Between 1916 and 1921 Winkler made at least 120 etchings of Chinatown, which was a popular subject among local artists at the time. But Winkler’s Chinatown imagery differed from the picturesque representations of his contemporaries; sometime late in 1916, his attention turned from the buildings of Chinatown to people at work in the neighborhood. This shift was indicative of the artist’s increasing identification with his fellow workers, immigrants, and ethnic outsiders in San Francisco at the start of World War I. As a German speaker caught up in xenophobic hysteria during the War, Winkler found a metaphor for his struggles in his experiences of Chinatown. Critic Louis Godefroy wrote in 1925 that Winkler’s Chinatown etchings “will remain a vital expression of this paradoxical bringing together of two most opposite races and civilizations. It was precisely that “bringing together”— in other words, Winkler’s identification with the simultaneous centrality of Chinese Americans within, and their alienation from, the city of San Francisco—that drew him to Chinatown during the First World War. 

Louise Siddons
Associate Professor of Art History
Oklahoma State University at Stillwater
Panorama, Winter 2015

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