Ad Reinhardt

(1913-1967)

A seminal figure in the history of abstract art, Ad Reinhardt is widely known as the creator of a series of black paintings. A result of several decades of continuous artistic and intellectual search, these paintings marked an important moment in the development of abstraction, simultaneously bringing to conclusion some of its concerns and opening up paths for new approaches. Developing ideas of Mondrian and Malevich and attempting to create “pure” paintings, Reinhardt eliminated from his art everything that he deemed was obscuring its essence. The resulting black canvases, which Reinhardt painted exclusively over the last decade of his life, became an important influence on the art movements of the 1960s, including Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and continue to be an important point of reference for artists today. In addition to his career as an artist, Reinhardt was a distinguished professor of art history, teaching at Brooklyn College, Hunter College and Yale University, and an author of humorous cartoons for various publications.

Born and raised in Queens, New York, in 1931 Reinhardt enrolled in Columbia University to study literature and art history, attending lectures by Meyer Shapiro, actively participating in the political events happening on campus, and editing the student magazine The Jester. Throughout these years he was also studying painting with Carl Holty, Franciss Criss, and Carl Anderson. Soon after graduation Reinhardt joined the American Abstract Artists group, where he met some of the leading abstract artists of the time, including Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. Influenced by the painters of the group, especially his teacher Carl Holty, in the early years of his career as a painter he explored ideas that came out of the cubist tradition, creating canvases with sharply outlined, interlocking forms in saturated colors. Later he would take great pride in the fact that he was the first American painter to work exclusively in abstraction since the very outset of his career, bypassing the surrealism that many later Abstract Expressionists were experimenting with at early stages. In 1940, he created his first collages and grid paintings, attempting to move away from the individual painterly gesture, and beginning in 1950 his works featured almost exclusively rectangular shapes. Though Reinhardt was in constant dialogue with the artists who came to be known as Abstract Expressionists, he nonetheless resisted association with the movement, strongly opposing the emphasis on individual gesture and emotional expression. He also actively argued against symbolism, mystic associations, and allusions to reality that many Abstract Expressionists employed in their works. In his writings, including “Art-as-Art” and “Twelve Rules for a New Academy” he called to dispense, among other things, of texture, composition, expressionism, illusion of space, and movement in painting in favor of formal, purely aesthetic work. Departing from the dense canvases of the late 1940s that featured “gestural calligraphy” and “glowing colors,” by mid-fifties Reinhardt was using exclusively symmetrical, grid-like composition and was systematically reducing his palette until only white, red, and blue were left. In 1953, he painted his first all-black canvases, and by 1956 he eliminated red and blue colors, creating exclusively black paintings for the following decade.

These works, titled simply Abstract Painting, Painting, or Black Painting, were initially rectangular-shaped, pronouncedly vertical canvases (horizontal would evoke landscapes and thus allude to reality), divided into a grid, and eventually evolved into perfect squares, featuring a cross-like composition. While called “black,” they are in fact not exactly monochrome: under an attentive, close look perfectly symmetrical squares and rectangles of black and sometimes very dark blue would manifest themselves. Embodying all the rejections that Reinhardt called for, these paintings provide the viewer with a pure aesthetic experience, devoid of interpretative attempts. There is no illusion or depth of space to them and they are absolutely static. To conceal the brushwork and thus remove any trace of individual gesture, Reinhardt thinned his paints and applied them in very fair layers to create a surface that would absorb light. This technique made the paintings extremely fragile: even a slightest touch can ruin them. This feature has