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Siegfried Gerhard Reinhardt was a child prodigy at drawing. Encouraged by his mother and nurtured by the St. Louis public-school system, Reinhardt moved through childhood and adolescence accumulating a steady host of Scholastic Arts Awards. When he was sixteen years old, he attracted a patron who purchased $350 worth of his art. At the age of seventeen, he had a one-man show at the St. Louis Artists Guild. Reinhardt attracted early national recognition when Life Magazine included him in a feature story in its March 20, 1950, issue, “Nineteen Young American Artists” (pp. 84, 93). Only twenty-four at the time of publication, Reinhardt was the youngest of the group. His thumbnail profile accurately described him: “self-taught, he studied art by copying old masters.” Two years later, Life returned with a follow-up article in its issue of March 24, 1952, headlined “Young Painter’s Progress: At 26 Siegfried Reinhardt Has Gained Recognition Across U.S.” The second article (pp. 88–90), illustrated with two pages of full color reproductions of his paintings, recounts the popular success of a one man show at the gallery of The University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale.

Reinhardt was three years old in 1928 when his parents, Otto Fredrick Reinhardt (1897–1968) and Minna Louisa Kukat (1899–1969), immigrated to America from Eydtkuhnen in East Prusssia. Eydtkuhnen (now Chernyshevskoye) was, at the time, notable as the transfer point for passengers from St. Petersburg traveling by rail to Berlin and Paris. Located in an area of constantly shifting political borders, it was near Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. (It has been controlled by Russia since the end of World War II as the easternmost municipality in the Kaliningrad Oblast.) As such, it proved a natural location for the flourishing import-export business established by an enterprising Otto Reinhardt. Reinhardt’s commercial ventures, however, fell victim to the runaway currency inflation of 1920s Weimar Germany, taking his young family’s prosperity along with it. With four children in tow, the Reinhardts decided to look for opportunity in America. They chose St. Louis as their destination because of the presence there of two uncles who had immigrated some ten years earlier. But it was not just the presence of family that made St. Louis a good choice. Since the 1830s, the Missouri city had been a magnet for German immigrants. By 1850, half of the city’s population claimed German origins. (“German” is used generally here, as there was no “Germany” per se until the political unification of 1871.) As it happened, 1928 was not a propitious year for new beginnings in America, either. Though the Reinhardts were poverty stricken when they arrived and soon added three American-born children to the eldest four, the existence of a large and well-established German American community offered cultural support, and as important, a network of employment opportunities. By 1930, Otto had found work as a die maker in a shoe factory. Otto and Minna went to night school to learn English and eventually Otto Reinhardt reestablished himself in business as a manufacturer of neon lights. (The best biographical source for Siegfried Reinhardt is an extended interview conducted in 1976 by Rick Gaugeit for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, with a transcript available from the Archives.) 

Siegfried, the second oldest of seven siblings, showed a talent for art as a very young child. His mother’s brothers were architects. He claims a recollection of a still-life picture in his home in Germany that fascinated him. He thought it magical to be able to reproduce an image that fooled him into thinking it was real. After his mother explained how it was done, he determined to become such a magician himself. His mother supplied him with pencils, and he began to draw. Even in America, with resources very scarce, he drew complicated images of trees on the paper that came home from the butcher shop. His mother suggested that he look at woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and attempt to replicate them. In this way, analyzing mark by mark, line by line, Reinhardt taught himself to draw.

Through the Scholastic Arts program, Reinhardt won a merit-based two-year scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana (since 1967 part of Indiana University). Still a high school student, he was unable to accept the offer which couldn’t be deferred. By the time he graduated, he had moved on. Encouraged by his mother who hoped for a “proper” profession for him, he accepted a scholarship to seminary to train as a minister in the Evangelical Reformed Church (Lutheran). That plan was definitively interrupted by a draft notice. As a recruit to the U.S. Army, Reinhardt reaped the reward of his dictionary memorization with a dazzling score on the vocabulary section of an army aptitude test. He was assigned to a writing unit where he spent his entire thirty-three months of service. He trained in Missouri, Texas, West Virginia, and New York City, before going to China and then Shanghai before his discharge. In Shanghai, Reinhardt was art director and a reporter for a local version of Stars and Stripes, the servicepersons’ newspaper. Returning home with G.I. bill in hand, Reinhardt prepared to enroll in Washington University in St. Louis. He expected to study in the art program, but his local reputation preceded him, and when he submitted his portfolio as part of the application, he was gently advised that he had already mastered all the pedagogy the art instructors had to offer. He was always welcome in the art studios, but not as a student. Reinhardt took the opportunity to major in English instead. At Washington University, a shared interest in art brought him together with Harriet Fleming Youngman (1921–1977), a war widow studying sculpture. They met in 1947, married in 1948, and were a devoted couple supporting each other’s art until Harriet’s death in 1977.

Reinhardt graduated from Washington University in 1950. The early 1950s gave promise to the possibility of a national reputation. Buoyed by the recognition attendant to the two articles in Life Magazine, Reinhardt’s fledgling career received another affirmation in the form of a major mural commission. The Chicago mapmaker Rand McNally had decided to build a new corporate headquarters in nearby Skokie, Illinois. Reinhardt was one of a small group of artists invited to compete for a mural commission. His was the winning proposal chosen by the eminent curator of American Art at the Chicago Art Institute, Frederick Sweet (1903–1984). Reinhardt painted The History of Publishing on a 134 by 244-inch canvas mounted in place on a wall. The finished mural, an impressive début, established a large and public presence for its creator’s art. It proved the first of many mural commissions, the final one being seven panels, each 8 feet high and totaling 142 feet in length, begun in 1980 for Lambert International Airport, and titled in its entirety, Aviation—An American Triumph (now at St. Louis University). Reinhardt also designed murals for execution in mosaic, including two at Eero Saarinen’s campus for Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana (now Concordia [Lutheran] Seminary), and a triptych on the lower level of the Visitors’ Center at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Siegfried Reinhardt sent pictures to annual exhibitions of the Whitney Museum in New York in 1951 through 1953 and again in 1955. His 1953 picture, Crucifixion, purchased from the exhibition by Senator William Benton, was donated back to the Whitney where it remains in the permanent collection. The picture, vibrating with dominant deep red tonalities, reminds the viewer that its artist was a stained-glass designer open to contemporary currents in modern art including cubism. On loan to the juried 1954 traveling show, “First International Exhibition of Sacred Art,” Crucifixion won second place among over 300 paintings, a signal honor for an American and a Protestant at that. Reinhardt also sent pictures to the annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1958, 1962, and 1964. In 1958, he listed his address as the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York City. In 1962 and 1964 his return address was The Midtown Galleries, New York City. Both Hewitt and Midtown were highly respected galleries showing contemporary American art, outside the dominant abstract expressionist mainstream. In 1955, shortly after KCET, the St. Louis educational television station, went on air, Reinhardt became a television trailblazer, the protagonist of series of seven half-hour shows during which he created a painting, Man of Sorrows, from conception to completion, all while the cameras rolled. In 1960, Reinhardt was still considered a member of the American youth movement, with four paintings and an artist’s statement included in the Whitney Museum’s traveling exhibition Young America, 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six. 

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