Ad Reinhardt was of the same generation as the Abstract Expressionist painters, but he developed a style and philosophy of art that more closely aligned him with the Minimalist artists of the 1960s. He spent the last 13 years of his life making nothing but black paintings. Though apparently monochromatic, like this one, these canvases are carefully composed grids of subtly varying tones. In 1962, Reinhardt wrote, “The one object of fifty years of abstract art is 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 more exclusive—non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-subjective.”
Clare Elliott
