Created in 1953, ‘Abstract Painting, Red’ is an outstanding example of Ad Reinhardt’s series of Red Paintings (ca. 1952 – 1954), several of which are held in prestigious museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Wien, Vienna. An advocate of pure abstraction, Reinhardt paid homage to both form and color with his monochromatic paintings of red, blue and black. Close inspection reveals a symmetrical grid of nine squares in varying shades of red—darker shades occupy each of the four corners, while a band of brighter reds move horizontally across the center of the canvas.
Reinhardt asks the viewer to look slowly, with meditation upon the shifting hues. His paintings have a timeless presence, and for all their formalist concerns, they are silent, subtle and soulful works. Reinhardt possessed an authority over color, surface and composition that is unsurpassed and reflects on his independent exploration toward the purity of painting, positioning him among the most innovative artists of the 20th Century.
‘The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and exclusive—non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.’
—Ad Reinhardt [1]
About the artist
Born in 1913 in Buffalo, New York, Ad Reinhardt was one of the foremost abstract artists of his generation. Moving toward all-over compositions in the 1940s, Reinhardt developed his monochrome paintings in the 1950s—the austere and subtle geometrical structuring influencing emerging generations of minimalist and conceptual artists. Reinhardt challenged gestural abstract expressionism, seeking to eliminate art from concepts of self-expression or meaning beyond visual experience. Reinhardt has been the subject of solo exhibitions in global institutions for over seventy years, with his first major retrospective co-organized in 1991 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Artwork images © 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
Portrait of Ad Reinhardt, New York, 1961. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection via Getty Images © 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich
[1] Ad Reinhardt quoted in Barbara Rose, ed., ‘Art-as-Art. The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt’ (New York NY: Viking Press, 1975), p. 53.
