Paul Reed
Orange Circle
1965

Name: Orange Circle
Brand: Paul Reed
Price: 15000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Signed & dated Verso. 1965 Paul Reed in 1970. He favored “staining” untreated canvas. Paul Reed, the last surviving member of the Washington Color School, who explored the complexities of color and form in vibrant bio-morphic and hard-edge abstract paintings, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Phoenix. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Jean Reed Roberts. Mr. Reed acquired his public identity as an artist when he was included, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, in “The Washington Color Painters,” a landmark traveling exhibition that began at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. All of the other painters had been shown, the year before, in “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” a 31-artist exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to write a new chapter in the historic march of abstract art. Like his fellow Washington artists, Mr. Reed rejected the hot, gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism and explored color and abstract forms in a cooler mode. Working with diluted acrylic paint, in discrete series that methodically explored formal issues, he created luminous fields of color by letting the paint bleed into, or stain, untreated canvas. “I have a saying: Pollock dripped, Frankenthaler poured,” he told The Washington Post in 2011, referring to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. “Morris Louis poured. Howard Mehring sprinkled. I blot.” In his first stained series, “Mandala,” color radiated from a circular central image. The nearly 100 paintings in his “Disk” series, which he called “a matrix for exploiting color,” consisted of a central circle and two triangles positioned at the corners of the canvas. Over the next decade he moved to hard-edge geometric zigzags and stripes in the vertical “Upstart” series, color grids and shaped canvases that allowed for more complex experiments in form and color relations. He also made welded steel sculptures and, in the “Quad” series of the 1980s, collaged photographs. “Reed was, in a sense, the ‘little master’ of that first batch of Washington colorists,” the critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in The Washington Post in 1997. “He was a latecomer — he didn’t turn seriously to painting until he was in his mid-30s — but he never considered becoming anything other than an abstract painter. And when he was ready to show, in his early 40s, he was a very good abstract painter indeed.” Mr. Reed gave himself a more modest assessment in an interview with NPR last year. “I’m sort of low man on the totem pole of that group of six,” he said. Paul Allen Reed was born in Washington on March 28, 1919. After graduating from McKinley Technical High School, he studied art for a semester at San Diego State University but, short of money, he returned to Washington to work as a graphic artist at The Times-Herald, taking art classes at the Corcoran School of Art at the same time. He was rejected for military service because of poor hearing. Mr. Reed worked for a short period as a graphic designer with an advertising agency in New York just as Abstract Expressionism was taking off, but he returned to Washington in the early 1950s and started his own design agency. In 1962 he was hired by the newly established Peace Corps to oversee the design of its publications. Mr. Reed had his first solo show in 1963 at the Adams-Morgan Gallery in Washington. The same year, in another solo exhibition, he showed his “Satellite Paintings” at the East Hampton Gallery in Manhattan. These were shaped canvases, each with a smaller companion canvas whose single image appeared to have been thrown off by the rotating, flower-like image of the main canvas. Stuart Preston, reviewing the show for The New York Times, described the works as “an interesting and not unoriginal attempt to develop color dynamics with the curve instead of the safer straight line.” In 1966 Mr. Reed was included in the exhibition “The Hard-Edged Trend” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in 1971 he was appointed assistant professor at the Corcoran School of Art, where he taught for the next decade. After his studio building was razed in 1972, Mr. Reed, who leaves no immediate survivors other than his daughter, began working in the basement of his home in Arlington, Va., where he turned to smaller formats, producing oil-pastel drawings, photo collages and gouache paintings on paper. He began painting on canvas again in the late 1990s, introducing flat, rectangular bars of color that seemed to float over the picture plane. In 2011 his work was included in “Washington Color and Light” at the Corcoran. His career was surveyed in the exhibitions “Evolution Through Color: The Art of Paul Reed,” at the Charles Marvin Fairchild Memorial Gallery at Georgetown University in 2010, and “Ultraviolet to Infrared: Paul Reed, 50 Years,” at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Va., in 2011. In recent years, his work was shown in New York at D. Wigmore Fine Art, which has three early Reed paintings in its current exhibition, “1960s Hard-Edge Painting: L.A., D.C., N.Y.” Credit: askart

Creator:

Paul Reed (1919, American)

Creation Year:

1965

Dimensions:

Height: 54 in (137.16 cm)Width: 40 in (101.6 cm)Depth: 3 in (7.62 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

Abstract Geometric

Period:

1960-1969