Thursday, September 11, 2008

Essay: Paul Reed

PAUL REED
By Wim Roefs

Washington, D.C., native Paul Reed has experimented with media and techniques throughout his long career. After an Abstract Expressionist period in the 1950s, Reed in 1959 began to use water-based acrylics, then a recent invention. “I started staining canvas, wetting the canvas, pouring the paint and letting it bleed,” he says. 

Reed would in the next five decades also create metal sculpture and photographic collages in which two seemingly unrelated photos and their mirror images were joined. He would make pastel drawings and shaped canvases, some of them directly nailed to the wall. He also produced gouache paintings done on plexiglass and transferred to paper. In the 1980s and 1990s, he did “stone portraits,” simply appropriating from nature stones that reminded him of sculptures by Rodin, Giacometti or Boccioni and putting them on pedestals. 

By then, Reed was already part of art history. In the 1960s, he was integral to Washington Color Field painting. The color field painters included Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, who in the early 1950s had picked up the staining technique when visiting Helen Frankenthaler. Reed, Noland and Morris, plus Gene Davis, Howard Mehring and Tom Downing, were the artists in “The Washington Color Painters,” and exhibition that traveled the country in 1965-66. The show marked the development in Washington, D.C., of a cooler, post-painterly, frequently hard-edged abstraction that stood in contrast to the more gestured, individualistic approach of many Abstract Expressionists. 

Reed was represented in the mid-1960s show with his geometric, relatively hard-edged “Disc” paintings. The paintings on unprimed canvas all had a circle in the center of the rectangular canvas and two triangles in opposite corners. Within this format, Reed would vary the colors of the individual fields to great visual and spatial effect, not unlike Josef Albers in his square paintings. 

But, as Claudine Humblet wrote in her recent three-volume book Nouvelle Abstraction Américaine 1950 –1970, Reed “approached the abstract adventure with individuality, without deliberately subscribing to the grip of a single dogma or giving in to the attraction of a single infatuation.” He would follow the Disc paintings with his Upstart series, such as the 1965 paintings Upstart 18F, #18L and #18R. By painting bands of colors that simultaneously overlay and sat next to each other, Reed explored color effects within a context of expressionism and geometry. 

Reed does so again in recent work such as GIJ and GMK, albeit in different forms. The equal attention to color, space and shape that Legrace G. Benson noted in a 1969 review in Art International remains, as does the spatial illusion created by layers of thin transparent glazes. Reed enhances the spatial effects nowadays by adding strips of thicker paint that form diagonally placed “platforms,” creating paintings that are reminiscent of some of his 1950s Abstract Expressionist work. The thick-and-thin contrast adds another dimension to what Benson called Reed’s “ambivalent spaces.” 

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Resume: Paul Reed

Selected Group Exhibitions
1964 Museum of Modern Art, New York City
1965 Institute of Modern Art, Washington, DC
1965 Art Institute of Chicago 25th Annual Exhibition of the Society of American Art
1965 Phoenix Museum, Inaugural Exhibition
1965-66 Washington Gallery of Modern Art, circulated to: University of Texas Art Galleries, Austin TX Art Gallery, University of California at Santa Barbara, CA Rose Art Galleries, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
1966 John Heron Art Museum
1966 Des Moines Art Center, Op Art
1966 National Collection of Fine Arts - The Hard Edge Trend White House Rotation Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Recent Acquisitions Exhibition
1966 American Embassy in Damascus Exhibition
1967 Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma – Collectors Choice VII
1967 School of Visual Arts Gallery, New York City – Homage to Morandi
1967 Corcoran Gallery of Art, Recent Acquisitions
1968 Comprehensive Survey National Collection of Fine Arts
1968 the Jefferson Place Ten Years, Washington, DC
1968 Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK – East Coast-West Coast Paintings
1969 Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT – Inaugural Exhibtion
1969 Steinberg Gallery of Art, Washington University], St. Louis, MO - The Development of Modern Painting, Jackson Pollack to Present
1969 The Westmoreland County Museum of Art, 10th Anniversary Exhibition
1969 University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
1969 Dec. Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL – The Washington Painters
1970 Feb. Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, FL - The Washington Painters
1970 May Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD – Washington Twenty Years
1970 Jul. Colorado Springs Fine Art Center - New Accessions USA
1971 Jan. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC – Melzac Collection
2000-2002 Multiple-Venue Tour in Modernism and Abstraction; Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Selected Solo Shows

1964 Jan. Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington, DC
1964 Dec. East Hampton Gallery, New York City
1966 Jan. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
1966 Apr. East Hampton Gallery, New York City
1966 Aug East Hampton Gallery, New York City
1967 Mar. Steinberg Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
1967 Nov. Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington, DC
1967 Nov. Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York City
1970 U.S. Peace Corps, Washington, DC
1971 Apr. Matthews Center, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
1971 May Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, VA
1971 Oct. Pyramid Gallery, Washington, DC
1971 Dec. Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York City
1973 Feb. Pyramid Gallery, Washington, DC
1976 Aug. Chilmark Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard
1977 Jan. Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
1978 Mar. Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
1979 Mar. Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
1979 Dec. Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
1981 Apr. Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
1982 Mar-Apr WPA (Washington Project for the Arts) , Washington, DC
1997 Feb. Watkins Gallery, Washington, DC
1997 Nov. the Arts Club of Washington, Washington, DC

Paul Reed is also in more than 50 public collections including: the Detroit Institute of Art in Detroit, Michigan; Emory University in Atlanta, GA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculptural Garden in Washington, DC; the National Museum of Art in Washington, DC; the Phoenix Museum of Art in Phoenix, AZ; the Santa Barbara Museum in Santa Barbara, California; and the Wadsworth Athanaeum in Hartford, CT.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Biography: Paul Reed

PAUL REED (American, b. 1919)

Washington, D.C., native Paul Reed, in 1965-1966 was with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis among the six painters in The Washington Color Painters, the first nationally traveling Washington Color Field exhibition. Reed has experimented with media and techniques throughout his career. After an Abstract Expressionist period, Reed in 1959 began staining canvasses using water-based acrylics, then a recent invention. Over the next five decades, he also created metal sculpture and photographic collages. He made pastel drawings and shaped canvases, some of them directly nailed to the wall. He also produced gouache paintings done on plexiglass and transferred to paper. Reed’s work is in dozens of museums across the country, including the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, all in D.C., the Detroit Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. In South Carolina, his work is in the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Columbia Museum of Art.