Lot132 N11733 Ad Reinhardt Abstract Painting, Black
“Reinhardt was perhaps the only American artist in the forties … to understand what the real issues were at the t.mes . In this sense … he was already (even before the fifties) an artist of the sixties.”
Two-by-two meters, black-on-black, the velvet noir field of Abstract Painting, Black posits an answer to Ad Reinhardt’s persistent, career-long question: how to create the world’s last paintings. The present work, executed in 1963, belongs to the artist’s corpus of Black Paintings, which he began in 1953 and committed himself to until his death in 1967. Spellbinding in their sepulchral majesty and revolutionary in their conceptual austerity, these paintings comprise Reinhardt’s most celebrated body of work, each declaring his relentless, obsessive odyssey into the realm of pure abstraction. Abstract Painting, Black is distinguished for its extensive exhibition history, and further test.mes nt to the series’ seminal importance in the artist’s oeuvre, Black Paintings are held in international institutional collects ions, among them The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate collects ion, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
“There was something very magnificent about his presence. It was one of those things where I felt shaken to my feet; that has happened very few t.mes s in front of very few people. That was Reinhardt.”
To enjoy the experience of a Reinhardt is to have earned it: before the matte plane of Abstract Painting, Black, skeptics are proselytized as Reinhardt summons color out of darkness. The longer one looks, passages of black reveal themselves to be mahogany and midnight navy, oscillating before the eye within the confines of his signature crossbeam device. As Reinhardt’s final, most radical body of work, the Black Paintings marked not only this revelation in technical mastery but also the apotheosis of his conceptual project, revealing an unrelenting consistency in the aims of his artistic enterprise. Devoutly abstract, Reinhardt’s career can be retrospectively charted as a march toward the Black Paintings: if it were his kaleidoscopic Cubist works of the 1930s and 40s that advanced his relationship with geometry, and the Red and Blue paintings of the early 1950s that distilled his interest toward the primary and fundamental, then it is his Black Paintings from 1953 onward which allowed him to find the absolute limits of the medium itself. Reinhardt became so consumed by the idea of “making the last painting which anyone can make” that he approached his practice with utter discipline; in fact, in the early 1960s, the artist limited his production to Black Paintings measuring five square feet. (the artist quoted in: “Ad Reinhardt,” LIFE, 3 February 1967, p. 50)
“It's been said many t.mes s in world art writing that one can find some of painting's meaning by looking not only at what painters do, but what they refuse to do.”
As his Abstract Expressionist peers discovered the canvas to be an arena or stage for gesture and exuberance, action and athleticism, Reinhardt had already moved on. The Black Paintings rendered the picture plane a void—a tomb for painting as we had known it. To achieve Abstract Painting, Black’s velveteen finish, Reinhardt drained the oil from his pigments such that light would be absorbed rather than transmitted. Nothing could be reflected in the painting’s surface, thus creating a hermetic world framed within the painting. Here, the matte quality functions as a layered point of abstraction – swallowing light, shape, and color – and the crossbeam structure further allowed him to modulate his tones and hues without relying on representational imagery. Accompanying his manual methodology was a kind of ideological manifesto as well: a list of twelve rules of what his paintings could not be, among them color, brushwork, texture, and movement.
- 1938
- 1940
- 1950
- 1952
- 1953
- 1956
- 1960
-
1938Untitled, 1938
16 by 20 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Even from the very first days as an artist, Ad Reinhardt was dedicated to expanding the possibilities of abstract art. Having joined the American Abstract Artists as a charter member and spokesman in 1937, from a young age the artist was recognized for his dedication to nonobjective art. Reinhardt’s early works in the 1930s presented hard-edged shapes with vibrant colors that underscore the artist’s interest in European geometric abstraction and Synthetic Cubism. -
1940Newsprint Collage, 1940
16 by 20 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Reinhardt had his first solo show with The Artists’ Gallery in 1943 and also found himself in various important group shows throughout the 1940s. During this period, he explored collage as a technique thoroughly, further displaying his interest in a Cubist manipulation of form or the abstractions of artists such as Burgoyne Diller or Piet Mondrian. Reinhardt began to use strips with a similar color scheme in his collages, foreshadowing his interest in the homogeneity of his later works. -
1950Abstract Painting, 1950
60 by 38 ½ in.
Private collects ion
Around 1950, Reinhardt worked on what is often dubbed as his “color brick paintings” that foregrounded his artistic capacity to celebrate color through contrapuntal compositions comprised of close-valued hues. His palette—which often included diverse vibrant colors—and his composition—which were much more diffuse and less rectilinear—began to take on the forms that later came to represent the artist’s unique visual lexicon. -
1952Red Painting, 1952
78 by 144 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Towards the early 1950s, Reinhardt standardized the geometric composition of many of his paintings, in an attempt to render the canvas exclusively as a vehicle for pure color. 1953 was a watershed year for Reinhardt’s career, as he committed to monochrome painting and received widespread critical acclaim. Reinhardt began to free himself from any intimation of content, advancing on the experiments of predecessors such as Pablo Picasso or Kazimir Malevich. -
1953Abstract Painting, Blue, 1953
49 â…ž by 28 in.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Blue also functioned as an important color for Reinhardt in the early 1950s. Though the blues exhibited a multi-tonal composition in many cases, ranging from Prussian to ultramarine blues, they began to move towards a muted palette as Reinhardt began experimenting with grayed out colors. These Blue paintings were worked on concurrently with Reinhardt’s Red paintings, suggesting his further interest in limiting himself to a certain tone and identifying subtle variety within that monochrome palette. -
1956Abstract Painting, 1956
80 ÂĽ by 50 â…ś in.
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
Around 1956, Reinhardt made the conclusive decision to focus exclusively on dark paintings, perhaps as a culmination of his career-long rumination on representing color as essence, which was cut short due to his sudden death in 1967. His reununciation of color gave way to his career-defining series, the Black Paintings, which see the artist modulate tones of deep blues, greens, and reds to give the effect of totalizing darkness. -
1960Abstract Painting, 1960-66
60 by 60 in.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
In 1960, his restrictive dedication was even further amplified when Reinhardt decided to limit his production to black, 60-inch squares. Though each presenting as a flat and serene black surface, each and every canvas diverges in their slight modulations of tone, all different objects that come together in the goal of presenting a pure, abstract, transcendent painting, now heightened by their complete standardization.
“The one object of fifty years of abstract art is,” the artist observed, “to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.” (the artist quoted in: Barbara Rose, ed., Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York, 1975, p. 53) Wresting himself free from any suggestion of content, Reinhardt reached a mode of production in its most essential form, without poetry, ornament, or palimpsests of a bygone past. In their complete abstraction – at the t.mes , even abstracting the idea of what a painting could look like – the Black Paintings are resolutely paintings for the present, if not the future.
In his final, catalytic contribution to the history of twentieth century painting, Reinhardt has asserted the culmination of his career’s mission and substantiated the conclusion of a genre. An altarpiece to abstraction, Abstract Painting, Black affirms Reinhardt’s place in the pantheon of true masters of color. Today, the Black Paintings are considered a progenitor for countless movements, most notably Conceptual Art and Minimalism, and bespeak the greatest paradox of all: it was his tireless search for the end of all painting that allowed Reinhardt to create a new beginning.
