Edna Reindel

Edna Reindel (1894–1990) was a subtle Surrealist and American Regionalist painter, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, muralist, and teacher active from the 1920s to the 1960s. She is best known for her work in large-scale murals, New England landscapes, and later for her commissioned work of women workers in WWII shipyard and aircraft industries as published in Life magazine in 1944.

Personal life and education

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Edna Reindel began her formal artistic studies in 1918 at the Detroit School of Design. The next year, she moved to New York where she attended Brooklyn's Pratt Institute until her graduation in 1923. In the following years, she worked as a freelance illustrator and painter. She won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship in 1926 and 1932, and continued to live and work in New York until she moved to California in the 1938. Edna Reindel died in Santa Monica, California in 1990 at age 96.

Artistic career

After emerging from the Pratt Institute, Edna Reindel illustrated children's books and book jackets (1926). Between 1933 and 1937, she created at least five different still-life covers for Conde Nast's House and Garden magazine. Most of these were very sensual depictions of flowers (probably influenced by Georgia O'Keeffe) in a style somewhere between surrealistic and hyper-realistic.