Winold Reiss (1886–1953)

WINOLD REISS (1886–1953)
City of the Future (Vertical mural panel "Fb" from Longchamps Restaurant, 1450 Broadway at West 41st Street, New York), 1936
Oil, gold leaf, and gold paint on canvas, 118 x 32 in.

EX COLL.: Longchamps Restaurant, New York, 1936–c. 1967; to Lewis Winter, New York, and by descent, until the present

From 1935 to 1951, Reiss designed and decorated nine Longchamps locations: 59th Street and Madison Avenue (1935); 42nd Street near Grand Central Terminal, 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, and 41st Street and Broadway, Times Square (all 1936); Broadway and Chambers Street opposite New York City Hall, 79th Street and Madison Avenue (1938); the Empire State Building (1939); 49th Street and Madison Avenue, behind Saks Fifth Avenue and St. Patrick’s Cathedral (1941); and one in Washington, D.C. (1951). While Reiss’s work as a decorator recalls his youthful training in the European arts and crafts tradition, his artistic language always represented an adaptation of technique and principles to present experience and requirements. In his work for Longchamps he was not a transplanted European, but an enthusiastic American.

Reiss’s ability to collaborate with progressive architects offers testimony to his understanding of the latest in contemporary design precepts. Reiss used Louis Kahn’s “Continental” building as the point of departure for his vision of the future. The limited palette was meant to be upbeat, glittering, and gilded. It provided an exuberant but not intrusive backdrop for the social occasions taking place in its spaces. The mood, similarly, while perhaps evocative of jazz-age enthusiasm of the 1920s, offered an elegant, geometric, forward-looking riff for a society struggling to slough off the very present effects of a devastating economic depression. Reiss’s City of the Future murals, originally installed in an elegant multi-mirrored space, radiated positive energy and boundless confidence in modern technology that would usher in a bright, beautiful, and promising new future. 

In 1967, the Longchamps restaurant chain was sold to new owners, who operated with a lower priced, faster food business model. Keeping the familiar brand name, they had no use for the inherited décor which had once been the epitome of New York glamor. In 1968, an intrepid New Yorker passed by Longchamps’ 41st Street and Broadway and saw an interior demolition underway, tearing out what had once been an elegant restaurant and bar whose themed decorations illustrated New York City’s past, present, and future. The man was Lewis Winter, owner of a brownstone building in what was then the gritty Chelsea neighborhood, who was also a devoted collector of vintage furnishings. He paid the demolition team to suspend work long enough for him to extract a series of brilliantly colored blue, white, and gold murals expressing a vision of the “City of the Future.” Transporting the paintings down to his Chelsea home, he invited a select group of would-be buyers to view the murals. Some were sold. The present work, originally occupying one side of a mirrored square building pillar, has descended in the family of its rescuer until the present.