Edna Reindel (1894-1990)
“I would say my landscapes and still lifes are straight realism with a modern trend.” Edna Reindel (1894 – 1990), a painter, muralist, and sculptor known for her striking, unemotional canvases filled with hard lines and blazing light, teetered her career on a razor’s edge between real and surreal. She earned praise for hyperrealistic images of Los Angeles women welding and assembling WWII aircraft in a series commissioned for LIFE in 1944, as well as for her more abstracted postwar meditations on the atomic bomb, which were exhibited on the walls of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney. Those critics who didn’t at first know what to do with Reindel, describing her as “a dark nervous woman” whose images were “about as meticulous as a fussy old spinster,” would later be stunned by her detail and clarity of expression: “Miss Reindel has few lessons to learn from anyone.”
Born in Detroit, Reindel moved to New York in 1919 to study at the Pratt Institute. The mid-twenties largely brought commissions for children’s books and House & Garden covers, a life of fairytales and florals Reindel may have resigned herself to until a 1926 Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship pushed her into the orbit of Luigi Lucioni, an Italian artist whose exquisite precision shaped Reindel’s mind and brush like a thunderclap. Her still lifes became more cool and alien, framed like unsettling snapshots. Macbeth Gallery held her first solo show in 1934. In 1937 she joined the WPA as a muralist; in the late 30s she moved to San Fernando to care for a sick brother, and when she was done with that, she moved to Santa Monica and started painting portraits of Hollywood icons, some of whom (Vincent Price, for instance) became fans and collectors of her art.
Sometime in the late 40s Reindel’s output began to slow, but it also underwent a shift: “Has she entered some sort of experimental interregnum?” Wondered one New York Times critic. “Her style appears in process of becoming transformed.” The end of WWII seemed to have ushered in a kind of softening and expanding for Reindel, her work inflected more heavily with surrealism and abstraction. She worked in new media, like metal sculpture and collage, and also undertook more writing and art restoration projects.