Ad Reinhardt at Frieze Masters 2021

“I was born the year abstract art was born.… I was born for it and it was born for me.”

—Ad Reinhardt, 1966

On the occasion of the gallery’s presentation at Frieze Masters, this viewing room features a selection of works from the fair by Ad Reinhardt, drawn primarily from the artist’s family collection. A major retrospective, Ad Reinhardt: “Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else,” opens at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid on October 15, 2021.

Dating from 1940 to 1950, these rarely seen paintings and works on paper demonstrate the unique stylistic shifts that occurred in Reinhardt’s work in this decade—a vital period in which the artist experimented with varied media and techniques. The works are distinguished by a keen sense of compositional inquiry, atmospheric color, the tension between foreground and background, and distinctive mark making—attributes that establish their singular importance not only for Reinhardt’s own development, but also for American abstraction and what would become known as the international triumph of American painting.

Ad Reinhardt in his studio at 732 Broadway, c. 1953–1957, with Untitled (1940) visible on the wall behind him.

In the mid-1930s, Reinhardt began experimenting with geometric forms influenced by cubism and constructivism. An early member of the American Abstract Artists, Reinhardt was part of the group who came to be known as the abstract expressionists, centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, along with fellow artists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman. Reinhardt’s art resonated with the younger generation of artists who emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s. He exhibited with many of those associated with color field painting, post-painterly abstraction, and minimalism, including Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Smithson.

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, 1940

Oil on Masonite in artist's frame

13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm)
Framed: 19 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches (48.9 x 41.3 cm)

First presented in the American Abstract Artists 5th Annual Exhibition, Untitled (1940) reflects Reinhardt’s description of works from the late thirties as his “late-classical-mannerist-post-cubist, geometric abstractions.” It was later shown in Ad Reinhardt: Twenty-Five Years of Abstract Painting at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1960, and featured in the major retrospective Ad Reinhardt at the Jewish Museum in 1966.

Exhibition poster for 25 Years of Abstract Art, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1960

“He was the only New York School artist who never painted figurative works—although unlike most of the others he actually could draw.… I was always impressed by the fact that his rejection of something was not because he could not do it, but rather he thought there were higher forms of creativity.”

—Barbara Rose, The Brooklyn Rail, 2013

Installation view, Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, Jewish Museum, New York, 1966

“Anyone who loves modern painting cannot get around Ad Reinhardt. You have to relate to him in some way or another.”

—Marlene Dumas, The Brooklyn Rail, 2013

“There was something very magnificent about his presence. It was one of those things where I felt shaken to my feet; that has happened very few times in front of very few people. That was Reinhardt.”

—Richard Serra, The Brooklyn Rail, 2013

Artists’ sessions at Studio 35, April 1950. Modern Artists in America edited by Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. Courtesy the Ad Reinhardt Foundation. Left to right: Seymour Lipton, Norman Lewis, Jimmy Ernst, Peter Grippe, Adolf Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Alfred Barr, Robert Motherwell, Richard Lippold, Willem de Kooning, Ibram Lassaw, James Brooks, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Poussette-Dart. Photo by Max Yavno. © Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

At the beginning of the 1940s, Reinhardt began “shattering” the surface of his paintings to create an all-over style of working. His collage studies using newspaper and magazine clippings avoided expressionist or personal touches and achieved purely abstract compositions. As Tessa Paneth-Pollak writes, “Abstraction was painting ‘relieved’ of its ‘picture purpose.’ … In 1940, collage provides him a means of negation … to ‘relieve’ pictures of their ‘picture purpose.’”

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, 1942

Collage on paper

5 11/16 x 8 1/8 inches (14.5 x 20.6 cm)
Framed: 12 1/2 x 15 1/16 inches (31.8 x 38.2 cm)

“In the late ’30s and early ’40s, he produced a series of small abstract collages that span only five or so years but were pivotal to his working-out of color interaction and problems of space.… In these fascinating works, Reinhardt turns representational photography into abstract landscapes of pattern and color.”

—Prudence Peiffer, Artforum, 2012

Ad Reinhardt, Collage, 1940. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, 1943

Gouache on board

7 7/8 x 10 7/8 inches (20 x 27.6 cm)
Framed: 14 3/4 x 17 5/8 inches (37.5 x 44.8 cm)

Made in 1943, a year before Reinhardt was drafted into the United States Navy, Untitled illustrates a period when his investment in color, expressionistic brushstrokes, and calligraphic elements was closely aligned. He classified this as “Rococo-semi-surrealist fragmentation and ‘all-over’ baroque-geometric-expressionist patterns.”

