Ad Reinhardt

Biography

In 1967 Ad Reinhardt made a lithograph for the portfolio “Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Viet Nam”: both sides of an air mail postcard addressed to “War Chief, Washington, D.C. U.S.A.”, with a list of thirty-four demands. Among them “no napalm”, “no bombing”, “no poverty” and, in the same column, “no art of war”, “no art on war”. The print is usually known by its first two words: “No War”. That same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and that same year he died.

Negation had long been his genre. In the “Twelve Rules for a New Academy” he listed: no texture, no brushwork, no drawing, no forms, no images, no colours, no light, no space, no time, no movement, no subject. That is how the “black paintings” of the 1960s are made: at first glance simply a canvas painted black, but look longer and the black breaks down into several nearly black shades. Reinhardt claimed to be painting the “last paintings” anyone could ever paint, and asked whether there could be an absolute even in black, which many do not consider a colour at all.

Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt was born on 24 December 1913 in Buffalo, New York; the family lived in the Riverside district on the bank of the Niagara until his father’s work took them to New York City. He thought of himself as a painter from childhood, won prizes for painting while still at school and, deciding that he had already mastered the craft, turned down scholarships from art schools for a full scholarship to Columbia University, where in 1931–1935 he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. There he became friends with Robert Lax and Thomas Merton; all three would later move towards simplicity, each in his own way. He drew covers for the university humour magazine “Jester” and edited it in his final year. After university he studied painting with Carl Holty and Francis Criss at the American Artists School and portraiture with Karl Anderson at the National Academy of Design.

In 1936–1940 he worked in the easel division of the Federal Art Project and, on Holty’s recommendation, joined the American Abstract Artists group, with which he exhibited for ten years and which he described as one of the greatest things that ever happened to him. In 1940 he designed the protest leaflet against the Museum of Modern Art that asked how modern it was. His first canvases of the late 1930s are geometric, with verticals and horizontals as in Mondrian, and with an eye to Constructivism and late Cubism. His first one-man show took place in 1943 at the Artists Gallery; then Betty Parsons took him on, and from 1946 he showed with her every year, and in 1950 he signed the protest against the Metropolitan Museum with the other “Irascibles”. From 1942 to 1947 he worked full-time at the daily newspaper “PM”, with a break for service in the Navy, and produced several thousand cartoons and illustrations there, among them the series “How to Look at Art”. In 1943 he illustrated the pamphlet “The Races of Mankind” by the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, directed against racial stereotypes: it was prepared for the army, the army banned it, after which close to a million copies were sold; congressmen disputed its claim of racial equality, and the navel on the drawn Adam and Eve was taken as communist propaganda. He also drew for the Brooklyn Dodgers, “Glamour” magazine, Macy’s and “The New York Times”.

After finishing at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, he began teaching at Brooklyn College in 1947 and stayed there to the end; he also taught at the California School of Fine Arts, the University of Wyoming, Hunter College and at Yale, where Josef Albers invited him for the 1952/53 academic year. In the late 1940s his manner for a time drew close to Abstract Expressionism, and he was a regular at The Club of the New York School, but around 1950 he returned to geometry with flatly laid, sharply separated colours. Then came the monochromes: all shades of red, all of blue, all of white; “Red Painting” of 1952 is now in the Metropolitan Museum, “Abstract Painting No. 34” of 1964 in the National Gallery in Washington. To my mind the cartoonist and the painter in him did not quarrel: in both he removed the superfluous until one thing was left.

Reinhardt died on 30 August 1967 in New York. His writings are collected in “Art as Art”, edited by Barbara Rose (1991); that same year the Museum of Modern Art showed a retrospective. In 2013 the David Zwirner Gallery exhibited thirteen black paintings together with cartoons and slides, in 2015–2016 Malmö and Espoo showed his comics and collages, and in 2021–2022 the Fundación Juan March in Madrid gathered 118 of his works, from canvases to pamphlets.