Even during his lifetime, and at the height of his career, the extraordinarily successful German-American artist
Winold Reiss (1886–1953) defied categorization. Steeped in the German arts-and-crafts tradition with its permeable boundaries between fine and applied arts, Reiss bucked the hierarchical world of American art and practiced a broad array of artistic disciplines with an excellence and panache that few could rival.
Reiss arrived in New York in October 1913. His first few years in America were busy with illustration, graphic design, fabric design, furniture design, and interior decoration, all while establishing his own art school and pursuing his higher calling as an easel painter. Reiss’s interior design career prospered through the building boom of the 1920s. Arguably, Reiss’s most spectacular and widely publicized interior was his 1930 project for the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights. This included the decoration of the
grand ballroom, a cavernous 3,000-person capacity room that architect Robert A. M. Stern called "the single most startling interior public space of the time in New York."
Scroll down for more