an illustrator.”
The exhibition showcases about 120 original artworks as well as a bounty of books and ephemera, organized in a dozen themes, including entertainment, gender, race, and youth culture. DelArt’s trove of original magazine cover illustrations, the core of the museum’s collection, sprawls over a wall of its own.
“We’ve been collecting illustration for over 100 years,” Campbell Coyle says, explaining that community members founded DelArt as the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts to preserve the archives of the influential artist and teacher Howard Pyle, whose narrative-rich works appear in “Jazz Age Illustration” alongside examples by his most successful students, including N.C. Wyeth and Frank E. Schoonover. “We have the original art for covers of ‘The Saturday Evening Post,’ ‘Colliers,’ ‘Cosmopolitan,’ ‘Ladies’ Home Journal’—mass-market magazines that were going to millions of Americans every month in the ’20s and early ’30s.”
The illustrations reflect the attitudes and issues of the day—such as Held’s September 30, 1926, cover for “Life” declaring “Sweet Sexteen” and depicting a young girl propped on a sofa and reading a book about psychoanalysis—as well as great diversity in aesthetics, from art deco to painterly realism.
Jazz made its way into the mainstream through nightclubs and musical revues, associated with New Orleans and understood as African American in its roots. The music was quickly assimilated and appropriated, even as the press began lamenting the Jazz Age by its heyday.
Campbell Coyle refers to a syndicated newspaper article that quoted a 1919 speech by Presbyterian pastor John Allen Blair, Ph.D., who said, “We are living in an age where everything goes. …There is a moral looseness, a lack of steadiness. …Jazz epitomizes the spirit of the age. Jazz is the most popular dance and jazz is the most popular music.”
Fitzgerald locked in the moniker of the tradition-busting era with the publication of his 1922 book, “Tales of the Jazz Age,” the cover illustration showing musicians performing. “They’re, of course, white musicians and young couples,” Campbell Coyle describes. “Girls in short skirts, flapper short hair, and rolled stockings, drinking out of flasks and smoking—all these controversial behaviors come together so well on that cover.”
Meanwhile, she says of the period, “We’ve got voting, we’ve got women working, we’ve got some loosening of strictures around things like premarital sex.”
It all reflected in the visual culture in everything from magazines to playbills to sheet music, and the imagery was remarkably modern. “The most modern art in anybody’s house at the time might have been on the sheet music on their piano,” Campbell Coyle says.
Sheet music illustrations appear in “Jazz Age Illustration” in the opening section devoted to the music, including many by Sydney Leff, who created almost 2,000 designs for composers such as Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, and Duke Ellington.
Imagery such as Leff’s cover for “Underneath the Harlem Moon” helped propel the New Negro Movement, the intellectual and creative revival of African American music, art, theater, and literature. DelArt borrowed portraits of two leaders of the movement, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, from the National Portrait Gallery. They were illustrated by German-born artist Winold Reiss for the journal “Survey Graphic” and Locke’s 1925 book, “The New Negro: An Interpretation.”
The show also features a wall of art deco posters for the World’s Fairs in Chicago and New York, as well as the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940. “The idea [of the latter event] was to celebrate 75 years since the end of slavery, and there was a contest for posters,” says Campbell Coyle, who consulted with many curators and scholars to produce the exhibition and the accompanying catalog. The winning design for the exposition, by Robert Pious, pays homage to Egyptian art and features a modern depiction of Abraham Lincoln and the city’s skyscrapers in the background.
Illustration styles varied widely during the Jazz Age, especially in magazines. One month might bring an art deco cover, and the next might be a cartoon or religious image.
Orientalism surfaces in Witold Gordon’s monochrome gouache illustrations for “The Travels of Sinbad,” which, incidentally, was never published, and in George William Gage’s moody oil painting cover for “The Door of the Double Dragon.”
Realism continued to thrive, demonstrated in works by McClelland Barclay and Gayle Porter Hoskins, who pivots from Western imagery to women and romance as magazines become popular.
Hoskins’ 1925 oil, “You can’t leave her here to suffer. Whether you want to or not, you’ll have to do it,” created for “Woman’s Home Companion,” brings the viewer into a love triangle. Miss Fifi Printon, with one hand on her hip and the other holding a cigarette, is “The Bad Little Egg” who smokes and drinks and stays out late, and now must choose between two kinds of men.
