Background

Ad Reinhardt was born Adolf D. Frederick Reinhardt on December 24, 1913 in Buffalo, New York, the son of Frank Reinhardt, a Lithuanian socialist of German extraction who emigrated to the United States in 1907 and became a tailor, and Olga Melitat, who emigrated to America in 1909. Reinhardt was raised in New York City's boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

Education

As a student at the Merton High School in Elmhurst, Queens, he did commercial art for Columbia Pictures, illustrated the books Voice and Speech Problems, and took summer jobs with newspaper agencies. After rejecting scholarships to art schools, Reinhardt entered Columbia University in 1931 and graduated with a B. A. in 1935.

In the summer of 1932 he worked in Warner Brothers' art department. At college he was an intramural wrestling champion but was thrown off the team for not staying in training. He was elected to the university's student board on the promise to abolish fraternities. He studied painting at Teachers College, where he made menus for the cafeteria. In one of his papers he praised the international style in architecture because it was "intelligent and cold, calm and impersonally happy, " a forecast of his own reductivist style in art.

In 1936, Reinhardt began to study art history at Columbia University's Graduate School of Fine Arts. He also studied painting with Karl Anderson and John Martin at the National Academy of Design and in 1936-1937 with Carl Holty and Francis Criss at the American Artists School.

Career

In 1937 he joined the Artists' Union and the American Abstract Artists and was hired by Burgoyne Diller for the Federal Art Project, from which he was fired in 1941 for sending a painting to the Moscow Art Festival.

In 1939 eight of his paintings were shown at the New York World's Fair. He was doing paintings and collages, a few of which were of rectangular facades punctuated by rows of windows but many of which were nonobjective combinations of rectangular, trapezoidal, and curvilinear planes. He also combined stances on art with art-making; thus, he designed the broadside handed out by those picketing the Museum of Modern Art in April 1940 against that museum's reluctance to exhibit work by current American modernist artists. Consistently nonobjective in his painting after 1940, Reinhardt is usually grouped with the New York school of abstract expressionism, but he was a gadfly within the group.

In April 1944 he entered the United States Navy, was assigned to photography school in Pensacola, Florida, and served as a photographer's mate on the SS Salerno. He was hospitalized as an "anxiety case" in San Diego, California, and was given an honorable discharge. Under the GI Bill, he studied Asian art history at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts for six years, beginning in 1946.

He had his first one-man gallery exhibition in 1944 at New York's Artists Gallery, and in November 1946 he was given the first of his many exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Reinhardt taught at Brooklyn College from 1947 to 1967 (he was made a full professor in 1965), the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1950, the University of Wyoming in 1951, the School of Fine Arts at Yale in 1952-1953, and Syracuse University in 1957. His students appreciated and sometimes venerated him, describing him as "spiritual. "

He traveled to Europe for the first time in 1952 and visited Japan, India, Iran, and Egypt in 1958 (there is a hermetic side to his art, suggesting the influence of Eastern religions) and Turkey, Syria, and India in 1961. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He died in New York City.

Achievements

• Adolph Reinhardt has been listed as a notable artist. by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ad Reinhardt: Early works ; exhibition February 16-March 13, 1999

    (The catalogue for an exhibition of early abstract paintin...)

  • Ad Reinhardt, Seventeen Works

Views

Although his painting in 1949-1950 was gestural and painterly, by 1952 he was revolting against cubism and the expression of the personality in art. His canvases appeared as monochrome color fields.

Only on close examination could one discern that there were a number of rectangles very close in tone to that of the total field. In this apparently featureless painting he anticipated the minimalist approach of postpainterly abstraction, or nonobjective painting, after 1960. Reinhardt set himself up as an aesthetic, even moral, arbiter within art. He urged an art with "no lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, no visions or sensations or impulses, no symbols or signs or impastos, no decoratings or colorings or picturings, no pleasures or pains, no accidents or readymades, no things, no ideas, no relations, no attributes, no qualities - nothing that is not of the essence. "

He insisted that "the one thing to say about art and life is that art is not life and life is not art. "

Reinhardt could be specific and vitriolic in his condemnations: he called Rothko "a Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-Fauve"; Pollock, "the Harper's Bazaar bum"; and Barnett Newman, whose canvases were somewhat like his in featuring broad, consistently painted rectangles, "the avant-garde huckster-handicraftsman and educational shopkeeper. " Nor did he trust the cultural establishment, as seen in his reference to the Museum of Modern Art as "the Museum of Middlebrow Art. " At the same time, Reinhardt often remained within the mainstream, as when he designed baseball magazines for the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942.

Connections

In 1945 he married Elizabeth Armand Decker; they had no children before their divorce in 1949. On Feburary 17, 1953, he married Rita Zyprokowski; they had one child.

Father:

Frank Reinhardt

Mother:

Olga Melitat

Spouse:

Elizabeth Armand Decker

Spouse:

Rita Zyprokowski

References

• Ad Reinhardt: Last Paintings
• Ad Reinhardt: Timeless Painting
• Ad Reinhardt
• Ad Reinhardt
• Ad Reinhardt