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He could be difficult, like Glenn Gould and Big Sur - Accept them as they are and be grateful.
Francis Don Reich was born Sept. 12, 1931, in Martinez, California. He worked wherever he was -- Europe, Balearic Islands, Mexico, Texas, Vermont, various California locales, but mostly Sacramento.
In 2005, I wrote this for his one-man show at the Crocker Museum:
"…Reich first came to the attention of the California art world in the 1950s, when he showed his work at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art and private galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles. His small drawings, watercolors and collages with spare, flat imagery were reminiscent of the work of Morris Graves sans the mysticism. Reich’s graceful yet forceful line made them unique. This series elided into a group of landscapes in which foreground objects or abstractions of objects were thrust assertively forward. This basic structure is still present much later in his wholly abstract paintings in which vertical facets battle with horizontal strips, the vestiges of landscape horizons."

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His first one-artist show, in 1952, was in the snack bar of a drive-in movie theater in Sacramento. Five years later he was showing at Sacramento State University and winning regional competitions.
By the time I met him he had already had his first major shows, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, when he was 27.
Influences? He admired Morris Graves and John Marin. Juan Gris. When he saw his first Matisse, he sent Matisse a crate of oranges. But direct influences are hard to find.
Especially with someone like Don Reich, Michael Levey was right that art history is an anesthetic relieving us of the responsibility to think, and making us forget that, “All art is novel and shocking, inexplicable and above all, made of contentions not susceptible to literary translation.” But critics still tried.

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