Images(2)

Abstract Painting

Artist Ad Reinhardt American, 1913–1967

Date1949

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm)
Frame: 60 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (153.7 x 102.9 cm)

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

Object number86.3

On View

Not on view

Label TextArt critic, cartoonist, art historian, teacher, and painter, Ad Reinhardt was a lifelong champion of abstraction. "Art is Art. Everything else is everything else," he maintained. Intimately associated with the Abstract Expressionists, Reinhardt was more doctrinaire than his colleagues. He insisted on unadulterated abstraction and disdained literary, narrative, religious, or historical associations.

Reinhardt's style also differed. Compared to Franz Kline's work, for example, Reinhardt's was hardly gestural. His canvases, employing a geometry of interlocking rectangles derived from Cubist cut-paper collages, are tightly controlled and carefully planned. Though the early Abstract Painting (note the lack of a suggestive title) still uses visible brushwork, it shows the beginning of Reinhardt's systematized compositions. The simple color scheme in this 1949 work was further reduced in the 1950s. By the late 1950s, Reinhardt's search for purity had led him to a grid format painted in gradations of black.
ProvenanceCreated New York, 1949; collection of the artist; given to Edgar Falcon Thorne (d. 2004), New York, later Warrenton, NC, early 1950s; sold to
NCMA, 1986.

Published References"La Chronique des Arts: Principales Acquisitions des Musées en 1986," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 1418 (1987), listed 48.

"From the Collections: Loan," North Carolina Museum of Art Preview (Spring 1986), illus. (b-w) 17.

Claudine Humblet, La Nouvelle Abstraction Américaine 1950-1970, Vol. 1 (Milan: Skira, 2003), illus. (color) 183.

Ad Reinhardt: «Art Is Art... And Everything Else is Everything Else» (exhibition catalogue) (Madrid: Fundacíon Juan March, 2021), cat. no. 22 (illus. color).Exhibition HistoryPossibly New York, NY, Betty Parsons Gallery, "Ad Reinhardt," October-November 19, 1949.

Madrid, Fundacíon Juan March, "Ad Reinhardt: «Art Is Art... And Everything Else is Everything Else»," October 15, 2021–January 16, 2022, cat. no. 22. Object Rights Statement

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