Published by Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner. Edited by Anna Gray, Kristine Bell. Text by Robert Storr.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner, New York, this catalogue presents a comprehensive exploration of the artist’s cartoon works, which he created for various publications throughout his lifetime, most notably the progressive tabloid daily newspaper P.M., in which his How to Look series first appeared in 1946. Reinhardt’s comics shed light on the artist’s humorous insight into art history, politics and culture, as well as his unparalleled critical sensibility as a painter and thinker. The publication includes new scholarship on this facet of Reinhardt’s practice by curator Robert Storr. Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied art history at Columbia University, where he forged lifelong friendships with Thomas Merton and Robert Lax. After studies at the American Artists School, he worked for the WPA and became a member of the American Abstract Artists group, with whom he exhibited for the next decade; later he was also represented by Betty Parsons. Throughout his career Reinhardt engaged in art-world activist politics, participating in the famous protests against The Museum of Modern Art in 1940 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 (among the group that became known as "The Irascibles").
Published by Richter Verlag. Text by Heinz Liesbrock.
From the outset, the paintings of Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) were from the start defined by clear, geometric forms. An encounter with Josef Albers in the late 1930s greatly influenced Reinhardt’s subsequent approach to color, and the two artists maintained a lifelong respect for one another’s work (in 1952 Albers offered Reinhardt a guest professorship at Yale, where he was then teaching). The sympathies between their arts lie in the extremity of their geometric reductions, which Reinhardt eventually also applied to color by reducing it to minutely differentiated squares of black on a five-square-foot canvas; but both Albers and Reinhardt envision painting as an art of geometric combinations of color. Reinhardt’s statement that his black paintings were “the last paintings anyone can make” betrays his debt to Albers, for his works do indeed seem to conclude the investigations opened by Albers’ Homage to the Square series. This volume surveys their affinities.
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Ad Reinhardt: Last Paintings
