Winold Reiss

German-American artist Winold Reiss (1886–1953) would decorate anything: a wall, a table, a room, a lampshade, a calendar, a train station, a napkin. He made much of his money decorating restaurants and hotel lobbies; someone once calculated that in the 1950s, 100,000 New Yorkers dined, drank or shopped every day in spaces decorated by Reiss.

Reiss is in the news because two works he did for a restaurant in the Empire State Building (above and top) were rediscovered at an online art sale site; the Manhattan gallery that recognized them snapped them up and hopes to sell them for at least five times the online sale price (NY Times). They are the only known survivors of a set of eight.

Reiss with one of the oval paintings

Reiss painted these in 1938 for a Longchamps restaurant; they were taken down in the 1960s when the space was converted to a Mark Twain-themed restaurant supposed to look like a riverboat saloon. Now it's a Starbucks. Which demonstrates, I think, one of the reasons to have art museums. In general it is great when we spread art out through the world to be seen cafes and lobbies and train stations, but those spaces are always being redone, and somebody should preserve the best stuff where it won't be swept away by changes in fashion or the whims of management.

One of Reiss's Art Deco interiors, for the Busy Lady Baking Company (1915)

Self Portrait, 1914, the year after Reiss arrived in New York from Germany.

Two Guns White Calf, 1927

Reiss was a madly productive and extremely versatile artist. One part of his work that has never gone out of fashion is his paintings of American Indians and their world. He visited the Blackfeet nation several times over the years from 1920 to 1948 and made portraits of several people he got to know.

Dan Bull Plume, 1948

Reiss was a commercial artist, and some of his Blackfeet paintings ended up being used for railroad company calendars and the like, but because he was on such close terms with the Blackfeet he painted this doesn't seem to have caused any backlash.

Reiss did a whole series of murals for Cincinatti's train station, depicting various industrial enterprizes in the city.

But mainly Reiss was a creature of New York in the Jazz Age, a habitué of skyscrapers and restaurants. He painted dozens of murals for such spaces, most of which are lost. This is a panel from a series called City of the Future, installed at Lindy's Restaurant in 1938.

A print – it's hard to find any medium Reiss didn't work in – titled Drawing in Two Colors.

Reiss knew many of the city's black artists and writers and painted several; this is Langston Hughes in 1927.

One of his most famous portraits is this one, of an otherwise unknown woman named Sari Patton.

Sioux Woman, 1940s

Isamu Noguchi, 1929. The ethnic diversity of Reiss's portrait subjects has gotten some attention lately; this exhibit calls him "The immigrant modernist who painted a diverse America," cramming a lot of good left-wing words into one sentence.

Reiss somehow found time to do some landscape paintings in the style of the era; this is Woodstock, c. 1920.

Funeral in Guadalupe, 1920

Art Deco is not my favorite artistic era, and Reiss won't make my artistic pantheon. But I am impressed by his extraordinary range and willingness to take on any project, and I love the attitude that says, "give me anything, and I will make it more beautiful."