The earliest piece in the show, a 1917 illustration by Erté, depicts a costume design for “Californie,” for “Milliardaires Americaines” with Madame Bénédicte Rasimi at Théâtre Femina in Paris—an example of the influential artist’s vision of Jazz Age and art deco glamour.
A watercolor, gouache, and graphite illustration by C. Coles Phillips that helped inspire the show—and that was originally created for the October 2, 1920, cover of “The Saturday Evening Post”—depicts a seated woman attending to her garments with needle and thread. Rendered in a style akin to Norman Rockwell, Campbell Coyle says, “This is a stunning piece—for an artist to be able to draw this and get that transparency. He had a hosiery advertising gig, not surprisingly, and he’s able to get that translucency in the fabric…just beautiful.”
Advertising presented a lucrative opportunity for illustrators, and major figures such as Phillips, Wyeth, Russell Patterson, and Maxfield Parrish cashed in.
The artists who leaned into fashion also benefited from clothing catalogs, the prevailing media to promote new looks. J.C. Leyendecker, the most popular cover illustrator for “The Saturday Evening Post” before Rockwell came along, was at the height of his career when he was creating advertising art, mostly for menswear. “Jazz Age Illustration” includes his 1929 oil on canvas study for a Kuppenheimer Suits ad that features Leyendecker’s partner, Charles Beach.
DelArt borrowed several Leyendecker works, including “Goodbye Summer,” an oil reproduced as the cover of the September 1934 edition of “The Saturday Evening Post.” “He makes incredible paintings that show you the times,” Campbell Coyle says. “‘Goodbye Summer’ speaks to race relations and how Black people were portrayed in the press. It was more or less policy at ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ that you only showed Black figures in service positions, like the porter in this picture. That’s typical of how the press was in this period, which is why there needed to be a Black press.”
Another image that inspired “Jazz Age Illustration” is Nicolai Remisoff’s gouache for the March 1923 cover of “Vanity Fair.” It shows the interplay of smiling, formally dressed figures onstage, skyscrapers in the background, and flanked by bright blue and white curtains from which a caricature of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the novel “Vanity Fair,” looks on in voyeuristic bliss.
“It’s weird and modern and kind of gender-bending and unexpected for our collection,” Campbell Coyle says, “but not at all unexpected in the 1920s. ‘Vanity Fair,’ like ‘Vogue,’ ‘Life,’ and ‘The New Yorker’ was a self-consciously modern magazine. It was made for the urbane audience. They were called ‘smart magazines.’ It’s a different audience from ‘The Saturday Evening Post.’”
Remisoff’s strange and wonderful image underscores the staggering depth of the DelArt collection of sensitive and fragile works that seldom see the light of day. The museum deftly tells one story of illustration through its works by Pyle, Schoonover, Wyeth, and Violet Oakley, the renowned muralist. “This is what’s hiding in storage,” Campbell Coyle says of “Jazz Age Illustration.” “So many of the covers are for magazines we haven’t heard of because they no longer exist. It’s exciting to bring together pieces that have gone out piecemeal in other shows and think about them through a different lens.”
Among them is a mixed-media work by Russell Patterson for the July 1932 cover of the humor magazine “Ballyhoo.” It shows a scantily clad cabaret performer on the sidewalk outside the theater holding an “on strike” sign. “This is classic Patterson,” Campbell Coyle says, noting that the artist also designed costumes and sets on Broadway. “Artists are beginning to specialize in things like pinups and cheesecake as you get toward World War II. He certainly does some of that. Interestingly, this piece was given to us by the model.”
The exhibition also puts a spotlight on DelArt’s recently acquired works by artists of color and women, including Neysa McMein’s pastel “The Admirable Hostess” for a Wallace Silver advertisement in the January 8, 1921, edition of “The Saturday Evening Post.” “This is one of my favorite acquisitions,” Campbell Coyle says. “McMein was a big deal in the 1920s and ’30s. She was hanging out with the Algonquin [Round] Table people, like Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.”
DelArt has also added “Flapper Filosofy” cartoon panels by Faith Burrows, alongside illustrations by Lucille Murphy and the nationally syndicated Nell Brinkley.
In addition to the visual spectacle of “Jazz Age Illustration,” DelArt is hosting a jazz performance series, a fashion show, and a symposium, a day of scholarly talks and behind-the-scenes tours where attendees can enjoy a deeper dive into the era.
After it ends on January 26, 2025, the exhibition will be adapted for the Biggs Museum in Dover, followed by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
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