Ten years ago, I was driving down Venice Boulevard one morning, late to work as usual, when I spotted a large modern artwork among the bric-a-brac in front of a thrift store. It’s got to be a poster, I thought as I circled the block. But no, it was a framed abstract oil painting with an over-sized, stylized signature in the upper right corner that said REYNOLDS. Being a fan of art featuring typography, I paid $15 and soon the canvas was hanging on my bedroom wall. Internet searches over the years led nowhere, but I suspected it was an early ’70s-era painting mass-produced in Mexico for tourist consumption.

Recently, my friends who own a vintage furniture shop showed me their collection of Reynolds paintings, including one that looked almost exactly like my beloved abstract (but arguably, not as good). They didn’t have any information about the artist, either. Coincidentally, last year I picked up a giant, lurid painting of sunflowers signed “Lee Reynolds” at my neighbor’s yard sale for $5. With my curiosity piqued anew, I found tons of Lee Reynolds’ original oil paintings in many different styles and subjects on eBay. Who was this often kitschy, sometimes brilliant, and very prolific artist? A Google search finally hit pay dirt.

Frank’s favorite flower painting found at a garage sale, only $5

Frank’s favorite flower painting found at a garage sale, only $5

In the late 1960s, Andy Warhol had glamorous lackeys silkscreen his canvases for him and called his studio The Factory. In the art-boom ’80s, Mark Kostabi set up an art sweatshop where struggling East Village painters made Kostabi-esque works under his not-so-watchful eye. But in 1965, Lee Reynolds Burr and his Vanguard Studios were there first. His original “art factory” in Beverly Hills produced more painted canvases bearing one signature than any artist in history, but none of the artworks for sale were actually painted by him.

Vanguard logo

Vanguard logo

Burr was born in Los Angeles and graduated with a BFA from UCLA in 1962. He initially created artwork for Bertini Studios but soon decided to go out on his own. Two years later, he founded Vanguard Studios with his business-savvy brother Stuart to give average American families the chance to own a “real” oil painting, much like the etchings that had democratized the art-owning experience in America a century earlier. With paintings sold through a network of Vanguard showrooms, furniture stores and interior decorators around the country, business started booming, and 10 years later, both men were multimillionaires with a publicly traded company.

Burr never set out to be part of the contemporary fine art movement. His product was decorative art: pieces that would look nice over couches in middle-class homes, with an actual artist’s signature (usually “Lee Reynolds” or simply “Reynolds”) to make them seem more exclusive and genuine. Vanguard tackled many different styles and subjects—landscapes, bullfighters, supercute or sad children, boats at sea, flowers, architecture, still lifes, romantic images of old Europe, and more—very well, with the representative pieces often mirroring the illustrative style of the day. Burr painted original works that were then copied by his crew of artists, but as business grew, he hired Americana painter Harry Wysocki as Vanguard’s chief designer and employed Argentine artist Aldo Luongo to contribute designs. Burr periodically traveled to Europe (where he hung out with Salvador Dali) to buy paintings at auctions that he could then replicate at his LA studio for mass consumption.

At any one time, Burr had between eight and 20 artists working at Vanguard, copying paintings by Wysocki, Luongo or himself—works that became officially known as “original reproductions by Vanguard Studios.” The young artists were paid by the painting and often churned out ten 48” x 60” canvases a day, sometimes with wildly different interpretations of the master designs. Most bore the name “Lee Reynolds,” but specific accounts, such as furniture stores, wanted exclusive artists’ signatures, so “Vanguard” morphed into the Dutch master-ish “Van Gaard,” and the fictional “Stuart” signature was a tribute to Burr’s brother.

Dismayed by his artists’ inconsistencies, Burr created a new assembly line system: Each canvas would be hand-painted with a two-color background, then, the black lines of the master design would be silk-screened onto the canvas, followed by more hand- painting done by the production artists. (The number written on the back of the canvases referred to the painting master, while the initials belonged to the studio artist.) All the master paintings were eventually destroyed systematically.

Burr’s nephew Christopher recently created a Web site to set the record straight about his uncle’s work, but unfortunately, the site is now down. He invited owners of paintings, prints and wall sculptures signed by “Reynolds,” “Lee Reynolds,” “Lee Burr,” “Van Gaard,” “Stuart,” or “Burton” to submit photos and stories about where and how they acquired the artwork, in exchange for background information about the collectible, which he then posted for all to see. His site featured hundreds of works and got more than 30,000 hits a month, and the emotional attachment people revealed about their paintings made it clear that these artworks were an important part of their lives. One collector noted that his horseracing-themed Lee Reynolds painting was featured in an interior on TV’s I Dream of Jeannie. Burr himself often commented on the displayed works, and it was easy to read between the lines about what he remembered fondly and what made him wince. While it’s estimated there were more than half a million Lee Reynolds paintings created, Burr has only painted around 350 original canvases of his own in his lifetime with precious few, if any, ever available for sale by Vanguard.

Worldly Lee Reynolds Burr (looks like Jeff Koons)

Worldly Lee Reynolds Burr (looks like Jeff Koons)

Burr sold his interest in Vanguard in 1974 and worked as a consultant for them until 1979. The company continued on without him under many different owners until it faded away in the late ’90s. Burr started East Park Gallery in New York City in 1983 and for 10 years it produced works of art to serve the higher-end markets of interior designers and luxury hotels. Well known and well regarded in his hometown and in art circles, Burr was commissioned to paint a 21-foot-long triptych to commemorate the 1984 LA Olympics that hung at the International Terminal at LAX for 20 years.

An avid art collector himself with Picassos and Renoirs in his collection, Lee Reynolds Burr is still a dashing figure who wears his ascot very well. He paints in his desert studio in Indian Wells, CA, where he recently completed his first commission in 20 years, and also spends time in LA. These days, he’s painting originals: wonderfully rendered ballerinas and color field collages using gold leaf and compositions with architectural motifs.

This article originally appeared in our November 2009, vol. 4, issue 2