Judit Reigl In Remembrance (1923-2020)

A major post-WWII exponent of modern painting has died in Paris at the age of 97 years old (August 6th, 2020). Of Hungarian birth, Beaux Arts trained in Budapest, Reigl escaped communist control of her country by crossing the newly established Iron Curtain at the risk of her life. She arrived in Paris in 1950 and quickly engaged with its art community, meeting André Breton, joining the surrealist movement and reading the luminary nineteenth century writers of their pantheon, notably Lautréamont and Rimbaud. The link of visual and literary culture, combined with music, would provide life-long inspiration to a painting career of broad ambition and originality.

Reigl did not long practice surrealism. In a decisive act, which formed her mature aesthetic vision, she embraced the practice of automatism, leading into gestural and chromatic abstraction, aligned with the slightly senior American painters of Abstract Expressionism. Henceforth, Reigl was a key protagonist of the modern movement, although the misguided rivalry between Paris and New York for the title of the art world’s capital, and perhaps the prejudice against women artists, meant that Reigl’s international reputation developed slowly. 

Reigl’s painting benefits from comparison with such artists as Pollock, Rothko and Kline. Recently, during the winter of 2019-20, in an inspired curatorial juxtaposition, a powerful example of her work from the Guano Series (1959-64) hung, to great effect, beside a 1960’s Twombly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two paintings reciprocally compliment each other. However, the most revealing parallel may be to de Kooning. Reigl’s painting, as de Kooning’s, was deeply invested in an expressive study of the human figure and in how gestural automatism tended to dissolve, via the signature brushstroke of each, into abstraction. It may be said that Reigl took this inspiration further than de Kooning wished in the monumental series of Déroulements, begun in the mid-1970’s, which constitutes perhaps the fulcrum of her artistic output.

Judit Reigl was widely recognized in the French art world as one of the leading protagonists of modern painting in the second half of the twentieth century. She was notably championed by the leading French critic of the period, Marcelin Pleynet. Her work was collected by the major institutions and she had numerous museum exhibitions. Internationally, and especially in the United States, she was represented by her tireless advocate, Janos Gat, who exhibited her work in his gallery and others, including Paul Rodgers/9w, and placed important paintings in the leading museums, notably New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Paul Rodgers