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Lionel S. Reiss"Lobstermen in Gloucester, Mass." Lionel Reiss WPA Social Realism Fishermencirca 1943
circa 1943
About the Item
Lionel S. Reiss (1894 - 1988)
Lobstermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1943
Watercolor on paper
Sight 17 1/2 x 23 inches
Signed lower left
Provenance:
Private Collection, Las Vegas, Nevada
In describing his own style, Lionel Reiss wrote, “By nature, inclination, and training, I have long since recognized the fact that...I belong to the category of those who can only gladly affirm the reality of the world I live in.” Reiss’s subject matter was wide-ranging, including gritty New York scenes, landscapes of bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and seascapes around Gloucester, Massachusetts. However, it was as a painter of Jewish life—both in Israel and in Europe before World War II—that Reiss excelled. I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that Reiss was “essentially an artist of the nineteenth century, and because of this he had the power and the courage to tell visually the story of a people.”
Although Reiss was born in Jaroslaw, Poland, his family immigrated to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. Reiss's family settled on New York City’s Lower East Side and he lived in the city for most of his life. Reiss attended the Art Students League and then worked as a commercial artist for newspapers and publishers. As art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he supposedly created the studio’s famous lion logo.
After World War I, Reiss became fascinated with Jewish life in the ‘Old World.’ In 1921 he left his advertising work and spent the next ten years traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Like noted Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Roman Vishniac, Reiss depicted Jewish life in Poland prior to World War II. He later wrote, “My trip encompassed three main objectives: to make ethnic studies of Jewish types wherever I traveled; to paint and draw Jewish life, as I saw it and felt it, in all aspects; and to round out my work in Israel.”
In Europe, Reiss recorded quotidian scenes in a variety of media and different settings such as Paris, Amsterdam, the Venice ghetto, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, and an array of shops, synagogues, streets, and marketplaces in the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lublin, Vilna, Ternopil, and Kovno. He paid great attention to details of dress, hair, and facial features, and his work became noted for its descriptive quality.
A selection of Reiss’s portraits appeared in 1938 in his book My Models Were Jews. In this book, published on the eve of the Holocaust, Reiss argued that there was “no such thing as a ‘Jewish race’.” Instead, he claimed that the Jewish people were a cultural group with a great deal of diversity within and between Jewish communities around the world. Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology, contributed the introduction to the book to support Reiss’s view. Unfortunately, the Nazis thought otherwise and initiated a policy of genocide against the Jewish ‘race’ that ultimately murdered 6 million Jews. After World War II, Reiss wrote, “Doubtless most of my models in Central and Eastern Europe were numbered among the millions of victims. They have haunted me for years.”
Reiss had first observed life in Israel in 1930-31 under the British mandate. In 1952, the Jewish Reconstructionist movement gave Reiss a grant that allowed him to devote six months to traveling through Israel and depicting what he saw. In Israel, he gushed, “there is a lifetime of possibilities in the inexhaustible themes.” In 1954, Reiss published his second book, New Lights and Old Shadows. It contained 210 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings that dealt with “the new lights” of a reborn Israel and the “old shadows” of a European Jewish culture that had been almost wiped out. Reiss reprised the same theme in his last book, A World of Twilight [1972]. He continued painting almost until his death.
Lionel Reiss’s strong Jewish identity and his premonition that European Jewish life itself was in danger of vanishing helped him create a record of that culture. “It was my hope,” he later wrote, “that by pencil and brush I might perpetuate many of the visual aspects of a people whose patterns of life were rapidly changing, and whose memorable landmarks were vanishing.” Thanks to his work, the faces, ghetto architecture, synagogues, and alleyways all remain to remind the viewer of a time and place that no longer exist.
- Creator:Lionel S. Reiss (1894-1988, American)
- Creation Year:circa 1943
- Dimensions:Height: 29 in (73.66 cm)Width: 33.5 in (85.09 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU184129905762
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