Jazz Age Illustration

Step back into the vibrant world of the 1920s and 1930s with Jazz Age Illustration, a major exhibition exploring the art of popular illustration during this transformative era. Featuring over 100 works by renowned artists such as Aaron Douglas, John Held Jr., and Frank E. Schoonover, the exhibition delves into the cultural impact of illustration during a time of dramatic social change.

Featuring more than 120 original works by the era’s most influential illustrators, Jazz Age Illustration captures the sights, sounds, and spirit of a nation in transition. The exhibition explores a wide range of themes—from the glamour of flappers and jazz musicians to the rise of cinematic stardom, and the vibrant cultural flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. It highlights how illustration both reflected and influenced the evolving identity of modern American life between the two World Wars, including the emergence of publications created for and by Black audiences during this dynamic era.

The exhibition draws from the Delaware Art Museum’s renowned illustration holdings and includes significant loans from private collectors, libraries, and museums across the country. Paintings and drawings originally published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and in books by authors such as Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among the works on view.

In addition to Rockwell’s own work—much of it created during the very decades featured in the exhibition—visitors will discover the work of his contemporaries, including Beatrice Anderson, Aaron Douglas, Erté, Loïs Mailou Jones, Russell Patterson, N.C. Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker, and others who helped define the visual culture of the time alongside the Museum’s permanent displays of Saturday Evening Post covers and other Rockwell works of this era.

Arranged thematically, Jazz Age Illustration also includes audio, video, and archival imagery in one section to ground the period in the Black cultural production of jazz music. Other thematic sections focus on entertainment, theater, dance, fashion, gender roles, the Harlem Renaissance, sports, advertising, and the legacy of Howard Pyle.