End of Summer, 1945

Artist Edna Reindel (1894 - 1990)

Date1945

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Credit LineGift of The Hilbert Collection

Object number2020.198

DescriptionEdna Reindel often painted in a surrealistic style as well as working in a traditional representational American Regionalist style. This painting, ostensibly a still life, evokes a dreamlike, otherworldly, Dalí-esque quality that hovers gracefully between hyper-realism and surrealism.

Edna Reindel was born in Detroit, Michigan and began her art studies at the Detroit School of Design, later graduating from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Reindel had her first important one-artist show in 1934 at the prestigious Macbeth Gallery in New York, and in November of that year was invited to exhibit her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Second Biennial of Contemporary American Painting. She moved to San Fernando, Calif. in 1938 to be close to an ailing brother – the same year that the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of her paintings.

After spending the years of the Great Depression working for the WPA and completing many important public art projects, Reindel moved to Hollywood in 1941. Her nine paintings of women working on the homefront, titled “Women at War,” were reproduced in Life magazine’s issue of June 6, 1944. Reindel continued to create acclaimed artworks that were widely exhibited throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.

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