Ad Reinhardt (1913-67)

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

Ad Reinhardt was born today in 1913, 9 months after the famous Armory Show, as he liked to say. http://bit.ly/1zwDZMI

[Ad Reinhardt. "Study for a Painting." 1939]

Ad Reinhardt

Quotes:

"Art is too serious to be taken seriously."

Wikipedia article "Ad Reinhardt".

External links

• Ad Reinhardt bio Guggenheim Museum site.
• Art Collection at MOMA site.
• [1] Ad Reinhardt, Graphic Designer
• [2] Ad Reinhardt cartoon collection

• ART IN REVIEW; Ad Reinhardt; Robert Motherwell

  For Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), Puritanism ultimately prevailed over hedonism. With calculated hyperbole, he declared that the history of painting ended with ...February 26, 1999 - By KEN JOHNSON
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  • Art Review - Ad Reinhardt Black Painting - Tall, Dark and Fragile ...

    Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting A 1955 photograph of Reinhardt in his New York ...August 1, 2008 - By HOLLAND COTTER - Arts / Art & Design

• Times Topics: Ad Reinhardt

  News about Ad Reinhardt. Commentary and archival information about Ad Reinhardt from The New York Times.

• ART/ARCHITECTURE; Ad Reinhardt, Newspaper Cartoonist: The Abstract ...

  But long before Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg took shots at the high-mindedness of the postwar American avant-garde, Ad Reinhardt (1913-67) was ...December 21, 2003 - By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

• Critic's Choice/Art; Of Ad Reinhardt, Priest of Modernism

  Only four viewing days remain for "Ad Reinhardt," the Museum of Modern Art's outstanding retrospective of one of America's most single-minded painters. ...August 30, 1991 - By ROBERTA SMITH

• Ad Reinhardt's Quest; Act Reinhardt

  THE untimely death of Ad Reinhardt at the age of 53 is an event that prompts some reflection on the nature of his ac complishment as an artist. ...September 10, 1967

• ART IN REVIEW; 'Ad Reinhardt and Contemporaries: 1940-50'

  Gallery shows of Ad Reinhardt are not an everyday event, which is reason enough to put this one on your things-to-do list. The paintings, most of them from ...November 14, 2003 - By HOLLAND COTTER

• ART: WHITNEY SHOWING AD REINHARDT COLLAGES

  8, the Whitney Museum of American Art has on view, as part of its ''Concentrations'' series, a group of paintings and collages by Ad Reinhardt (1913-67). ...January 31, 1981 - By JOHN RUSSELL

• Ad Reinhardt, Painter, Is Dead; Reduced Color to Bare Minimum

  Ad Reinhardt, a prominent figure in the development of "minimal art" in painting, ... Larry Fried Ad Reinhardt in front of his "Ultimate Painting, No. 39"September 1, 1967

• Ad Reinhardt's Black Humor; Retrospective Nothing"? Comic Issue

  Retrospective The question that confronts us at the Ad Reinhardt exhibition, currently installed at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, ...November 27, 1966

	Next Reinhardt work>
	Abstract Painting, 1960- 1966. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, By exchange, 1993. 93.4239. © 2007 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
	Ad Reinhardt’s writings on art read as a litany of negative aphorisms. Describing his signature black paintings, which he focused on exclusively from 1953 until his death in 1967, he wrote: “A free, unmanipulated, unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.” These canvases—muted black squares containing barely discernable cruciform shapes—challenge the limits of visibility. Reinhardt’s strategy of denial echoed his conviction that Modernism itself was a “negative progression,” that abstraction evolved as a series of subtractions, and he was creating the last or “ultimate paintings.” Rather than forecasting the death of painting as a viable art form, however, Reinhardt was instead affirming painting’s potential to transcend the contradictory rhetoric that surrounded it in contemporary criticism and the increasing commercial influences of the market. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois suggests in his study of the artist, what Reinhardt hoped to realize recalls the aspirations of Negation Theology, a method of thought—evident in Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and early Christianity—employed to comprehend the Divine by indicating everything it was not. The artist’s attraction to the mystical side of negation arose from his appreciation of Eastern art and religion, namely the abstract, all-over patterning of Islamic design, the poetically reductive space of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, and the meditative, ascetic quality of Zen Buddhism. The last he encountered through his friendship with the poet Thomas Merton, who was also a Trappist monk and authority on Zen. Reinhardt saw his own dark canvases, with their classic, geometric compositions, monastic repudiation of anything extraneous, and contemplative depth as a fusion of Eastern and Western traditions. However hermetic Reinhardt’s black paintings may seem, they were not created in a vacuum. The kind of profound, self-reflexive abstraction he advocated was partially a product of, and reaction to, the climate of Cold War America. Despite the iconoclasm of his aesthetic discourse, Reinhardt was actively engaged in political and social issues throughout his life. During the early 1940s, his editorial cartoons appeared in the leftist newspapers The New Masses and PM. Later, he participated in the antiwar movement, protesting against America’s involvement in Vietnam, and donated his work to benefits for civil rights activities. An aesthetic moralist, Reinhardt sought to create an art form that—in its monochromatic purity—could overcome the tyrannies of oppositional thinking. Nancy Spector