St. Olaf College

Edna Reindel

Contemporary painter
United States
1894 - 1990

View objects by this artist.

Edna Reindel was born on February 19, 1894 in Detroit Michigan.  She began studying at the Detroit School of Design in 1918, before moving to New York City the following year and enrolling at the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn.  There, she developed her skills in drawing and painting while also working as a freelance artist and book illustrator.  She continued to work as an illustrator following her graduation in 1923.  In 1926, she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship award as she began shifting toward a career as a fine artist.  She won a second Tiffany Fellowship in 1932.

In 1943, Reindel produced an iconic series of paintings depicting women factory workers for which she is best known today. That year, at her suggestion, Life magazine commissioned Reindel to paint a series of works celebrating women’s contributions to the war effort.

After the war years, Reindel’s style evolved, responding to recent trends in American art that looked to European surrealism as a new source of inspiration. Increasingly her still lifes and landscapes took on fantastical imagery. In 1947 she began a series of surrealistic pen-and-ink drawings of “The Effects of War on People.” One of these drawings, Weep for Los Alamos, was selected for the Carnegie Institute’s Painting in the United States 1947 exhibition, while Hiroshima appeared in both the 1948 annual exhibition of Abstract and Surrealist art at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibition of 1949. Reindel’s activity from the early 1950s on seems to have declined substantially, a pattern frequently observed of modernist artists at mid-century in response to the rise of abstract painting. She continued painting and creating art until at least the 1960s, painting portraits and still lifes, while trying her hand at abstraction, collage, and sculpture. She moved from Santa Monica to Los Angeles in 1962, and then bought a house in Southfield, Michigan, in 1973, to be closer to her sisters, Lillian and Florence. Reinfeld died in Santa Monica.
George Arbanas, ‘20
October 2019
Sources
“Edna Reindel.” Hirschl & Adler, https://www.hirschlandadler.com/galleries/edna-reindel.