As a true highlight of the High Museum of Art’s collection of the American 1930s, comes the newly acquired oil and gold leaf mural by Fritz Wilhelm Winold Reiss (1886-1953). The piece, titled City of the Future (Transportation), was the centerpiece of a nine-part mural that was commissioned by Henry Lustig for the Longchamps Restaurant near Manhattan’s Times Square in 1936.
“By this time Reiss was, for all intents and purposes, the in-house designer for the popular upscale restaurant chain,” says Stephanie Heydt, the High’s former Margaret and Terry Stent curator of American art. “Between 1935 and 1951, he led the design for nine Longchamps in addition to several other sites he contributed to starting in 1923. His commissions for these and other notable New York City commercial spaces included all manner of considerations, ranging from the overall design concept down to the smallest of details, such as the look of the menus, napkins, furniture and matchboxes.”
Fritz Wilhelm Winold Reiss (1886–1953), City of the Future (Transportation), 1936. Oil, gold leaf and gold paint on canvas, 56½ x 182 in. Mural panel from Longchamps Restaurant, 1450 Broadway at West 41st Street, New York.
Heydt also shares that the Transportation panel is dominated by a flying boat modeled after the Sikorsky S-42 Clipper, which at the time, was the most advanced aircraft in the world, and in the mural panel’s lower-right corner is a sleek four-door sedan whose silhouette is based on the 1936 Lincoln-Zephyr, the first successful streamlined automobile in America and now considered an automotive design icon.
“Created to cohere within the decorative scheme of a commercial restaurant, the mural also conveys the high degree of artistic purpose and is stunning as a singular object,” says Heydt. “The painting captures the glamor and sheen of the Art Deco era, with its sleek lines and sophisticated limited palette enhanced by the dramatic shine of gold leaf.”
Reiss was also well known as a painter and printmaker during his era. “His artwork is only now gaining traction among collectors and museums following the first monograph presentation of his work in 2022 at the New York Historical Society,” Heydt notes. “His best-known are his portraits of notable figures of the Harlem Renaissance.”
This significant piece and certainly, historic contribution, will be at home among the High’s collection of period design masterworks like Walter Dorwin Teague’s Nocturne Radio (circa 1935) and Viktor Schreckengost’s The New Yorker (Jazz Bowl) from 1931, among others.
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