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Magnolia, c. 1946, oil on canvas, signed lower left, 22 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches, this original oil painting was part of Reindel's Flowers of Our Land series, commissioned by the John Morrell & Company and published in their 1947 calendar and extensively reproduced as a photo-mechanical print which was available for mail order
$18,000
Edna Reindel was a painter, teacher, sculptor, illustrator, and muralist. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Reindel studied at the Pratt Institute in New York City, where her instructors included Lewis P. Skidmore. She painted and did illustration work in New York before moving to California in 1938. Reindel won two Tiffany Foundation Fellowships (1926 and 1932). While in New York, Reindel showed at Weyhe Gallery and was represented by MacBeth Gallery for many years. During the 1930s and 1940s, she exhibited extensively, including at the Corcoran Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Golden Gate International Exhibition, New York World’s Fair, the Carnegie Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art, among many others. During the Depression, Reindel was part of various public work projects, including the Federal Art Project and the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture. She completed murals in Swainsboro, Georgia and Stamford, Connecticut. In Los Angeles, she was represented by Francis Taylor Galleries and Stendhal Gallery.
Her easel practice included precisely rendered still life compositions, as well as landscapes, which drew on Renaissance traditions and techniques. The clarity of her compositions, the unexpected array of objects in her still life works, her feel for hyper-realism and unusual perspectives and cropping place her works in the Magic Realist and surrealist canons. Reindel described her works as “Psycho-realism” which she characterized as combining “emotional, psychological and realist forms, resulting in symbolic expressionistic painting.” Reindel was a commercially successful artist. Her sleek aesthetic was popular during the 1930s and 1940s leading to the use of her paintings as cover illustrations for House and Garden magazine. During World War II, Life Magazine hired Reindel to do a series of illustrations depicting women at war. After the war, Reindel completed a series of paintings addressing the risks and consequences of the atomic bomb. She was also commissioned by the John Morrell Company to complete a series of twelve paintings for its 1947 calendar. Magnolia was one of only two paintings selected by the Company to be photo-mechanically reproduced and sold via mail order. During the 1950s and 1960s, Reindel did metal sculpture and worked, in part, as a painting restorer for the heiress and art collector, Doris Duke. Her paintings are in the collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is listed in Who was Who in American Art and other standard references.