by Emily Burkhart
April 15, 2023
Edna Reindel, Lockheed Worker Working on the Fuselage of a P-38, 1942, from the series “Women at War,” Life Magazine, June 6, 1944. Oil on canvas, 38 x 26 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Image courtesy of Google Arts & Culture.
During World War II, the Detroit-born artist and illustrator Edna Reindel (1894-1990) received a commission from Life Magazine for a series of paintings documenting women aiding the war effort at Lockheed Aircraft Factory and Shipyard in Los Angeles. Calling the series Women at War, Reindel completed nine paintings based on studies and sketches between 1942 and June 6, 1944, when Life published the series as part of an article of the same name. Today, these may be her most well-known works. The following is a brief overview of Reindel’s life and art, particularly her House and Garden magazine covers, U.S. government commissions, and, of course, the Women at War paintings.
Edna Reindel posing with her sketchbook in front of a P-38 plane at Lockheed Aircraft and Shipyard, Los Angeles, CA. n.d. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the Edna Reindel papers, ca. 1918-1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Biography
A painter, printmaker, illustrator, muralist, sculptor, potter, teacher, and restorationist Edna Reindel was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 19, 1894. Not much has been published about her personal life. We do know that she began study in 1918 at the Detroit School of Design, now the College of Creative Studies, a private art school. She then moved to New York in 1919 to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from which she graduated in 1923. She then established herself as a freelance artist, illustrating books and book jackets including Yesterday and Today: A Collection of Verse arranged and selected by Louis Untermeyer (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1927), Green Magic: The Story of the World of Plants by Julie Closson Kenly ( 1930), and The Merry Ballads of Robin Hood by Laurabelle Dietrick and Joseph Franz-Walsh (1931), among others.
During this period, Reindel also received two Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowships for further study, enjoyed her first solo show at New York’s Macbeth Gallery, won an award from the Art Directors Club of New York, and earned a first place prize at the Beverly Hills Art Festival, in addition to other honors. She became known for her flower and still-life studies, portraits of Hollywood movie stars, genre scenes, large-scale murals, landscapes featuring Martha’s Vineyard in New England where she would summer, and the Women at War series. Her work has been characterized as both Surrealist and American Regionalist and has been described as containing “a mysterious dynamic” that “featur[es] rich colors, unconventional cropping of space and unusual perspectives.”
Edna Reindel, The Bull Fight, ca. 1936. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30.25 in. Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California. Image courtesy of Crocker Art Museum.
House and Garden Covers
Between 1933 and 1937, Reindel was tasked by Condé Nast with creating several still-life covers for House and Garden magazine. Today, these iconic covers can be ordered in reproduction from both Condé Nast’s online store and Fine Art America. Many of the covers feature sensuous flowers in surprising composition, somewhat reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), in a style between surrealism and hyperrealism.
Edna Reindel, House and Garden Household Equipment, August, 1933. Image courtesy of Condé Nast.
House and Garden Four Rooms in Color, October, 1934. Image courtesy of Condé
House and Garden Spring Gardening, March, 1935. Image courtesy of Condé Nast.
House and Garden Fall Furnishing and Gardening, October, 1935. Image courtesy of Condé Nast.
Edna Reindel, House and Garden Double Number: Spring Gardening and Building Details, March, 1937. Image courtesy of Condé Nast.
Treasury Section of Fine Arts and WPA Murals
In 1933, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture (later the Treasury Section of Fine Arts) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Public Works of Art Project commissioned Reindel to create a number of paintings, murals, and sculptural works for government buildings across the country. Two of the “easel paintings” commissioned by the WPA are still on display in the Pentagon and at the Department of Labor Building in Washington, D.C. Sadly, the location of others are unknown. We do know that in 1935, she received a commission from the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) to paint a mural for the Stamford, Connecticut, housing project called Fairfield Court. Spanning four walls of a reception room, the exuberant mural no longer exists except in photographs, neither does another government mural Reindel executed around 1938 for the Governor’s House in Christiansted, St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. It had an undersea theme but only a study survives.
Edna Reindel in front of one of the murals for the Fairfield Court Housing Project, Stamford, CT, with her cat, Dozy ca. 1940. Photographed by Iris Woolcock. Image courtesy of the Edna Reindel papers, ca. 1918-1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Edna Reindel, Study for Mural, Governor’s House, St Croix, ca. 1938. Oil on canvas, 20 in. x 16 in. Image courtesy of MutualArt.
