Robert Reed, San Romano, Hydraulic Lift, 1979

“The activity, the clash, the pomp, and circumstance… the organized confusion was something that I identify with very much,” Robert Reed said in 1986, when discussing Paolo Ucello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1438–40), which he had seen at the National Gallery in London a few years earlier. “I began to develop a vocabulary which became the vocabulary through which I speak now, but it came directly from those paint- ings.” The American artist’s San Romano Series, which contains ten large-scale paintings, is inspired by the painting, and is showing in part in a new exhibition at Pilar Corrias in London.