ART CITIES:N.York-Ad Reinhardt

Adolph Frederick “Ad” Reinhardt was an abstract painter writer, critic, and educator active in New York beginning in the ‘30s and continuing through the ‘60s. Although commonly associated with the Abstract Expressionists, his work had its origins in geometric abstraction, and, increasingly seeking to purify his painting of everything he saw as extraneous to art, he rejected the movement’s expressionism.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Drawn exclusively from Museum and Private Collections, “Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings” at David Zwirner Gallery in New York this is the first exhibition devoted entirely to this body of work since the artist’s 1965 solo show at the Stable Gallery, New York. The exhibition is organized by the Ad Reinhardt Foundation and presents the largest number of his “Blue” paintings ever shown together. The blues in Reinhardt’s paintings appear to change before one’s eyes, influenced by subtle shifts in color within each canvas and in neighboring works. Reinhardt paired tones of blue that are so similar that it may take minutes to see they are not the same, creating resonant compositions that challenge the limits of perception. In bringing these works together, this exhibition will afford a rare opportunity to experience one of the greatest twentieth-century painters thinking in color. Born and raised in New York, Reinhardt studied art history and philosophy at university in the ‘30s, and began painting around 1936. His aesthetic and conceptual foundations include Cubism, Constructivism, and the austere compositions of de Stijl co-founder Piet Mondrian. While many of his peers experimented with figurative work influenced by Surrealism, Reinhardt, by contrast, worked in an abstract mode from the very beginning of his career. In the late ‘40s, he became deeply interested in Chinese and Japanese painting, Islamic art, and, importantly, East Asian philosophy. Except for his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Reinhardt earned much of his living as a teacher. He read, wrote, and traveled extensively. Possessor of a mordant wit, which he turned on himself and his fellow artists, and great draftsmanship skills, he also produced cartoons satirizing the art world or expressing his socialist political views. Reinhardt 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 colors. These eventually led to monochromatic blue and red paintings ordered by strict geometric arrangements and, finally, to his Black Paintings. These paintings appear to be unmodulated fields of black, but are in fact subtle compositions incorporating intensely dark shades of red, blue, and green. Reinhardt continued refining his Black Paintings until his untimely death in 1967, considering them the resolution to his quest for “The strictest formula for the freest artistic freedom”. His focused body of work and his emphasis on restrained and repeating compositions make him a progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual art.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, Duration: 12/9-21/10/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com

 

 

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