
#23 D – SOLD
1965
27.25" x 21.75" Framed: 32.25" x 26.75"
Painting, oil on canvas
27.25" x 21.75" Framed: 32.25" x 26.75"
Painting, oil on canvas
Signed and dated verso 1965
Reed’s disc paintings, ranging up to 7 by 9 feet in size, incorporate the triangle, circle and rectangle in varying color combinations. As Elisabeth Stevens explained at the time,
…the smoothly brushed backgrounds and the wedge-shaped areas he usually includes in the upper right and lower left corners are “unmixable” colors created by superimposing one layer of transparent acrylic on a lower layer that has already dried.
In 1965-1966 the discs were shown in a landmark traveling exhibition entitled Washington Color Painters organized by Gerald Nordland, which opened at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art near Dupont Circle. This marked the first formal recognition of a local “school” of painters including Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Howard Mehring and Paul Reed, all working in color abstraction. This was soon followed by Reed’s solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery.
Georgetown University Library
Evolution of Color
…the smoothly brushed backgrounds and the wedge-shaped areas he usually includes in the upper right and lower left corners are “unmixable” colors created by superimposing one layer of transparent acrylic on a lower layer that has already dried.
In 1965-1966 the discs were shown in a landmark traveling exhibition entitled Washington Color Painters organized by Gerald Nordland, which opened at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art near Dupont Circle. This marked the first formal recognition of a local “school” of painters including Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Howard Mehring and Paul Reed, all working in color abstraction. This was soon followed by Reed’s solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery.
Georgetown University Library
Evolution of Color
About the Artist
(1919 - 2015)

While in New York, Reed visited museums and galleries, becoming acquainted with New York Abstract Expressionists and Action Painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. In 1950, Reed returned to Washington to start his own graphic design business. Through his childhood friend, Gene Davis, Reed became acquainted with the works of the artists at the Washington Workshop for the Arts, including Jacob Kainen and Kenneth Noland. He also formed friendships with fellow Color Painters Tom Downing and Howard Mehring, who introduced Reed to the work of their Washington Workshop mentor, Morris Louis.
Reed’s early paintings are highly gestural and expressionistic in style, similar to Davis’ early work. In the late 1950s, he encountered the technique of staining raw canvas with pigment – a technique made possible by the invention of water based acrylic paint and becoming increasingly popular with Louis and his Color School colleagues. Reed began staining in 1959.
Over the next several decades, his work evolved through a variety of forms and compositional structures, each designed as a vehicle for the expression of ‘pure color’.
Like Mehring, Reed believed in the use of precise geometrical form as the best vehicle for the exploration of color. Reed’s best-known works employ stripes, grids or curvilinear shapes filled with luminous, transparent colors in delicate hues that overlap and bleed into one another. Throughout his career, Reed also experimented with a variety of other artistic media, including welded sculpture, photography, and print-making. From 1962 - 1972, he served as Art Director for the Peace Corps. In 1973, he began teaching at the Corcoran School of Art.
Reed began exhibiting in the 1960s at a number of Washington galleries, including the Corcoran Gallery, the Washington Gallery of Art, Jefferson Place Gallery, and Adams ‐ Morgan Gallery. A number of his works were included in Gerald Nordland’s 1964 ‘Washington Color Painters’ exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Art. His works have been exhibited in a variety of prominent museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Phoenix Art Museum. He is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
He died at his home in Phoenix in 2015 at the age of 96.
Sources & Further Reading:
Washington Gallery of Modern Art. The Washington Color Painters. 1965. Humblet, Claudine. The New American Abstraction 1950-¬‐ 1970. Italy: Skira, 2007.
Download Full Biography