Ad Reinhardt, Untitled, 1943 (detail)

Untitled (1943) speaks to the artist’s experiments with all-over painting, which culminated in his “ultimate” black paintings of the 1960s. Broad yellow brushstrokes have been applied over another painting, thereby partially destroying one painting in the creation of another and creating a complex surface. The perceptual play between flatness and depth, recession and projection were strategies he continued to develop.

“The general impression provided by the all-over canvases of 1946–48 is one of a light- and color-filled lyricism.”

—Lucy Lippard, in Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, 1966

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, c. 1946 - 1949

Gouache and ink on paper

19 x 23 5/8 inches (48.3 x 60 cm)
Framed: 25 1/2 x 30 1/4 inches (64.8 x 76.8 cm)

Untitled (c. 1946–1949) belongs to a body of gouaches on paper from the late 1940s, in which Reinhardt obscured fluid, calligraphic lines of ink with loose, shimmering brushwork. These works are characterized by their “abstract impressionism”—a phrase Reinhardt favored because “impressionism” is “entirely involved with the sensation, the impulse about the marks on the surface,” and not, to paraphrase the artist, about theories, phenomenology, epistemology, positivism, or empiricism.

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, c. 1941 – 1943

Gouache and ink on paper

9 7/8 x 10 1/8 inches (25.1 x 25.7 cm)
Framed: 12 1/4 x 14 1/4 inches (31.1 x 36.2 cm)

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, 1943

Gouache and ink on board

11 1/4 x 16 1/2 inches (28.6 x 41.9 cm)
Framed: 15 x 17 inches (38.1 x 43.2 cm)

“We saw that pictures these days are only imitations and substitutes of real things and therefore not ‘high’ art.… We saw that both light and time is space, that you yourself are a space, that a painting is a flat space. We saw that an abstract painting is not a window-frame-peep-show-hole-in-the-wall but a new object or image.… Looking isn’t as simple as it looks.”

—Ad Reinhardt, 1946–1947

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, c. 1941 – 1943

Gouache and ink on board

6 1/2 x 11 inches (16.5 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 12 1/2 x 15 inches (31.8 x 38.1 cm)

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, c. 1941 – 1943

Gouache and ink on board

4 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches (10.8 x 15.9 cm)
Framed: 10 3/4 x 12 5/8 inches (27.3 x 32.1 cm)

“The works of Ad Reinhardt from 1941–1952 comprise a record of contrasting forces that ran through his entire career.… He was totally inventive, free-ranging, and difficult to categorize. Above all, it was his belief in abstraction as the unique art vocabulary possible which set Reinhardt totally apart, doing, in the artist’s own words, ‘pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, changeless, relentless, disinterested painting.’”

—Robert T. Buck, in Ad Reinhardt: Early Works, 1999

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, 1949

Gouache and oil on paper

27 5/8 x 40 5/8 inches (70.2 x 103.2 cm)
Framed: 34 1/4 x 47 3/8 inches (87 x 120.3 cm)

Untitled (1949) belongs to a group of paintings on paper made between 1949 and 1951, which marks the advent of loose-edged squares and quasi-rectangles—layered, monochromatic bands or “bricks” that produce depth. This work emphasizes Reinhardt’s continued preoccupation with reduction and his removal of extraneous gestural expressions.

Ad Reinhardt

Orange Painting, 1950

Gouache on paper

27 3/8 x 40 1/2 inches (69.5 x 102.9 cm)
Framed: 34 1/8 x 47 1/8 inches (86.7 x 119.7 cm)

“The broad gestures or disembodied floating squares and rectangles in the works of 1948 to 1950 … were at once stroke and plane. They were also value, as the artist compressed his palette toward a single key. Here Reinhardt began to intuit what would be his personal solution.”

—Margit Rowell, “Ad Reinhardt: Style as Recurrence” in Ad Reinhardt and Color, 1980

Ad Reinhardt, Galleria d'arte L'Isola, 1985

Ad Reinhardt in his studio, c.1941–1942 (detail). Photo by Harry Bowden. Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

“If you don’t know what [Ad’s paintings are] about you don’t know what painting is about.”

—Frank Stella, 1967

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