Ad Reinhardt
by Michael Corris
from Reaktion Books
A pioneering avant-garde artist with fierce political beliefs, Reinhardt immersed himself in the vibrant left-wing political and cultural circles of the 1930s and ’40s, only to be marginalized by the social and cultural conservatism that arose in postwar America. Corris examines Reinhardt’s work against this historical background, charting the development of his entire oeuvre, ranging from his abstract paintings to his popular graphic artwork, illustrations and cartoons. Ad Reinhardt also re-evaluates Reinhardt’s role and influence in the art world, chronicling his time as an artist and educator at the California School of Fine Arts, University of Wyoming, Yale University, and Hunter College, and examining his influence on younger artists who created successive avant-garde movements such as minimal and conceptual art.
A long-awaited examination of a less-heralded American master, Ad Reinhardt is a fascinating portrait of an artist whose political radicalism infused his art with a poignant resonance that stretches, through this rediscovery, into the present.
Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art)
from University of California Press
Ad Reinhardt is probably best known for his black paintings, which aroused as much controversy as admiration in the American art world when they were first exhibited in the 1950s. Although his ideas about art and life were often at odds with those of his contemporaries, they prefigured the ascendance of minimalism. Reinhardt's interest in the Orient and in religion, his strong convictions about the value of abstraction, and his disgust with the commercialism of the art world are as fresh and valid today as they were when he first expressed them.
Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella
from Hatje Cantz
In the late 1940s, several prominent artists of the New York School--among them Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella--were intently studying the color black. That work, interrelated but not collaborative, resulted in an astonishing number of almost monochromatic black paintings, which today are considered treasures of many major collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art's. For the first time, Black Paintings gathers all of the best of the title artist's black works together: textured black, striped black, blue-black, brown-black, black-black. In thorough illustration and thoughtful analysis, it sheds light on the differences between these postwar works as well as their commonalities. For Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, black was a way to disappear into something new, a way to a new artistic vocabulary. For Mark Rothko, it stood for emptiness and nothingness; it asked the spectator to reflect back on it. For Ad Reinhardt, it offered denial and invisibility. Each artist's black portfolio reflects a breakthrough or transition in his own work, and, combined, they represent a larger moment of transition. The Black Paintings marked both a beginning and an end: the end of painting as illusion, as a window onto the world, and the beginning of painting as the mode for the creation of self-sufficient perceptual objects--a change that granted new roles to both artist and viewer.
Ad Reinhardt and color
Ad Reinhardt
Mondrian, Reinhardt: Influence and affinity : October 24-December 13, 1997, 32 East 57th Street New York, NY, PaceWildenstein
Ad Reinhardt: Art comics and satires ; [exhibition], Truman Gallery ... NYC, Oct. 2-30, 1976
Ad Reinhardt, Seventeen Works
Ad Reinhardt: Black Paintings 1951-1967. March 1970
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