Paul Reynard


Paul Reynard was an artist, art teacher, Gurdjieff movements instructor, and co-president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York.

Life and career

Reynard was born as Paul Léon Reynard in Lyon, France, the son of Charles Jean Reynard
and Alice Anne Claudia Ollier, on 3 October 1927. He received his early training in Lyon under the painter Claude Idoux, with whom he later worked on the famous windows of the Church of Baccarat, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France. He also worked, on his own, on stained-glass windows in churches throughout France and Germany. In 1947, Reynard moved to Paris, where he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and in the ateliers of Fernand Léger and Jean Souverbie.
Throughout the early to mid-1960s, Reynard taught drawing at the Écoles d'Art Américaines at Fontainebleau, and at schools in Besançon and Angers. After moving to the United States in 1968, he painted a number of murals throughout the Northeast, including one at 100 Park Avenue in Manhattan, and another at Harvard University. Besides designing and painting murals, several solo shows of his paintings, banners, and drawings were given in New York and at various locales in the United States and Canada. Throughout this period, Reynard also taught drawing at the Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, as well as at The School of Visual Arts, where he worked until retiring in 2002.
From 2003 until his death in 2005, Reynard worked closely with the editors of a book about his work in the United States, Paul Reynard: Work in America.
Reynard's first marriage was to the artist Josée Tenas, with whom he had two sons, Antoine and Nicolas. Nicolas, a photographer with National Geographic, died in an airplane crash in 2004. Reynard's second marriage, on 23 December 2004, was to Ellen Dooling, daughter of D. M. Dooling, the founder of Parabola Magazine.

Exhibitions