Background
The son of a Jewish innkeeper, at 17 he was conscripted into the Austrian army and spend World War I in the trenches.
artist etcher sculptor engraver and architect
The son of a Jewish innkeeper, at 17 he was conscripted into the Austrian army and spend World War I in the trenches.
Student Academy Fine Arts (Prague), 1920.
Reder is quoted as having said, "We were born already drunk with fantasy", referring to his early life in Bukovina. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. While working on his sculptures in his spare time, he supported himself by carving cemetery monuments.
He moved to Prague in 1930 because of anti-Semitic demonstrations.
In 1935 Reder had his first solo exhibition at the gallery of Manes, an association of artists in Prague. This exhibition created a sensation and was widely published by newspapers in Prague, Paris, Wienna and Basel.
Most sculptures were sold. Two years later, in 1937, he moved to Paris and became a good friend of the sculptor and painter Aristide Maillol.
In 1940 he exhibited at the Wildenstein Gallery in Paris.
On his release, they travelled to Havana, Cuba, where Reder influenced many artists. All the works in his Paris studio were later destroyed by the Germans. Reder arrived in New York City in 1943, but in 1945 he became partially paralysed by a serious illness, and concentrated more on woodcuts and drawings.
He became an American citizen in 1948.
He was shown regularly at the Whitney Museum and was shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1949. In 1954, Reder went to Italy to sculpt in Rome and Florence.
In 1956, he was given a one-man exhibition at The Galleria d"Arte Moderno L"Indiano, Florence, which received much attention and acclaim from art historian John Rewald. In 1961 he was given a solo one-man retrospective exhibition show at the Whitney Museum and for the first time in its history the museum devoted three of its floors to a single artist.
Bernard Reder died in 1963 in New New York
His last four years were very productive, producing over thirty-five bronze sculptures. He created many of these directly in wax using a lost-wax casting technique he had learned in Italy. Reder"s works are currently held in many collections, including the following:
Whitney Museum of American Art
Museum of Modern Art
National Gallery of Art
Brooklyn Museum
New York Public Library
Art Institute of Chicago
Museu d"Arte Moderna in São Paulo Paulo, Brazil
Hofstra University, Long Island, New New York
Married Gusti Korn, September 1924.