| Ad Reinhardt | ||
| Birth Date: December 24, 1913 |
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| Death Date: August 30, 1967 Artist Gallery |
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| Born Adolph Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York, and lived with his family in the Riverside section along the Niagara River. His cousin, Otto and he were close, as well as the extended family.
Ad Reinhardt studied with abstractionists Carl Holty and Franics Criss in 1936 and with Karl Anderson at the National Academy of Design in the same year. His paintings and collages of the 1930s were composed of hard-edged, un-modulated, flat planes with both curved and sharply angled perimeters. During the 1940s, he made a number of cartoons, which included attacks on the art world. By 1950, Reinhardt’s vestiges of atmospheric effects had been eliminated through the use of small color bars jammed together in dense juxtapositions. At the same time, he began to experiment with large oblong shapes of close-valued colors.
In the 1960s Reinhardt developed his ultimate style in the so-called black paintings. These works were essentially non-relational, monotone, texture less, and devoid of any meaning other than that suggested by their mere presence. They fulfilled Reinhardt’s desire for a pure artistic statement. As he said in 1962, “The one work for a fine artist, the one painting, is the painting of the one-size canvas-the single scheme, one formal device, one-color monochrome, one linear-division in each direction, one symmetry, one texture, one free-hand brushing, one rhythm, one working everything into one dissolution and one indivisibility”.
Nevertheless, the very slight tonal difference of each square in a black painting does suggest the shallowest three-dimensional movement.
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