Ad Reinhardt

Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt (born 24 December 1913 in Buffalo, † August 30 1967 in New York, NY) was an American color field painter, cartoonist and art theorist. He is considered the forerunner of Minimalism in painting.

Life

Ad Reinhardt studied from 1931 to 1935 literature and art history at Columbia University in New York, among others with Meyer Schapiro. In 1935, he earned a bachelor's degree. He was a friend of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax and gave them out with the humorous college newspaper The Jester. 1936-1937 he studied with Carl Holty (1900-1973) and Francis Criss (* 1901) on the progressive American Artists School in 1936, he had been briefly at the National Academy of Design with Karl Anderson.

Reinhardt received from 1937 to 1941 thanks to Burgoyne Diller orders of support for artists ( Federal Arts Project ), the New Deal Works Progress Administration ( WPA / FAP) in the Department of easel painting: Reinhardt Artist, Class 1, Grade 4, $ 87.60 mo, Easel Division. . In 1937 he became a member of the American Abstract Artists, whose director Carl Holty was. He was involved in the American Artists ' Congress and the Artist's Union. He wrote from 1942 for the left newspaper PM. 1943 and 1944 he had his first solo exhibition, in 1944 one of his paintings was acquired by a public collection. In 1947 he took part in the group exhibition organized by Barnett Newman The Ideographic Picture at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Reinhardt was represented from 1946 until his death of Betty Parson.

After graduating in art history at New York University with Alfred Salmony and serving a year (1944 /45) he received in 1947 a position at Brooklyn College. There he taught until his death and was a guest lecturer at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, at the University of Wyoming, Yale University and at Hunter College in New York. After Yale Josef Albers had him 1952/53, invited as a Visiting Artist Critic, where he found a deeper understanding of color through the encounter with Albers.

Cartoons

1946 and 1947 he made a collage of cartoons ( "art comics ") for the Sunday supplement of the liberal New Yorker magazine PM, to which he - used woodcut templates from calendars, almanacs and manuals of the 19th century - Max Ernst following. The cartoons, which he slightly supplemented with drawings, published under the heading "How to look at ( ... a cubist painting, ... low Surrealistic art, ect. ) '. In them, he satirized the advice literature of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s he produced cartoons for the newly founded by Harry Holzmann art magazine trans / formation, in which he Cubism, Surrealism, and exhibitions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art on American Art (1950 ) or in Museum of Modern Art parodied over abstract American Art ( 1951). From 1952 to 1956 he worked for the art magazine ARTnews and also sat down in the cartoons snappy with the (preferably New York ) art world apart.

Painting

Reinhardt's painting was greatly influenced by Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko. He painted constructive geometric images and limited his color gamut on a chromatically narrow range, for example, to reds. In his Brick Paintings of the 1940s, he distributed apparently at random " bright color blocks on the screen, so that there is a kind of all-over structure ".

Under the influence of Josef Albers ' low range color studies he worked in the early 1950s to " series of red and blue images in a range of colors close to each other ." After 1953 he created exclusively Black Paintings, which he understood as " meditation panels ": black tinted, rectangular images with rectangular cross-like shapes that are, however, hardly noticeable. Only on closer inspection the finest gradations can be seen in the color structures.

In 1968, posthumous work by him at the documenta 4 in Kassel were shown. 1985 showed the Stuttgart State Gallery next monochromatic images that originated 1952-1967, also color slides and cartoons by the artist. The Josef Albers Museum. Quadrat Bottrop presented Reinhardt Latest images from along with works by Josef Albers 2010/2011. It was the first Reinhardt exhibition in Europe for 25 years. She stood so in the excited by Ad Reinhardt 25 -year cycle, should be exhibited in the abstract art. It alluded to his 1960 shown at Betty Parsons exhibition 25 Years of Abstract Painting. In addition to some geometric works his series of black paintings have been shown in Bottrop, which differed only by examine them carefully in shades of light absorption.

Art Theory

Despite his sharp and sometimes vituperative criticism of the American Abstract Expressionists, he is associated with this art form. He is regarded as " the art purist par excellence ". For him, art is heading for a reduction process, " the all essentially foreign and accidental elements such as icon, content, statement, style and composition slowly eliminated " in the end even all colors except black. "With the almost black image of the vanishing point is conceptually achieved in painting, driven purism to the extreme. "

" The one thing that can be said about art is that it is one. Art is art - as-art and everything else is everything else. Art - as-art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art. The one subject of fifty years of abstract art, art as art present, and when nothing else to make her only the one that it is, by secreting more and more defined and makes them pure and empty, absolute and sole - non- representational, non- performing, non- figurative, non- imagistisch, non- expressionistic, non- subjective. The only and one way to tell what is abstract art, is that to say what it is not. "

Writings

• Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell (ed. ): Modern Artists in America. , 1950.
• Barbara Rose: Art- as- Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. New York 1975.