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Kandinsky

He discovered Kandinsky from books. “I didn’t understand it, but I saw him articulating his own world of abstractions, and I knew there was more there than I understood.”
Reich articulated his own world of abstractions, especially in his faux realist work.
He was surprised to learn that abstraction had been around for so long but had never been accepted widely. The abstractionists taught him not to let public opinion or trends bother him. Reich saw his early successes as resulting from his stripping such influences away.
All his life he was willing to change directions, in his words, “to escape the pull of gravity of my artistic prejudices.” He was always wary of falling into familiar patterns that could lead to decorative painting. “You have to give up artistic partying,” he said. He preferred “controlled ugliness.” He knew the risk of falling into his own footsteps. His vastly resourceful imagination pitted self-denial against self-expression.
He understood Abstract Expressionism as a rebellion against stodgy pre-war notions of art in America -- i.e. that art must instruct, communicate, tell a story, do a service to the community. He was skeptical of government-supported public art policies that he saw as, “taking away artists’ first freedom -- our right to roam intellectually.”

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He saw that with abstract expressionism, for the first time in America, it was OK just to sling paint. The mere act of painting, “not painting something, but the act itself” was being accepted as valid.
He refused to take the road to New York as such Californians as Richard Diebenkorn had taken. But he understood how artists had become “sick and tired of being made to perform like a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

Legion of Honor

He credited Ross Smith of the Legion with an important role in the California-New York dialogue. Smith scoured California studios for art to show in San Francisco and then secured exhibitions in the East for the Californians he had discovered, including Reich.
But the Pop Art and other realist movements of the 60s left Reich cold. He felt artists were again pandering to the public’s demand to be entertained by easily recognizable images. And the images being produced were untruthful; artists were deleting the hard facts, like court painters of old. (Cf. his fascination with Goya, accepting and going beyond Hemingway’s remark that Goya painted the royal family with spit ).
Besides, he felt that the abstracted high horizon landscapes he was doing were played out. He put some work away, refusing to look at it for years, to come back with a dispassionate eye. He destroyed some of it.

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