Ad Reinhardt

American, 1913–1967

BiographyAdolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1913. From 1931 to 1935, he studied literature and art history at Columbia University, where he received his bachelor's degree. After taking a few studio classes at the National Academy of Design, he studied at the American Artist's School on Fourteenth Street, where he was influenced by the abstract painting of his teachers, Francis Criss (b. 1901) and Carl Holty (1900-1973). In 1937, Reinhardt joined the American Abstract Artists, and became involved in the American Artists' Congress and the Artists' Union, both socially and aesthetically progressive arts organizations. He worked for the Easel Division (as opposed to the Mural Division) of the WPA Federal Art Project between 1936 and 1941. His painting of this period is fully abstract, solid toned, and geometric, comprised of interlocking circular and rectangular shapes.

During the early 1940s, Reinhardt's painting passed through a brief period of gestural marking and organic forms. By the mid to late '40s (after his return from military service in 1944-45), Reinhardt's painting developed in a consistent direction of hard-edged, geometric abstraction. In 1946 he joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, where Abstract Expressionist artists such as Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman regularly exhibited, and his work appeared there in The Ideographic Picture group exhibition of 1947. In 1947 Reinhardt also began teaching art history at Brooklyn College. He remained a prolific writer and polemicist throughout his life.

Throughout the 1950s, Reinhardt gradually purged all curving forms from his canvases, creating exclusively rectilinear, and eventually square blocks of single colors. The solid, symmetrical, monochrome blocks that are associated with his late painting began to appear in 1952. His final series of monotone works, in which the picture field is barely visible, was comprised of nine Greek crosses. Reinhardt's late work had an impact on Minimalist and Conceptual art in the 1960s and ‘70s.