#adreinhardt

Untitled (Composition #104), Ad Reinhardt, 1954-1960, Brooklyn Museum: Contemporary Art

Size: 110 3/4 x 42 3/4 x 2 1/2 in. (281.3 x 108.6 x 6.4 cm) Other: 108 1/4 x 40 1/8in. (275 x 101.9cm) Medium: Oil on canvas

Robert Singer

A-6401

2021

36”x36”

Untitled from Artists and Writers against the War in Vietnam, Ad Reinhardt, 1967, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

John B. Turner Fund Size: composition: 11 1/4 × 3 1/4" (28.6 × 8.3 cm); sheet: 25 3/4 × 21" (65.4 × 53.3 cm) Medium: Screenprint with collage additions from a portfolio of nine screenprints (two with collage additions, one with die-cut, one with punched holes), six lithographs (one with embossing), and one etching

Robert Singer

A-7381

2021

36”x36”

Abstract Print from New York International, Ad Reinhardt, 1966, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

Gift of Tanglewood Press Size: composition and sheet: 12 x 12" (30.5 x 30.5 cm) Medium: Screenprint from a portfolio of seven screenprints, two lithographs, and one offset lithograph with objects in various media

“Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” - Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt was one of the most relentless defenders of the purity of abstraction. He felt that art should be divorced from everyday life and viewed art making as a pure, disinterested, and ethical pursuit. His early painting and collage features bold, geometric shapes and patterns that he pared down into allover compositions of staccato marks in an increasingly limited range of colours. These eventually led to monochromatic blue and red paintings ordered by strict geometric arrangements and, finally, to his Black Paintings. His focused body of work and his emphasis on restrained and repeating compositions make him a progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual Art.

The monochromatic dark blue of Abstract Painting, Blue, with its barely perceptible differences in colour tone, relates solely to the flat surface, the rectangular shape of the canvas support, and the properties of pigment. Reinhardt’s rationale for such “pure painting” was that, being entirely independent of every other aspect of life, it would be incorruptible. Such aesthetic integrity would, he hoped, gird art against the threat of being used to deliver political messages, whether of the right or the left. Reinhardt made abstract paintings that would be ends unto themselves, because he did not want art to be exploited as a means for some other political or ideological purpose.

📷

1. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Blue, 1953, Pace Gallery

2. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Blue, 1952, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

3. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, Blue, 1952, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

4. Ad-Reinhardt,1943. Photograph: Dan Keleher