Reinhardt, Ad (redirected from Ad Reinhardt)

Reinhardt, Ad (Adolph Reinhardt), 1913–67, American painter, b. New York City. Both a painter and an art theorist, Reinhardt is best known for his black paintings, begun in 1960. Associated with minimalism (see modern art), the paintings appear all black and exhibit only slight variations in hue and the presence of form on close scrutiny. In rejecting the conventional attributes of painting, he attempted to abstract the pure and contemplative qualities he admired in Eastern art.

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Reinhardt, Ad(olf Frederick)

(born Dec. 24, 1913, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 30, 1967, New York, N.Y.) U.S. painter. He studied art after graduating from Columbia University. He employed several abstract styles in the 1930s and '40s, but by the early 1950s he had restricted his works to monochrome paintings incorporating symmetrically placed squares and oblong shapes against backgrounds of similar colour, in which drawing, line, brushwork, texture, light, and most other visual elements were suppressed. He explained his style as a conscious search for an art that would be entirely separate from life. He influenced the Minimalist movement of the 1960s, more as a polemicist than as a painter.

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Reinhardt, (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich) Ad (1913–67) painter, teacher; born in Buffalo, N.Y. He studied at Columbia University (1931–35, 1936–37), and at New York University (c. 1946–50). Based in New York, he was a member of the American Abstract Artists group (1937–47). He taught at Brooklyn College, New York (1947–67), and worked as an art critic, illustrator, and cartoonist for various periodicals. Influenced by oriental art, he traveled to Asia in 1958. He began as an abstract minimalist and colorist and remained so. In the 1940s he painted bright abstractions, went on to his red and black period, as seen in Red Painting (1952), and from 1952 he concentrated on his "black" paintings, which combine subtle color tonalities.