Robert Reiff

Robert Reiff

American, 1918–1982

A.B. University of Rochester

M.A. Columbia University

Ph.D. Columbia University

Lecturer, Middlebury College, 1958

Assistant Professor, 1961

Associate Professor, 1962

Professor, 1968–82

Chairman of Art Department, 1973–79

Selected Collections

Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Oberlin College, Ohio

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Middlebury College Museum of Art

Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica

University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York

Until the expansion of the art history and studio art faculty in 1968, Robert Reiff taught courses in studio art, design, and art history. Thereafter, although he offered some instruction in studio art, particularly in collage and watercolor, he concentrated primarily on teaching modern and Asian art history.

Although he wrote his doctoral thesis on Arshile Gorky and was himself an abstract expressionist painter for a time, most of Reiff’s later paintings explore formal properties of color, shape, and line. Influenced by the reaction to amorphous expressionism, and by the hard-edge geometry of paintings by Hannes Beckman and Joseph Albers, Reiff subjected his brush strokes—the evidence of his personal touch—to rigorous control. In his watercolors, however, he let the lyrical shine.

–Emmie Donadio