Thomas Reinhardt was born into an artistic German family in 1940 in Santa Monica, California. His grandfather Max Reinhardt was an eminent and influential theater director in Berlin during the first half of the 20th century. When Hitler came to power, the Reinhardt family emigrated to the United States. Thomas’s father, Wolfgang, became a film producer in Hollywood. His mother, Lally, was a painter whose abstract works were the first important influence on Thomas.

His creativity has taken two main paths throughout his life. On the one hand he has worked with drawing, painting, and collages made from paper cut-outs, on the other he has been involved in the designing and creation of gardens. In the 1970’s, during a long stay in Jerusalem, Thomas designed and built a garden with mosaic stone walls in the desert on the Mount of Olives. During this period he also produced pictures using the media of crayon, aquatec and magic marker.

In the early 80’s he started creating collages using paper cut-outs. Many of his pieces from this period are figurative. From 1982 to 1996 he was active as a landscape artist creating gardens in the Hamptons, N.Y. They became famous and were featured in many magazines—among them “House and Garden Magazine”, “Garden Design” and the German professional gardening magazine “Gartenpraxis”. Thomas received an award for his garden creations from the Perennial Plant Association of America. He co-authored the book “Ornamental Grass Gardening” published in 1989.

In 1996, together with his wife Martina, he moved to Umbria, Italy, where he created the ‘Giardino Reinhardt’ in a parklike setting. It included a tropical jungle garden, an extensive double perennial border, and a garden in an existing olive grove.

The Giardino was open to the public for a number of years, and was visited by groups from all over the world—among these the “Royal Horticultural Society” of Great Britain, the “Perennial Plant Association of America”, and an Australian group of the “Mediterranean Garden Society”. ‘Giardino Reinhardt’ was selected as one of the ‘Grandi Giardini Italiani’ and received acclaim in ‘Gardenia’, the Italian editionof ‘Vogue', ‘Ville Giardini’, ‘Rosanova' and ‘Architettura del Paesaggio’. The French/German TV channel “ARTE” devoted a special feature to it in 2011.

In the fall of 2010 Thomas reimmersed himself in the art of collage using paper cut-outs. Interestingly, he began this new creative phase by unpacking old folders containing papers and cut-outs left over from his work of 30 years before. For this reason many of the pieces he created after 2010 incorporate cut-outs from the 80’s side-by-side with new paper cut-outs.

He exhibited his works at the Palazzo Casale in Cortona, Italy, in the summer of 2012 and at the ‘Galleria 28 Piazza di Pietra’ in Rome in May-June 2016. He is in the process of preparing an exhibition to be held in Germany. An article by Bill Dodd on Thomas Reinhardt’s art was published in the online journal ‘Wall Street

International’ in July 2013.