Artist Biennial

Ad Reinhardt

1913–1967

46 works in the collection 37 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

A prominent member of the mid-twentieth-century New York avant-garde, Ad Reinhardt distanced himself from his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries by focusing on the formal relationships within a work rather than compositions that emphasize self-expression. His writings, lectures, and artistic output are distinguished by a philosophical meditation on the meaning of abstraction and the virtues of art-for-art’s- sake, or, as he termed it, “art-as-art.”

Reinhardt often expressed his views in the form of cartoon collages he published in select newspapers and journals. Museum Landscape satirizes the art world’s liberal use of the term abstraction by taking aim at the Whitney Museum’s 1950 Annual. Featuring collage elements from a review that declared, “Abstraction Crowned at Whitney Annual,” the work depicts, among other elements, finger paints as the medium of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Reinhardt’s search for a “pure” abstract art culminated with his “black” paintings. Beginning in 1956 he worked exclusively with five-by-five-foot square canvases featuring dark, matte, hand- painted surfaces. The somber variations of Abstract Painting’s nine extraordinarily subtle black-on-black squares are perceptible only through sustained viewing and are lost in reproduction. The only viable experience, Reinhardt felt, was in contemplating the actual painting. In their elimination of subject matter and personal expression, these works not only represented a distilled vision of art but also prefigured the concerns of Minimalists whose work would gain traction in the 1960s and 1970s.