|
3
I wrote in his Sacramento Bee obituary that he was never a member of a major art movement except his own.
Jerald Silva, a life-long friend and a fellow artist, said after Reich’s death that he had been, “The purest artist I have ever known.”
Bernard Berenson said art is like a plum pudding, and the masters are the plums. Don Reich was a plum.
Reich earned an impressive list of prizes and had shows in major museums around the world. He had fellowships in art colonies -- Huntington Hartford in Los Angeles and MacDowell in New Hampshire where Virgil Thomson composed a portrait of the artist.
There were times when he was taken up by the elite and their galleries and museums.
But there were down times as well. The IRS confiscated his paintings. He almost died in a cave-in while digging for Gold Rush artifacts. He could identify the bottles
|
4
in “Sunday Morning in the Mines.”
He suffered many rejections and experienced dry periods, but not many.
He was kicked out of a high-end San Francisco gallery in the 1960s because they wanted him to continue in the style that was selling, and never change.
He refused to paint Reich paintings, and certainly not the prettier early work he was known for.
Bird (Twilight) 1958 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento
|
