I spent some time today looking at a magazine that was published in the US in the 1930s and 1940s under the name of Asia and Asia and the Americas.
The publication history of this magazine is long and complex, and the Wikipedia entry explains its origins and transformations.
In the 1930s it was published by Richard Walsh and his wife, author Pearl S. Buck, both of whom were very sympathetic of the efforts of Asian societies to claim their places in the modern world.
While the content of this magazine clearly deserves to be studied and analyzed, the one thing that immediately attracted my attention was the art on the cover of this magazine, particularly the cover art from the 1930s.
At that time an artist by the name of Frank McIntosh painted the covers for the magazine.
And his paintings are astonishingly beautiful.
Yes, of course these paintings exoticize Asia to some extent.
And the repeated appearance of women (particularly Balinese women) in these paintings of course serves to feminize Asia as well.
But there is something in the colors and lines and curves of the paintings that McIntosh created that is very Art Deco, and which therefore places them at the forefront of artistic style in the 1930s.
Indeed, I may be blinded by ethnocentric bias, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen Southeast Asia look as “cool” as it does in these images. . .
. . . even Southeast Asia as viewed from the perspective of a “Malayan night.”
Thanks for pointing this out. The French journal Indochine has had some art deco leanings, but nearly as sumptuous as the images you show above.
I just browsed a few years worth – 1938-1941. The magazine considers Asia in a broader sense that most people seem to do now – basically everything from Turkey to the Pacific islands. There’s very little on Indochina. The articles that did appear take an attitude that the French have a nice little colony but so much more could be done for it and with it. (Especially in terms of keeping it out of German and Japanese hands). There were some wonderful illustrations of Bali by Miguel Covurrubias –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Covarrubias
Yea, I didn’t want to say too much about the journal because I would need to study it more, but it was clearly an odd creature. On the one hand it was publishing the writings of Owen Lattimore and Edgar Snow, two “progressive” China scholars, but then yea the articles I saw on Indochina were translations from the French of ?? Meynard, which appeard to be pretty basic colonial-style writings about the exotic Oriental “other.”
And then it has many advertisements for stopping off in Hawaii when you take your cruise ship to Asia.
I guess the impression I was getting was that it was interesting to see how a “sympathetic” view of Asia in the 1930s in the US was still encased in some degree of racism/Orientialism/elitism, etc.