Luckily, however, Reindel’s 1938-1939 Treasury Department mural for the local post office of Swainsboro, Georgia (now the Emmanuel County Courthouse), featuring Eli Whitney, called Experimenting with the First Model of the Cotton Gin, remains. It depicts Whitney’s 1791 experiments and demonstration of the cotton gin.
Edna Reindel, Experimenting with the First Model of the Cotton Gin, 1939. Emmanuel County Courthouse, Swainsboro, Georgia. Photo by Jimmy Emerson, DVM. Image courtesy of Natasha Moore.
Life Magazine Women at War Series
In 1942, during World War II, Life Magazine commissioned Reindel to create a series of portraits of Rosie the Riveter-type women working at Lockheed Aircraft Factory and Shipyard in Los Angeles. Calling the series Women at War, Reindel studied and sketched women at work there between 1942 and 1944. From these sketches, she made nine paintings that were reproduced in color and published in the June 6, 1944, issue of Life. Later that year, the series was also exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Prior to her death, Reindel gave four of these paintings to the new National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC–Assembly Line for the P-38 at Lockheed (1942), Lockheed Worker Working on the Fuselage of a P-38 (1942), A Woman at Lockheed Fastening the Plastic Canopy of the P-38 (1943), and Lockheed Welder of Intake Duct for a P-38 (1943).
Edna Reindel speaking with a P-38 plane welder at Lockheed Aircraft Factory and Shipyard, Los Angeles, CA. n.d. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of Edna Reindel papers, ca. 1918-1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The Women at War paintings have often been compared to Diego Rivera’s (1886-1957) work in his Detroit Industry murals on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. But while Rivera infused his work with a Mexican Magical Realist aesthetic as can be seen on the North Wall mural reproduced here, Reindel employs a more formalist realist approach informed by American Regionalism. This was an art movement that flourished in the U.S. from 1925-1945, embracing the ideal of art-as-storytelling during the Great Depression through the end of World War II. Interestingly, there are no women depicted on Rivera’s factory floor as his murals were painted prior to the exodus of men to war while Reindel’s pictures focus on the women occupying this space among a scattering of men remaining.
Edna Reindel, Welder Working on the Intake Duct of a P-38, 1943, from the series “Women at War”, Life Magazine, June 6, 1944. Oil on canvas, 38 x 26 in.National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Image courtesy of Rabih Alameddine.
Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry North Wall detail, 1932-1933. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Move to the West Coast
Reindel had been based in New York City until 1938 when she relocated to California to be near her critically ill brother. She remained largely in the Los Angeles area after he died in 1940 until her own death at the age of 96 on April 3, 1990. Over the decades, her work was the subject of many solo exhibitions as well as numerous group shows, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, 1940) and the Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh, 1947) to the Dallas Museum of Art (1953), New York’s Whitney Museum (1934 and 1949), and the Detroit Institute of Arts (1978-79).
Edna Reindel, Magnolia, 1947. Oil on canvas, h: 34 in. x w: 31 in. x d: 2 in. Image courtesy of 1stDibs.
During her long career as an artist, Reindel worked in pen and ink, watercolor, and oils. She was also a muralist, illustrator, potter, and sculptor. She taught and wrote books on painting, acquired art restoration skills, and developed a portrait specialty painting Hollywood actors and some of their family members such as Spencer Tracy and Gregory Peck. In reaction to the development of the atomic bomb, she produced a series of anti-war drawings, widely acclaimed at the time, called The Effects of War on People that included Angels Wept at Los Alamos (1949), Hiroshima (1949), and Radioactive Mother and Child (1949) but their whereabouts seem to be unknown.
Edna Reindel’s last years are not well-documented. There is even a discrepancy about the actual location of her death between Michigan, where she had family and kept a house for some time, and California, where she mostly lived from 1938 on. However, there is every indication that she continued to work and experiment with new media as long as she was able.
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Edna Reindel in her studio, ca. 1942.
Photographed by Charles Seeberg.
Collection of the National
Museum of Women in the Arts,
Washington, DC.
Image courtesy of