No. 1, from the portfolio Ten by Ad Reinhardt

“Art is art. Everything else is everything else,” Reinhardt famously quipped. He was one of the most radically abstract painters of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s. He eliminated from his process the intuitive gestures that defined his peers’ careers, instead challenging the viewer to focus their attention on meditative, monochromatic blocks of color, and the minute variations in tonality from one area of the canvas to the next. He believed that “pure” art was separate from everyday life. Close, sustained looking reveals differences in tonality within each work and between the two compositions.