Reginald Pollack

Reginald Murray Pollack (1924–2001) was an American painter known for metaphorical and theme based works of art. He was also a veteran of World War II having served in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

Pollack was born to Hungarian immigrants in Middle Village, Long Island, New York, on July 29, 1924. He graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City. Pollack had an identical twin brother Merrill, who was an editor and writer with positions at the Saturday Evening Post, Simon and Schuster and Viking Press. Another brother Louis Pollack established the Peridot Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York. Pollack and his brothers were routinely taken by their father who was a tailor at Lord and Taylor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There they taught themselves to sketch. After serving in the U.S. Armed Forces Pollack using the GI bill traveled to Paris to study art. There he married his first wife Hanna Ben Dov, also an artist. He also married his second wife, Naomi Newman, an opera singer while living in Paris. This second marriage produced two daughters, Jane and Maia. His third wife and confidant of 32 years was Kerstin Birgitta Binns, an engineering organizational administrator of Swedish, Danish descent. In 1971 Pollack wrote the book: The Magician and the Child, dedicated to:" Kerstin Birgitta." They married in 1974, and she became his muse. Today she is the curator of the Reginald Pollack Collection.

Pollack was a founding member of Galerie Huit, the first gallerie in Paris operated by Americans; there were 12 of them, all World War II Veterans. While in Paris he studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, (1948–1952) "Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a Mecca for American and European artists...Pollack said the tutelage of the Parisian artists he came in contact with (Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Francis Poulenc, Jacques Lipchitz, and Constantin Brâncuși) made him realize 'my responsibility to civilization '. Pollack spent 14 years in Paris, eight of them living directly next door to the famed sculptor Constantin Brâncuși who became his mentor. Pollack said Brâncuși was a "modern-day artistic shaman, a holy man as mystically in tune with the primal cosmos as he was impervious to the strains of ordinary existence". The history of Galerie Huit is a remarkable and significant one in the recent history of American art." The artists represented at Galerie Huit were: Rodney P. Abrahamson, Oscar Chelimsky, Carmen D'Avino, Sydney Geist, Burt Hasen, Al Held, Raymond Hendler, Herbert Katzman, Paul Keene, Jonah Kinigstein, Jules Olitski, George Ortman, Marianna Pineda, Jack Robinowitz, Haywood Bill Rivers, Robert L. Rosenwald, Shinkichi Tajiri, Harold Tovish, Hugh Townley and Hugh Weiss.

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