Winold Reiss “will not be classified”

Hirschl & Adler

This event has ended.

Even during his lifetime, and at the height of his career, the extraordinarily successful German-American artist Winold Reiss (1886-1953) defied categorization. Was he a fine artist or a designer, illustrator or architect, printmaker or muralist? Steeped in the German arts-and-crafts tradition with its permeable boundaries between fine and applied arts, Reiss bucked the hierarchical world of American art by practicing a broad array of artistic disciplines with an excellence and panache that few could rival. Upon visiting the artist’s bustling art school and studio abounding with Reiss’s own portraiture, landscapes, abstractions, graphic work, illustrations, interior and exterior studies, mural projects, furniture and fabric designs, the writer P. W. Sampson began his 1931 feature on the artist with a simple conclusion: “Winold Reiss will not be classified.”

Hirschl & Adler presents the first comprehensive gallery exhibition on Winold Reiss in more than 30 years. Featuring 40 works from across the artist’s four-decade career in the United States, the exhibition seeks to capture the full range of Reiss’s celebrated versatility through his oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, prints and drawings.