“I don't understand, in a painting, the love of anything except the love of painting itself.''
A firm champion of abstract art as an entirely objective notion—”art-as-art and as nothing else”—Ad Reinhardt’s paintings are t.mes less (Ad Reinhardt quoted in Barbara Rose, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York 1975, p. 53). Executed in 1945, Untitled is a kaleidoscopic mix of saturated reds, greens, and ochre. Reflecting the artist’s belief that good painting did not depict objects or subjects from reality but instead was steeped in the non-representational, the present work is clear in its formalistic celebration of color. Reinhardt studied art history at Columbia University while concurrently taking painting classes at Columbia Teachers College. Upon graduating, he continued to study painting at the American Artists School and the National Academy of Design, and also was part of the American Abstract Artists Group. The 1940s were a formative period for the artist as he found his footing in the New York art world, which he quickly did; Reinhardt participated in group exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery and had his first solo exhibition at the Artists Gallery in 1943.
Essential to Reinhardt’s development as an artist was the narrative of abstraction following World War II; for the first t.mes , a truly global artistic movement occurred, with post-war artists and collects ives informing one another around the world. In the midst of this, however, Reinhardt’s paintings stood out: "Through the 40s, Reinhardt’s paintings distinguished themselves from European abstraction through a total occupation with surface rather than readable formal structure, without compositional elements that outweigh one another. The paintings were organized by signs, either of a geometric order, of small rectangles of color fitting into one another, or of a blurred and less clearly delimited order, creating together the characteristics of ‘all-over’ painting" (Alfred Pacqument in Exh. Cat. Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Ad Reinhardt, 1973). An exquisite example from this decisive moment in Reinhardt’s career, Untitled is a chromatic paragon, demonstrating his adept study and commitment to purity in color and form.
