Ad Reinhardt

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

Life

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

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

After graduating in art history from New York University with Alfred Salmony and one year of military service (1944/45), he received a position at Brooklyn College in 1947 . There he taught until his death and was visiting professor 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 invited him in 1952/53 as a visiting artist critic , where he found a deeper understanding of color through the encounter with Albers.

Cartoons

In 1946 and 1947 he produced collaged cartoons ("art comics") for the Sunday supplement of the liberal New York magazine PM , for which he - following Max Ernst - used woodcut templates from calendars, almanacs and manuals from the 19th century. The cartoons, which he supplemented slightly with hand drawings, appeared under the heading "How to look at (... a Cubist Painting, ... low Surrealistic art, ect.)". In them he satirized the advisory literature of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s he made cartoons for the art magazine trans / formation , newly founded by Harry Holzmann , in which he explored cubism , surrealism and exhibitions, e.g. B. the parodied in the Whitney Museum of American Art on American art (1950) or in the Museum of Modern Art on abstract American art (1951). From 1952 to 1956 he worked for the art magazine ARTnews and also grappled with the (preferably New York) art business in the cartoons.

painting

Reinhardt's painting was heavily influenced by Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko . He painted constructive-geometric pictures and limited his color range to a chromatically narrow spectrum, for example to shades of red. In his Brick Paintings of the 1940s he apparently randomly distributed “colorful blocks of color on the canvas, so that a kind of all-over structure results”.

In the early 1950s, influenced by Josef Albers' low range color studies , he worked on "series of red and blue images in a spectrum of closely spaced colors". After 1953 he only created Black Paintings , which he understood as “meditation panels”: rectangular pictures tinted black with cross-like rectangular shapes, which, however, are barely perceptible. The finest gradations in the color structures can only be seen on closer inspection.

In 1968 his works were shown posthumously at the 4th documenta in Kassel . In 1985 the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart showed monochromatic pictures, which were created between 1952 and 1967, as well as color slides and cartoons by the artist. The Josef Albers Museum. Quadrat Bottrop exhibited Reinhardt's last pictures together with works by Josef Albers in 2010/2011. It was the first Reinhardt exhibition in Europe for 25 years. It was part of the 25-year cycle suggested by Ad Reinhardt, in which abstract art should be exhibited. He alluded to his 1960 exhibition, 25 Years of Abstract Painting, shown at Betty Parson . In addition to some geometric works, his series of black paintings were shown in Bottrop, which only differed in the nuances of light absorption by looking closely.

Art theory

Despite his sharp and sometimes abusive criticism of the American abstract expressionists, he is assigned to this art direction. He is considered "the art purist par excellence". For him, art is heading towards a process of reduction “which slowly eliminates all foreign and accidental elements such as symbol, content, message, style and composition”, and finally all colors except black. "With the almost black picture, the vanishing point in the painting is conceptually reached, the purism taken to extremes."

“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 object of fifty years of abstract art is to be presented art-as-art, and as nothing else, to make of it only the one thing that it is by separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive - non-representational, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagistic, non-expressionistic, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art is is to say what it is not. "

- Ad Reinhardt : quoted from Ulrich Reisser / Norbert Wolf: Kunstepochen . Volume 12: 20th Century II . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 75f.

Fonts

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

Exhibitions

literature

  • Michael Corris: Ad Reinhardt . Reaction, London 2008
  • Gudrun Inboden, Thomas Kellein : Ad Reinhardt . State Gallery Stuttgart 1985.
  • Lucy Lippard : Ad Reinhardt . New York 1981
  • Heinz Liesbrock (Ed.): Ad Reinhardt. Last pictures - Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers: An encounter . Catalog for the exhibition in the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop. Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf 2010. ISBN 978-3-941263-19-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gudrun Inboden / Thomas Kellein: Ad Reinhardt , Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1985, pp. 87 ff
  2. ↑ Ulrich Reisser / Norbert Wolf: Art Epochs , Volume 12: 20th Century II . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, p. 74.
  3. ↑ Barbara Hess: Abstract Expressionism . Taschen, Cologne 2005, p. 64.
  4. ^ Josef Albers Museum Quadrat - last pictures. Ad Reinhardt
  5. ^ Gudrun Inboden / Thomas Kellein: Ad Reinhardt , Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1985, p. 9
  6. ↑ For example from Barbara Hess: Abstract Expressionism . Taschen, Cologne 2005, p. 92 and by Ulrich Reisser / Norbert Wolf: Kunstepochen . Volume 12: 20th Century II . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, p. 73.
  7. ^ Ulrich Reisser / Norbert Wolf: Art epochs . Volume 12: 20th Century II . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003; P. 73.
  8. ^ Ulrich Reisser / Norbert Wolf: Art epochs . Volume 12: 20th Century II . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 74f.
  9. ↑ Announcement on the exhibition ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed on August 31, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ica.org.uk
personal data
SURNAME Reinhardt, Ad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reinhardt, Adolph Frederick; Reinhardt, Adolph Dietmar Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and art theorist
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Buffalo , USA
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 1967
Place of death New York City , New York