Ad Reinhardt was a prominent American abstract artist, writer, critic, and educator. 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. Although he was in turn rejected by many of his peers, he was later hailed as a prophet by Minimalists. His Black Paintings, which occupied him from 1954 until his death, are regarded as his crowning achievement, while the many cartoons he created that made fun of the art world brought him fame as a wry commentator.

• Ad Reinhardt is one of the few major American artists to have explored geometric abstraction, and unlike many of those Cubist and Bauhaus-influenced artists who did, he firmly opposed attempts to put abstraction in the service of design - be it for the purposes of decoration, industrial design, or advertising.
• His most famous series, the Black Paintings (1954-67), are all a uniform five-foot square, and are composed such that a ghostly Greek cross hovers, barely visible, in a mist of barely distinguished black and gray hues. Reinhardt felt they represented the ultimate abstract paintings; paintings which were concerned with art alone, and which bore no reference to anything outside themselves - not even to the hints of soul and angst in Abstract Expressionist pictures.
• Although Reinhardt sought to remove all references to the external world from his pictures, he remained convinced that his art had the potential to effect social change. He also maintained an interest in various types of mysticism - something the viewer might appreciate in the struggle to comprehend the barely delineated forms in his Black Paintings.

Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York, to a family of Jewish immigrants who soon after settled in New York City. He excelled at school and exhibited an interest in the visual arts from an early age; in High School he worked as an illustrator for the school's newspaper. An inveterate reader, he set his sights on the elite universities of the East coast, and turned down several scholarships from art schools, opting instead for the undergraduate studies in art history at the Columbia University in New York, which he commenced in 1931.

At Columbia, Reinhardt studied under Meyer Schapiro, an iconic American historian of art. His two majors included literature and art history, giving him a solid background in the humanities, while informing him of the latest trends in visual arts and theory. Schapiro, known for his Marxist views, introduced Reinhardt to radical campus politics, which shaped the leftist views that he maintained throughout the rest of his life.

Upon graduation in 1935, Reinhardt began training as an artist, first at the National Academy of Design, and later at the American Artists' School on 14th Street. At the AAS he fell under the influence of two progressive painters, Francis Criss and Carl Holty, who were influenced by the European traditions of Cubism and Constructivism.

Between 1936 and 1941 Reinhardt was one of the few abstract artist employed by the WPA/FAP project in its easel division. While engaged on this work he met other leading artists such as Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, whose friendship would continue to be important to him.

During this period Reinhardt's works were mainly influenced by the geometric abstraction he had learnt as a student. At times his work took on aspects of gestural abstraction, yet his handling was restrained in comparison to that of some of his peers. In concert with this he also worked as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for several New York publications, including PM and Art News.

Reinhardt's mature work is characterized by his search for an absolute form of abstraction. He considered Abstract Expressionism to be plagued with suggestive biomorphism, an abundance of emotional innuendos and a cult of the ego. In contrast, he sought to create an abstract art that contained no suggestions of narrative or emotion, and not the slightest reference to anything outside the canvas.

In this regard Reinhardt was deeply influenced by the art and theoretical writings of Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), the Russian Suprematist. Malevich's Black Square (1915) inspired the artist to begin using solid fields of color arranged in rigid geometric patterns of squares and rectangles. These experiment in the early 1950s resulted in several series of paintings devoted to a single color - the Red Paintings, the Blue Paintings, and, finally, the Black Paintings.

From 1954 until his death in 1967 Reinhardt devoted himself exclusively to the Black Paintings. The artist believed in the profound symbolic potency of the color black. For him it was the absolute zero, the end of light, a point so irreducible that painting as a genre was pushed to its limit of expression.

An encounter with one of Reinhardt's Black Paintings is inevitably complex and conflicting. The viewer is stunned by the complete absence of either a narrative or coloristic interplay; and yet the canvas is overwhelmingly full of color, and a closer look reveals that the ostensibly monochrome surface is composed of various shades of black - from light to dark.

Reinhardt developed a sophisticated technique to create the effects he desired. He siphoned off oil from the pigments that he used to produce a very delicate suede-like finish. His matte surfaces thus further absorb light into their refined darkness. This technique is responsible for the serious conservation issues associated with Reinhardt's Black Paintings today. Their surfaces are so fragile and the original technique so complex that the conservation and restoration of each canvas is always an arduous, expensive and time-consuming task.

Reinhardt died of a massive heart attack on August 30, 1967, at the age of 53, in his New York studio.

Ad Reinhardt's oeuvre remains a pivotal cornerstone in the evolution from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s to the Minimal and Conceptual art movements of the following decade. Often ridiculed by his expressionist peers, Reinhardt came to be seen as a priest and prophet figure by the subsequent generation, for whom he provided a bridge back to Constructivism. While it is debateable whether Reinhardt ever managed to completely purge his art so completely of references to the outside world, this aim was identical with that of Minimalists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Robert Morris.


Below are Adolph Reinhardt's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else."

"The only way to say what abstract is, is to say what it is not."

"Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist."

"My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil."

"As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color."

"I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality."

"My paintings are the last paintings one can make."