In Advance of Spring

Fred Reichman (1925-2005) was a noted San Francisco painter and teacher whose works have been exhibited throughout California and the Bay Area as well as internationally. He was born in Bellingham, WA and moved to San Francisco in 1934. After receiving his BA and MA from the University of California at Berkeley and living in Europe for two years on a UC Berkeley Taussig fellowship, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Davis, the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California extension in San Francisco. His paintings are in many public collections including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern art, the San Francisco Legion of Honor, the Oakland Museum, and the Berkeley University Art Museum. Reichman exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, and Wiesbaden Germany. Reichman originally worked from his imagination and was interested in creating abstract landscapes influenced by Paul Klee. After traveling in Europe and seeing the great Asian art collections, particularly Japanese art, his focus shifted. Reichman's mature style and inspiration evolved from a combination of Western European, West Coast and Eastern influences including Cezanne, Matisse, Pascin, Piazzoni, Sengai, Chu-ta, and haiku poetry. Like the haiku poetry he loved, Reichman's work was based on personal observation of the intimate with "a focus on nature with compression and economy of means." According to Leah Ollman of the Los Angeles Times, Reichman's works "are acts of reverence for precise moments in time, confluences of light, color, awareness."