Abstract Painting

Pulsating reds, pinks, greens, and blues produce a sensation of movement and optical effects in Ad Reinhardt's brilliantly colored painting with its carefully developed geometric pattern and abstract imagery. The grand scale of Abstract Painting, if not the uniform surface, brings to mind the vast nineteenth-century landscapes of Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt.

Reinhardt's "all-over" abstract geometric patterns were influenced by the work of Kasimir Malevich and the color blocks and grid structures of Piet Mondrian's paintings. In 1947, the year before the AMAM painting was created, Reinhardt's work was included in The Ideographic Picture, an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, which also featured Barnett Newman and Hans Hofmann, further artistic influences for Reinhardt. In his later years, the artist's monochromatic work of the 1950s and 1960s had its own important impact on a younger generation of Minimalist and Conceptual painters and sculptors, including Donald Judd, Jackie Winsor, Carl Andre, Brice Marden, and Frank Stella, who owned a number of Reinhardt's "black paintings."

The first major retrospective of Reinhardt's work was held in 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York. In March 1967, Reinhardt wrote to Oberlin College's Ellen Johnson that he had been in the hospital and wondered if she had ever received a copy of his Jewish Museum catalogue. He also wanted to know if she was still interested in "that 76 in. × 144 in. multicolored- rectilinear-formed 1948 painting of mine?" He added that prices of his paintings were rising but that he would sell it to Oberlin for the price they discussed earlier because he did not want "any banks to get it. New York banks are clamoring for large paintings, for lobbies." On June 1, 1967, Reinhardt sent an invoice in his distinctive calligraphic hand confirming the purchase of Abstract Painting for the AMAM collection. Three months later, he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.

The artist's grandson made an important gift to the AMAM in 2007 of Number 18 (1949), a poetic watercolor with freely brushed luminous green squares, gone over with cross-hatching and enlivened by flickering lines of black ink swirling across the watercolor's surface. Together, the grand Abstract Painting and this watercolor give an idea of the range of Reinhardt's vision as he sought to explore the underlying geometric structure and colorism in his work.