Young Girl with Doll (Black Doll)

The German-born, America-based émigré modernist Winold Reiss, a multitalented graphic artist and designer, was first drawn to the United States through his childhood fascination with Native cultures. From the late 1920s through 1940s, in hundreds of Indigenous portraits rendered in vivid pastel—the largest of his artistic output—he sought to convey the unique character of his subjects, in addition to their precise features, rejecting stereotype for an innate humanism. This was especially the case with Niitsitapi sitters, members of the Blackfeet Nation that Reiss first visited in the Great Plains of Montana, in 1920, returning regularly until 1948, when the artist’s ill health made the trek from New York impossible.

Over the years, Reiss developed a close relationship with many Blackfeet individuals and families, and his affection was apparently reciprocated. The tribe made him an honorary member, naming him Kseskstakepoka, or Beaver Child, and, after his death and cremation, his ashes were scattered over a hillside on the reservation, following a traditional Blackfeet mourning ceremony. In addition, the summer art school that Reiss held in Glacier National Park, from 1934 to 1937, drew many Blackfeet students who went on to become artists, and his legacy continues to be recognized by the community today.

This tender portrait depicts Black Doll, or Sekotan, daughter of Arrow Top, a member of the Blackfeet Craft Association. The work reveals Reiss’s representative style of pastel drawing in its innovative compositional design as well as the intense emotional depth of the figure. Rendered close to the picture plane and wearing a loosely rendered white garment defined by assured blue and pink strokes of pastel, the subject commands the viewer’s attention with her vivid face, framed by black-plaited hair secured with blue ribbons. In her lap, Sekotan holds a large doll, also sporting black braids, dressed in detailed beaded regalia with attached greenery, possibly for ceremonial purposes.