A d Reinhardt's Abstract Painting from 1956 represents a pivotal moment in the artist's groundbreaking career. What began with the colorful geometry of his 1930s production gave way to the gestural works of the 1940s, and in the 1950s, his paintings became more ordered and dark in color as they advanced toward the style for which Reinhardt is best known. A peer of such titans of the New York School as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt remained faithful to non-objective painting throughout his practice, distinguishing him as a trailblazer among his contemporaries. In the present work, he has already landed on his visual grammar of inert, monochromatic fields of black with faded rendition of geometric shapes—a laconic aesthetic vocabulary. An intimately scaled example of the most acclaimed period of the artist’s career, Abstract Painting forms part of Reinhardt’s revolutionary practice.
Several t.mes s in the early fifties Reinhardt was asked by his friend Thomas Merton, a monk of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, for “some small black and blue cross painting” (Michael Corris, Ad Reinardt, Reaktion Books, London, 2008, p.87). This request would spawn his series of black square paintings, in the earlier of which faint cruciform shapes would emerge only barely from their backgrounds. These cross motifs evolved into rectilinear forms, as in Abstract Painting, and Reinhardt’s modulation of tone continued to be nearly indiscernible. Simultaneously charged by the absence of light and presence of form, the present work is also rooted deeply in the artist’s theoretical underpinnings. Reinhardt was fascinated by East Asian philosophy and infused the beliefs and practices of Confucianism, Zen Buddhism, and Tibetan Mysticism into his practice. Consequently, the black paintings and their invisible contents demand the viewer’s concentration, their humanity, to access the works. Abstract Painting is self-conscious of its own t.mes lessness and forces the viewer to submit to it, to quiet the mind and partake in its stasis. Forms like the one seen in the present work, which resembles the letter H, would eventually vanish in the coming years into unpolluted passages of black paint, making the present work an important, mature example of Reinhardt’s process of pictorial distillation.
Just three years after the completion of the present work, fellow New York painter Frank Stella would present an interpretation of Reinhardt’s advents, debuting his own series of Black Paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Reinhardt’s cool, contemplative paintings of the mid-1950s, set against the energetic surfaces of many of his contemporaries’ work, are a test.mes nt to his ingenuity and decisive originality, and for this he is often lauded by scholars as a forefather of Minimalist and Optical art. Abstract Painting embodies Reinhardt’s staunch belief in the purity of the picture plane and his tireless search for what he called “art-as-art” (Barbara Rose, ed. Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. The Viking Press, New York, 1975, p.53). Reinhardt, however, did not exist entirely outside his artistic milieu, and his work, so pithily put by an anonymous observer, is a culmination—an end, even—of the advents of the t.mes ’s Color Field painters: “Rothko pulled down the shade, Newman closed the door, and Reinhardt turned out the lights” (Anonymous, Ad Reinhardt (exhibition catalogue), New York City, 1967, p.25).
