Just A Car Guy: Winold Reiss art, and the Cincinnati Union Terminal

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Winold Reiss art, and the Cincinnati Union Terminal

When it came to design, his German and Viennese influences were even more pronounced. “Reiss’s designs were flattened and heavily graphic in appearance at a time when the graphic aesthetic was very new to audiences,” says Parker. In the interiors he designed for such projects as the Restaurant Crillon in Manhattan and the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights, as well as the murals he created for the Cincinnati Union Terminal (the resulting glass mosaics occupied 11,908 square feet of the Art Deco train station), he aimed for nothing short of the Wiener Werkstätte ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

above, this photo was taken in the 60s, below, this was taken recently, notice the alcoves are not labeled, and the shops are closed

“Probably a reason for his success in interior design was that his specifications regarding upholstery, curtain material, floorcoverings, tabletops, menus, matchboxes, and even advertising were all coordinated to complement the murals and pictures,” his son recalled.

For Ford Peatross, founding director of the Center for Architecture, Design and Engineering in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Reiss’s boundary-blurring approach made him far ahead of his time, paving the way for designers like Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey and Walter Dorwin Teague. According to Peatross, “The decorative vocabulary of the Vienna Secession movement, the bold colors and forms of German Expressionism and the conventions and abstractions of African art, all evident in Reiss’s early work, were to be transformed into something distinctly American.”

https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/winold-reiss-at-hirschl-and-adler/

For the two massive rotunda murals, Reiss created two timelines: one of the history of the United States, from the Native Americans to the ‘modern’ citizen, and one of Cincinnati, from settlement to the ‘modern’ period. In these two murals Reiss planted several real life figures, from a local engineer, a Union Terminal construction worker, even his brother, to, to three Blackfoot Native Americans. Reiss preferred to work from the real thing, not creating characters from scratch. As such, he drew on previous work to chance opportunities while photographing local industry.

The Cincinnati Union Terminal murals are extraordinary not only for their size and the boldness of their color and design but also for the artist’s use of mosaic, an unusual choice for the time. After Reiss’s death, he and his work fell into relative obscurity as tastes and trends in art changed. The terminal itself closed in 1972 and was partially demolished.

Each mural weighs eight tons and depicts the laborers inside Cincinnati manufacturing companies, including Procter and Gamble, Baldwin Piano and Crosley Broadcasting. Artist Winold Reiss created the massive glass-tile mosaics for Union Terminal in the early 1930s, and they were moved to the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in 1973

But then two airport terminals housing the murals were being demolished around 1990, as their lifespan was over, and the murals were returned, as part of the prior railroad terminal was nor the Cincinnati Museum Center, and the awe-inspiring murals of the rotunda are once again on view to visitors.

The 1931 10 feet tall and 4 feet wide paintings served as preliminary sketches for the crafting of Union Terminal's mosaic murals were added to the Museum of Natural History and Science center's collection.

The mosaic makers used Reiss' paintings as templates for the tile murals, and the paintings turned up when Bernard Goldberg, New York art dealer, collector, former boutique hotel developer, and fan of Reiss' work bought the set of seven mural paintings in 1997 for a hotel he planned to build near Grand Central Terminal. The hotel deal fell through.

Goldberg put the paintings in storage, but then after talking to Betty Krulik, the New York City-based art appraiser and "Antiques Roadshow" veteran who was examining the map mural painting for Ellen Avril, daughter of a downtown Cincinnati butcher, decided to donate them to Cincinnati museum center, reuniting the 7 paintings with the map painting.

this giant map of the USA would have been too expensive to move, so instead, it was destroyed

The murals themselves were executed in glass mosaic tile. This format would provide exceptionally vivid colors that would not fade with age or be difficult to maintain, something ideal in a potentially dirty, smoke-filled train station. Reiss would work with the Ravenna Tile Company of New York to create the magnificent murals for the new terminal. Reiss's chief responsibility in the project was the creation of the one-third scale cartoons, which Ravenna would use as a reference to create the full scale mosaic tile murals.

Ultimately there was space for 23 mosaic murals in the terminal building. Reiss would photograph local business and create his cartoons from these images, almost directly.

David Lombardi was motivated to digitally recreate the Cincinnati Union Terminal with the Weiss murals, quite amazing

and if you click through, you'll see that halfway down the page are the 360 digital images, very cool

http://www.lombardi.work/ut-cgi/ A labor of love personal project to build a digital recreation of the lost concourse section of Cincinnati Union Terminal. An exquisite example of art deco architecture.