ART CITIES: N.York-Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt was one of the most relentless defenders of the purity of abstraction. “The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else…making it…more absolute and more exclusive—non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective,” he argued in 1962. For Reinhardt, this manifested as an evolving effort to strip his paintings of everything external to the fundamental fact of paint on canvas.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

An exhibition of work from the 1940s by Ad Reinhardt is on show in New York. Reinhardt charted a unique and radically experimental path in his art during the 1940s, thrusting himself, from the outset of the decade, into the project of completely non-objective painting. While many of his contemporaries treated the canvas as a stage for depicting archetypal forms, mythic iconography, and the representation of the subconscious, Reinhardt pursued and achieved a degree of directness in his exploration of color, line, and form that would not be matched by his fellow American abstractionists until the end of the decade. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois notes: “Reinhardt was perhaps the only American artist in the forties … to understand what the real issues were at the time. In this sense … he was already (even before the fifties) an artist of the sixties.” Among the works in this presentation are collages and gouaches from the early 1940s that signal Reinhardt’s ambitious progression and reaction against geometric order, which might surprise viewers primarily familiar with the artist’s later work. The vibrant arabesques and expressive calligraphic lines of Reinhardt’s work from later in the 1940s is exemplified by the artist’s seminal 1946 canvases Painting and No. 4. Reinhardt’s gesturalism in these works is sensitively balanced by his sense of structure and the richness of his palette, which includes surprising incidents and applications of pink, teal, royal blue, and yellow. This exhibition underscores the range of Reinhardt’s colorism during the 1940s. The assertive reds in “Gouache Painting” (1949), for example, are sensitively counterbalanced by grayish blues and yellow-greens, making the contrast between the high-keyed warm tones and the cooler shades a study in the visual effect of complementary color placement. This work also sees Reinhardt shifting from the use of calligraphic and expressive lines and brushwork to deploying a loose matrix of overlapping and interlocking rectangular “brick” forms, which he would continue to develop into the early 1950s. Signaling future directions in his art, “Abstract Painting” (1948), Reinhardt’s first all-black painting—and likely the first all-black painting made in the United States—shows the artist’s ability, several years before his well-known series of black paintings, to visually articulate the subtle differences in the luminosity and sheen of oil paint when applied at various levels of density. Also on view is a seminal modular-grid painting from 1940, a work that precedes Reinhardt’s disassembly of the geometric regime through collage and gesturalism but which stands as a transition point for the artist. This modest-sized canvas recalls some of Piet Mondrian’s most ambitious early paintings as well as the vivid colorism of Paul Klee’s Bauhaus grid compositions. It also shows how, even at the very beginning of the decade, Reinhardt already had an advanced and nuanced understanding of opticality and color relationships. A related and similarly avant-garde grid painting from circa 1940 features a cruciform arrangement of rectangular units, a compositional format that Reinhardt would subsequently return to in his red, blue, and black paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. The variety of approaches reflected in this presentation elucidate Reinhardt’s embrace of immediacy, the formal and material conditions of the support, and all-over compositional formats. Taken together, Reinhardt’s exuberant experimentalism during this decade stands as a testament to his vast and singular achievements in abstraction. As the artist once asserted of the importance of abstract painting, “In its dissatisfaction with ordinary experience, the impoverished reality of present-day society, an abstract painting stands as a challenge to disorder and disintegration. Its activity implies a conviction of something constructive in our own time.”4

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 1/11-16/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/