In his early years, Reiss traveled within Germany with his father, who studied peasants of particular types that he wanted to draw or paint.

Reiss studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in München under Franz von Stuck where he met his future wife, Englishwoman Henrietta Lüthy.

The lightness of style, use of grids, and gilded and highly colored panels refer more to the Wiener Werkstätte of Vienna than the Jugendstil of Munich.

In January 1920, he finally got to go to the West, and spent months on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, painting 36 portraits of tribal members.

Reiss illustrated Alain Locke's historic 1925 anthology The New Negro, an important book about African American culture at the time of the Harlem Renaissance.

Reprintings of the book, however, have dropped Reiss’s name from the title page and deleted the portfolio of portraits he contributed to the original edition.The changes were documented in 2001 by scholar George Bornstein.

[2] George Hutchinson builds on Bornstein’s research to speculate that this may be because of the controversy surrounding the portraits, which depict some of these distinguished African American figures with notably dark skins and features that may suggest caricature, though others are brown or of light complexion.

[3] The effect of the deletion is to suggest that the Harlem Renaissance was a mono racial movement rather than a cosmopolitan one, in which people of various colors and ethnicities participated.

Study of the development of Reiss's work through the various decades shows that his floral abstractions of the 1930s and the sparse geometry of the 1940s were influenced by his early teachers and leading artists in Germany and Austria.

In 1938, Reiss painted 8 oval murals for a Longchamps restaurant in the Empire State Building, named Temptation, Contemplation, Liberation, Anticipation, Animation, Fascination, Adoration and Exultation.

[1] In 1996, Tjark established the Reiss Partnership to create a vehicle for fostering awareness of his father's artistic legacy and to make it accessible to a broad public.