Background
Paul Reed was born on March 28, 1919, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, into the family of Charles Miler and Lula Rachael (Annadale) Reed.
McKinley Technical High School
Corcoran School of Art
McKinley Technical High School
San Diego State University
Corcoran School of Art
Paul Reed was born on March 28, 1919, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, into the family of Charles Miler and Lula Rachael (Annadale) Reed.
After graduating from McKinley Technical High School, Paul Allen Reed studied art for a semester at San Diego State University but, short of money, he returned to Washington to work as a graphic artist at The Times-Herald, taking art classes at the Corcoran School of Art at the same time.
Paul Reed worked for a short period as a graphic designer with an advertising agency in New York just as Abstract Expressionism was taking off, but he returned to Washington in the early 1950s and started his own design agency. In 1962 he was hired by the newly established Peace Corps to oversee the design of its publications.
Mr. Reed had his first solo show in 1963 at the Adams-Morgan Gallery in Washington. The same year, in another solo exhibition, he showed his “Satellite Paintings” at the East Hampton Gallery in Manhattan. These were shaped canvases, each with a smaller companion canvas whose single image appeared to have been thrown off by the rotating, flowerlike image of the main canvas.
Paul Reed acquired his public identity as an artist when he was included, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring, in “The Washington Color Painters”, a landmark traveling exhibition that began at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965.
All of the other painters had been shown, the year before, in “Post-Painterly Abstraction”, a 31-artist exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to write a new chapter in the historic march of abstract art.
In 1966 Mr. Reed was included in the exhibition “The Hard-Edged Trend” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in 1971 he was appointed assistant professor at the Corcoran School of Art, where he taught for the next decade.
Like his fellow Washington artists, Reed rejected the hot, gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism and explored color and abstract forms in a cooler mode. Working with diluted acrylic paint, in discrete series that methodically explored formal issues, he created luminous fields of color by letting the paint bleed into, or stain, untreated canvas.
In his first stained series, “Mandala”, color radiated from a circular central image. The nearly 100 paintings in his “Disk” series, which he called “a matrix for exploiting color”, consisted of a central circle and two triangles positioned at the corners of the canvas.
Over the next decade, he moved to hard-edged geometric zigzags and stripes in the vertical “Upstart” series, color grids and shaped canvases that allowed for more complex experiments in form and color relations. He also made welded steel sculptures and, in the “Quad” series of the 1980s, collaged photographs. Mr. Reed then gave himself a more modest assessment in an interview with NPR. He began painting on canvas again in the late 1990s, introducing flat, rectangular bars of color that seemed to float over the picture plane.
Paul Reed, the last surviving member of the Washington Color School, who explored the complexities of color and form in vibrant biomorphic and hard-edge abstract paintings, died on September 26, 2016 at his home in Phoenix. He was 96.
Paul Allen Reed adhered to the artistic traditions of Post-Painterly Abstraction and Abstract Illusionism.
Reed was the last living member of the Washington Color School - an art group that gained national fame in the 1960s.
On July 10, 1939 Paul Allen Reed married Esther Kishter, with whom he had three children, Jean Reed Roberts, Thomas, and Robert Reed.
