Dozy and Mandolin

Artist Edna Reindel (1894 - 1990)

Datec.1936

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions27 x 35 in. (68.6 x 88.9 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Credit LineGift of The Hilbert Collection

Object number2020.197

DescriptionEdna Reindel was a painter, illustrator, and sculptor active from the 1920s to the 1960s. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied at the Pratt Institute in New York. Upon graduating in 1923 she took up book illustration and freelance commercial artwork for a number of years. Her first solo show was mounted at New York's Macbeth Gallery in 1934.

During the '30s, along with many other American artists, Reindel went to work for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), creating paintings and murals for federal buildings. She soon became known for the bold, simplified, highly delineated forms and figures that became her signature.

By 1937, Reindel had moved to Los Angeles and settled in Santa Monica, where she painted portraits of Hollywood stars in addition to still lifes that were increasingly inflected with Surrealist motifs and elements. In 1940 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Reindel is also known for her series of paintings of women working on the assembly lines of the "arsenal of democracy" -- the aircraft factories and shipyards in and around Los Angeles -- commissioned by Life magazine. Her "Women at War" paintings were published in the June 5, 1944 issue of Life, just one day before D-Day.

This painting is a study for one of her federal mural projects of the late 1930s, commissioned for the Fairfield housing project in Stamford, Connecticut by the Treasury Relief Art Project. Reindel's own cat, Dozy, was the model for the mural. Here she combines several unrelated elements -– one of which is Dozy -– in loose proximity, in a work that seems to transcend reality. The high-key color palette and air of mystery are typical of her mature work.

On View

Not on view

Collections